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Perhaps surprisingly, the relation between [the JMM] and [the Cookbook] has not been considered formally before, and notably our results show that the rules implied by [the Cookbook] for Power are at odds with the requirements of the JMM. Concretely, while working on our proofs we found a counter-example to the DRF requirement of the JMM if the rules of the Cookbook are used for Power.
The example was then tried on a Power 7 machine “and (we) were able to reproduce the erroneous behavior in the two different JVM’s we tested, indicating that this is not simply a theoretical inconvenience, but a critical dichotomy between desired semantics and implementations.”
Where the rules of the Cookbook are correct, the authors prove that they are so. Where the rules do not produce correct implementations corrections are proposed, which have subsequently been re-integrated into an updated Cookbook.
There are four levels to the proof structure. At the top level, the semantics of the JMM are modelled.
Below this level, we have a high-level, architecture-agnostic, operational semantics which adopts Power semantics for normal variables, and SC semantics for volatile variables and locks. We denote this semantics by cookbook-high.
Cookbook high deals with normal references, volatile references, and locks. The authors show that Cookbook high semantics respect the JMM.
Below Cookbook high is a model of the intermediate low-level representation introduced in the Compiler Writers Cookbook (‘Cookbook Low’):
This is an intermediate representation used in [the Cookbook] to establish the barriers needed to impose ordering at lower-levels to implement the semantics of cookbook-high. This language serves to bridge the gap between the cookbook-high language and multiple target architectures, each of which have their own ISA that implements different barriers and memory models.
References that are volatile at the Cookbook high level are just normal references at this level and barrier instructions are introduced to prevent local reordering of certain types of instructions. It is shown that Cookbook Low simulates Cookbook High.
At the bottom of the tree, are models for x86 and Power. Regarding Power:
The main differences between this language and cookbook-low are: (a) this language implements the actual barrier instructions of Power, that is lwsync and sync as opposed to the more abstract barriers of cookbook-low, and (b) unlike the barriers of cookbook-low, these barriers have a global meaning (potentially involving more than one thread).
For x86,
This language represents the TSO memory model of x86 processors. It has only one barrier instruction, namely mfence. It also has a cas() instruction, used in the implementation of locks.
ARM is not formally modelled in this work, hampered by the fact that “the new ARM v8 relaxed memory model is not yet quite well understood” :
We are tempted to make the argument that ARM is similar to Power leveraging [24]. Unfortunately [3] has found [24] to be inaccurate w.r.t. ARM. In [3] a different model is proposed, but it is claimed that some current ARM architectures suffer from a bug, which simply stated allows reads on the same reference to be reordered. Moreover, the new ARMv8 relaxed memory model is not yet quite well understood (see [12]). We note however that most of the behaviors discussed in [3] w.r.t. ARM are sound for the JMM, and could easily be incorporated into cookbook-high without affecting our proofs. Moreover, the conservative strategy of [15], which compiles all barriers to the sync-like dmb is guaranteed to satisfy our simulations as shown in Theorem 5.
Thankfully most of don’t need to write a compiler honouring Java Memory Model semantics, but it’s good to know that work of this nature exists so that those that do can implement it faithfully for us. The paper is also a good read if you’re interested in understanding some of the intricacies and subtleties involved in providing consistent high-level semantics across modern hardware architectures.Notre Dame junior quarterback Everett Golson, who started the first 12 games of the season before losing his job for Tuesday's Music City Bowl, told irishillustrated.com Wednesday that he plans to return to school for the spring semester.
The play of former backup quarterback Malik Zaire in the bowl win over LSU created a quarterback controversy, and Golson's comment that he is on track to graduate in May will just add fuel to the "Will Golson transfer?" fire. If he does indeed graduate in May, he will be free to transfer over the summer and play next season as a graduate transfer.
Golson was a Heisman candidate early in the season, when Notre Dame started 6-0. But he and the Irish stumbled badly down the stretch, with Notre Dame losing five of its final six regular-season games before turning it around against LSU. Golson threw for 3,445 yards and 29 touchdowns, but he also tossed 14 interceptions and lost eight fumbles. In a four-game losing streak to end the regular season, Golson threw as many TD passes as interceptions (seven).
At the same time, despite a lack of height (he's 6-foot-0), Golson is an accomplished passer, and he also led the Irish to the BCS national championship game in the 2012 season. Thus, if he does decide to transfer, he will have a long suit of suitors.
Golson could be one of at least two high-profile quarterbacks to move on, with rumors continuing to swirl that Ohio State's Braxton Miller -- who missed this season with a shoulder injury -- possibly is looking to transfer.
Mike Huguenin can be reached at [email protected]. You also can follow him on Twitter @MikeHuguenin.Buy Photo Campaign signs outside a Reno mayoral candidate forum in April. (Photo: Tim Dunn/RGJ)Buy Photo
RGJ Media and KNPB tonight will host the first debates for the Reno mayoral candidates.
There will be two debates featuring 10 candidates previously determined by three equally weighted criteria. The first debate will take place at 8 p.m. and will be aired live on KNPB Channel 5 and webcast above, and the second debate will take place at 9 p.m.
The first debate will feature candidates Idora Silver, Hillary Schieve, Marsha Berkbigler, Robert Avery and Ray Pezzonella. The second debate will feature Eddie Lorton, Ken Stark, Chuck Reno, DeLores Aiazzi and Ian Pasalich.
The remaining eight candidates will have a chance to tape statements that will air at 10 p.m. on KNPB Channel 5.
NOTE: If you're on a mobile device, the live stream will begin at 8 p.m. To view the debate, type or paste this url into your browser: https://www.rgj.com/story/news/politics/2014/05/28/9692859/
WEIGH IN: From a mobile device, to rate each candidate's response to questions, type or paste this url into your browser: https://www.rgj.com/story/news/politics/2014/05/29/9745017/
Read or Share this story: https://www.rgj.com/story/news/politics/2014/05/28/live-stream-of-reno-mayor-debate-at-8-pm-today/9692859/It was absolutely hilarious. Will update with links/transcript as I can.
The short story is that they were discussing the VA Health System, and Tancredo made some kind of rude, liberal bashing thinly disguised comment to Kos, to which Kos responded to, awesomely and without fear, I might add. Kos said something along the lines of (in reaction the the Tancredo insult): "I didn't get depressed and dodge the draft..."
Tancredo got PISSED, demanded an apology and said something about how he "won't be insulted" and demanded an apology. Kos said "NO" and Tancredo removed his earpeiece and left. The cameras switched from split screen to just a shot of Markos, he finished strong, Shuster thanks him, and FIN.
FANTASTIC. LOVED IT. CAN'T WAIT FOR THE YOUTUBE.
UPDATE:
More detail:
Tancredo was talking about how military members hate the VA and how they all want vouchers to go buy private insurance. Markos LAUGHED at this, Tancredo started to get pissy, and said "talk to the veterans!" So Markos says "Tom, I am a veteran, I did not get a deferment because I was too depressed to fight in a war I supported in Vietnam."
Tom goes on to say "That's a cheap, rotten, low, stupid thing to say."
They talk over one another.
Tom says "You're not gonna do that. You're not gonna try to insult me that way and then pretend like you were just going on to talk about that. You either apologize or I'm off."
Markos says "I'm not pretending anything, I told you straight up."
Tom leaves. MAD.
Markos continues, coherently, calmly, and CORRECTLY, talking about how damaging republicans are in reference to health care. He goes on to close talking about how Republicans have worked their whole lives to make people fear government and how this will ruin that for them.
Hannibal, down in the comments, pointed out this gen:
Tancredo was active with the College Republicans and a conservative, nonpartisan organization, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). As a Republican student activist Tancredo spoke in support of the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of Northern Colorado he became eligible to serve in Vietnam in June 1969. Tancredo has said he went for his physical, telling doctors he had been treated for depression, and eventually got a "1-Y" deferment[6].
NOW WITH VIDEO!!! THANKS TO m00finsan and robertoroberto and BuckeyeBattleCry
http://www.youtube.com/...
UPDATE:
Wow, thanks guys! I never get to the Rec List! And THIS!!!
I appreciate it, I really do. I will post the transcript when it is up or when I get home from dinner, whatever happens first. Again, Kos - WAY TO EFFIN' GO!!!!
UPDATE:
Back from dinner. I had eggplant parm - it was great. I checked into the transcripts again; it appears the Ed Show still hasn't provided a transcript. I think my summary above is meh but the video speaks for itself. If you want to check back in tomorrow or next week for the actual transcript, here is the link. Happy Friday night, all.
ADDITIONAL VIDEO:
Check out KO's thoughts above in the video clip from Countdown last night.
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT COURTESY OF TrueBlueMajority:
Tancredo:...every veterans' group I ever went and talked to complained about the Veterans Administration and the way it was a bureaucratically run program that didn't serve their needs. They would much rather have vouchers that would allow them to go out and buy their insurance... kos: [laughing out loud off camera] Tancredo:...in the private marketplace. They've talked about it. You're laughing... you may want to talk to the veterans. They talked to me and that's what they said! Shuster: Markos? [kos and Tancredo both talking at the same time] kos: I'm I'm I'm I'm a veteran... Tancredo: That's what I'm telling you, there is no government role... kos: [alone] Tom, Tom, I'm I'm I'm a veteran, okay, I did not get a deferment because I was too depressed to fight in a war that I supported in Vietnam. I'm I'm I'm a veteran... [both talking at the same time] kos:...and people want a more effective, they want a more effective VA, and that's more money. Tancredo: yeah well that's a... you know that's a cheap rotten [or] stupid thing to say. You you you cannot, no, listen, no, you're not gonna do.... Tancredo: [alone] You're not gonna do that. You're not gonna, you're not gonna try to insult me that way and then pretend like we're just going on and talking about that. You either apologize or I'm off. kos: I'm not pretending anything, I told you straight up. [Tancredo takes off his microphone] kos: The issue here, what the Republicans are afraid of, this is a threat to Republicans... [Tancredo walks off the set] kos: [all alone on screen now] They built an entire ideology predicated on telling people that government does not work. They are terrified of government programs that work because then people will realize that the government is not the enemy, and that they're going to work, they're gonna vote Democratic because Democrats are the party who realize that people need help, and government can sometimes offer solutions. Shuster:Thank you Markos Moulitsas and also Congressman Tom Tancredo for the time that he was with us—I think he left a little bit early—but the Congressman is always welcome on this show we always appreciate hearing his point of view and it's a feisty one and that's what we like around here. Markos thank you as well.
AND WE'RE WIKI'D!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/...An Ontario judge has ordered a psychiatric assessment to determine if alleged terrorist Rehab Dughmosh is fit to stand trial on terrorism-related charges.
Dughmosh, 32, is accused of threatening employees at a Canadian Tire store in Scarborough with a knife on June 3 and pledging her allegiance to ISIS.
"I am pledged to the leaders of the believers, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi," Dughmosh said in reference to the leader of the Islamic State during a June court appearance.
Dughmosh faces 14 terror-related charges
She faces 21 charges total, including 14 terror-related charges under Section 83.2 of the Criminal Code, federal Crown prosecutor Howard Piafsky told CBC News previously.
The section bans "terrorist activity," whether it takes place "in or outside Canada."
These offences include one count of participating in terrorist activity, which relates to Dughmosh's alleged travel to Turkey and attempt to enter Syria in April 2016.
Psychiatric assessment ordered for'reasonable grounds'
Justice Kimberley Crosbie asserted she has "reasonable grounds" to believe a psychiatric assessment is necessary, under Section 672.23 of the Criminal Code, due to the Toronto woman's behaviour throughout her court appearances.
Dughmosh refused leave her cell at Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, Ont., on Monday to appear by video in court.
She has also refused to attend court three times before. On Aug. 21, Dughmosh appeared in handcuffs, flanked by two correctional officers, stripped of her niqab after a judge ordered staff at the centre to retrieve her from her cell by force.
Throughout the appearance, Dughmosh repeated, "you're all infidels. I do not pray to the God you worship," several times in Arabic.
Crosbie ruled it wasn't required for Dughmosh to be brought in by force on Monday after a correctional officer testified she had been pepper-sprayed earlier because she had acted aggressively towards staff.
In her absence, counsel assigned lawyer Ingrid Grant to represent Dughmosh.
'Isolation behaviour'
Crosbie stated there was nothing in the accused's first two court appearances to make her believe she was unfit to stand trial.
"She was responsive to my questions and engaged. She even pleaded guilty," she noted.
On Aug. 15, when Dughmosh refused to leave her cell, federal Crown prosecutor asserted she may be mentally unfit.
During Monday's appearance, a correctional officer said the accused has refused to wash or shower since her arrest.
Crosbie asserted this behaviour ultimately caused her to be concerned about Dughmosh's ability to understand the charges.
"Her isolation behaviour may indicate underlying mental health issues," Crosbie noted in her decision.
Dughmosh will undergo a five day psychiatric assessment at Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences in Whitby, Ont.
Results from the assessment will be presented in court on Sept. 6.We’ve hinted at this news in the past week, but now it’s official: Pillar VC is leading a $500,000 seed funding round for LBRY!
Pillar is a perfect fit for LBRY, with the mission of “treating founders the way we would want to be treated.” This is precisely what LBRY is trying to achieve for digital content creators – a distribution system that connects them directly to their fans with no intermediary taking a cut of their profits. We want to give creators the power to say, “No, thank you!” to YouTube and other big media companies that exercise control over their users’ original content.
LBRY is humbled at this endorsement. Beyond helping us grow our dev team and deliver better software faster, we hope this news also serves to show that we take our primary goal seriously: every film, song, book, and app ever made – available anywhere. Pillar VC is operated by determined visionaries who conducted careful due diligence in funding LBRY. With their help, we will provide the content distribution protocol of the future.
These funds will be used to advance the development of our beta as quickly as possible. We will have a Windows version released this month. By the end of this year, we are anticipating opening up the beta app – and going to full product release in 2017. No more waiting lists!
Click Here to Read the Full Press ReleaseTwo Golden State Warriors Appearances including Kevin Durant’s First Preseason Home Game as a Golden State Warrior
Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah Make Their Preseason Debut with New York Knicks on October 4
Additional Preseason Action from NBA All-Stars Stephen Curry, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, Isaiah Thomas, James Harden, and More
ESPN will tip off its 2016-17 NBA game schedule with five pre-season telecasts, starting with a doubleheader on Tuesday, Oct. 4. At 8 p.m. ET, Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah will make their preseason debut with the New York Knicks as they visit the Houston Rockets and James Harden. At 10:30 p.m., Kevin Durant will make his preseason home debut as he joins Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors to host the L.A. Clippers and Chris Paul.
On Tuesday, Oct. 18, at 10 p.m., the Clippers return to action as they visit the Sacramento Kings and DeMarcus Cousins on ESPN. The Knicks will then visit the Boston Celtics and Isaiah Thomas on ESPN on Wednesday, Oct. 19, at 7:30 p.m., followed by the Warriors making their second preseason appearance on ESPN as they tip off against the Los Angeles Lakers and the second selection in the 2016 NBA Draft Brandon Ingram in San Diego at the Valley View Casino Center at 10 p.m.
All ESPN NBA preseason games will be streamed on WatchESPN.
NBA Preseason Games on ESPN
Date Time (ET) Telecast Network(s) Tues, Oct. 4 8 p.m. New York Knicks at Houston Rockets ESPN / WatchESPN 10:30 p.m. L.A. Clippers at Golden State Warriors ESPN / WatchESPN Tues, Oct. 18 10 p.m. L.A. Clippers at Sacramento Kings ESPN / WatchESPN Wed, Oct. 19 7:30 p.m. New York Knicks at Boston Celtics ESPN / WatchESPN 10 p.m. Golden State Warriors vs. Los Angeles Lakers at Valley View Casino Center ESPN / WatchESPN
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Media contacts: Ben Cafardo at 860-766-3496 or [email protected], (@Ben_ESPN);
Gianina Thompson at 860-766-3496 or [email protected] (@Gianina_ESPN).It's Broncos vs Seahawks in the big game, but it all might come down to the manatees.
Hugh and Buffett, two manatees who live at the Aquarium at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., have offered their pics for Super Bowl XLVIII. However, like humans, they can't agree on which team will win.
Aquarium officials put up targets featuring each team's logo up against the walls and waited to see which would appeal to the giant marine mammals.
Hugh picked the Seahawks while Buffett picked the Broncos, according to WTSP-TV.
The law of odds says Hugh and Buffett each have a 50/50 chance of being right, but Mote Marine lab researcher Kat Nicolaisen is putting more stock in Buffett's pro-Broncos prediction.
He has chosen the correct team for the past six years, while Hugh has been right four out of six Super Bowls, Bradenton.com reported.
“He's definitely on a roll,” Nicolaisen told HeraldTribune.com. “If he picks 10 years in a row, we'll have to sign him up with SportsCenter or a Vegas bookie or something.”
You may not want to bet the house on a Super Bowl prediction made by a manatee.
Dumb As A Blog points out that manatees can’t really see all that well, so they were only choosing between “blurry object” and “other blurry object.”
Buffett's predicting ability is uncanny, but he has a ways to go before he matches the feat of the most famous animal sports oracle, Paul the Psychic Octopus.The first round of the 2016 NFL Draft is in the books, but plenty of talent remains.
Rounds 2 and 3, set to kick off Friday evening, represent the sweet spot of the annual selection process. With needs to fill, teams have plenty of players to pick from.
Let's take a look at a handful of remaining gems and their possible fits:
1. Myles Jack, OLB, UCLA: The former UCLA star admitted Wednesday that his surgically repaired right knee might eventually require microfracture surgery, a revelation that greased the skids for a wild slide down the board. Once seen as a top-five pick, Jack fell right out of the first round. Viewed as too much of a risk on Thursday, Jack should have plenty of suitors on Day 2 -- maybe as early as No. 32 to the Browns or a team angling to trade up. "Just a freak athlete," one scout told Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "He is Von Miller freakish." Said another: "He could start for us at strong safety and be the No. 2 running back. He transcends today's game." Teams don't know how long he can play, but it's not too early to take a chance on Jack's upside.
Perfect fit? Dallas Cowboys: Owner Jerry Jones is eternally in win-now mode, making Jack the ideal pick for a team looking to get to the Super Bowl ASAP. With a history of taking risk-addled players, the 'Boys and Jack would make for a juicy match.
2. Derrick Henry, RB, Alabama: If teams could read the future, would Cardinals running back David Johnson have gone in the third round last year? Jeremy Hill was a second-rounder, along with Le'Veon Bell and Eddie Lacy. Will Henry be the next backfield star plucked later than deserved? Last year's Heisman Trophy winner is a load to bring down at 6-foot-3 and 245 pounds. "If he gets going north-south you better bring it, because he's going to get yards after contact. If it's muddy in Green Bay and it's the championship game and you've got to control the clock, I want Derrick Henry in my backfield," gushed one scout.
Perfect fit? Miami Dolphins: No matter what coach Adam Gase says about Jay Ajayi, the Dolphins need help in the backfield. Henry would fill that need in a hurry.
3. A'Shawn Robinson and Jarran Reed, DTs, Alabama: It's a surprise that neither of Alabama's stellar defensive tackles were taken in Round 1. Look for a steady run on "hog mollies" starting early Friday. Clemson end Kevin Dodd won't last long, either.
Perfect fit? Buffalo Bills: Coach Rex Ryan isn't finished adding depth to a line that let him down last season. Either one of these big-bodied defenders would make the Bills coach a happy camper.
4. Connor Cook, QB, Michigan State: Dogged by concerns over his leadership and mental makeup, Cook's on-field work at Michigan State was impressive enough to make him the top signal-caller left. It all depends on the coach and fit he inherits, but quarterbacks -- even cocksure fellas with a little bit of 'tude -- don't stay unemployed for long.
Perfect fit? Cleveland Browns: Cook isn't for everyone, but coach Hue Jackson feels destined to pick a young passer to groom. This is the next best option after Paxton Lynch landed with the Broncos.
5. The O-linemen: Four tackles, two guards and a center went off the board Thursday, but teams can still land talent along the offensive line. Tackles Le'Raven Clark (Texas Tech), Shon Coleman (Auburn) and Jason Spriggs (Indiana) are all waiting for some love.
Perfect fit? New York Jets: Trading for Ryan Clady was nice, but he's a patch. Gang Green could use a new right tackle while looking for their future bookend.
6. Reggie Ragland, ILB, Alabama: Not the fastest defender in the draft, but Ragland might be the hardest-hitting linebacker left. Medically flagged for an "enlarged aorta," Ragland's condition is "not expected to alter his football career," per NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport, but "some teams have pushed him down a bit." "When he hits people they stop right there," one scout told McGinn, with another adding: "Great (expletive) kid. He'll knock the (expletive) out of you. Fast, explosive, not very smart. That's going to affect him on the next level." It's easy to grasp why he slipped, but Ragland packs a punch. If teams are comfortable with the total package, he should hear his name in Round 2.
Perfect fit? Green Bay Packers: With need at inside linebacker, the Packers would serve as a nice landing spot. Ragland is an old-school, hard-hitting thumper -- ideal for the Green Bay winter.
He's not the top wideout remaining, but Miller's story is fascinating. Once a two-time Big Ten MVP at quarterback, Miller missed all of 2014 with a shoulder injury before returning as a wideout last season. Miller was a revelation, showing insane on-field gifts despite a limited role for the Buckeyes. "He's going to go by at least the third round because of his speed and athleticism," one NFC executive told NFL Media's Lance Zierlein. "He's got some traits that will get him drafted early and a team will worry about coaching him up after they get him in."
Perfect fit? New Orleans Saints: Miller isn't for everyone, but Drew Brees could use help in the passing game and coach Sean Payton has the creative gifts to make the most of the former Ohio State star.
8. Hunter Henry, TE, Arkansas: The top tight end in the draft, Henry can do a little bit of everything. A solid blocker, the Arkansas product also caught 51 passes with zero drops last season. Drawing comparisons to Jason Witten, Henry is a strong fit for today's NFL attacks. Peg him for Round 2.
Perfect fit? Atlanta Falcons: Jacob Tamme is 30 and Levine Toilolo won't make anyone forget about Tony Gonzalez. Henry would give quarterback Matt Ryan a new weapon to play with.
9. Su'a Cravens, OLB, USC: Drawing comparisons to Arizona's Deone Bucannon and Carolina's Shaq Thompson, Cravens is the latest safety/linebacker hybrid to hit the scene. An athletic ball-hawk at USC, Cravens needs to land with a team certain on how to use him. "Probably the hardest guy to evaluate," said one scout. "They played him at linebacker at USC. Is he a safety? I don't think so. Is he a linebacker? I don't think so. Is he a solid football player? Yeah."
Perfect fit? New England Patriots: While some coaches might struggle to fit Cravens into their scheme, Bill Belichick won't. The Patriots coach loves unique players who can play all over the field. Cravens fits the bill.
10. Sterling Shepard, WR, Oklahoma: Arguably the top wideout left after Thursday's run on receivers, Shepard has drawn comparisons to Seattle's Tyler Lockett. Not a big guy -- he's 5-foot-10 and 194 pounds -- the former Oklahoma star looms as a tantalizing slot receiver for the right club. He'll go quick.
Perfect fit? Cincinnati Bengals: After missing out on the first wave of receivers in Round 1, the Bengals need to address the position sooner than later. A trade up for Shepard makes sense.
How would this draft class be viewed if Jack and Smith were healthy? Once seen as a potential top overall pick, Smith's landing spot is a mystery after he suffered nerve damage and two torn knee ligaments in the Fiesta Bowl. Not expected to play in 2016, Smith could still find a home in the third round. If he regains form, this could be the steal of the draft.
Perfect fit? Jacksonville Jaguars: Why not? General manager David Caldwell has built a young roster designed for future success. The front office is under pressure to win, but a mid-round flier on Smith would make Caldwell and coach Gus Bradley look like masterminds if he rounds back into shape.Last week, the Rosetta spacecraft crashed into comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after orbiting it since 2014. It was supposed to do that: the mission was at an end, and the mission designers wanted to end it by getting a close look at the surface of the comet. But this raises an interesting problem: how do you get a device that is designed to never stop to actually stop?
A spacecraft like Rosetta is built from the ground up to keep going, to reboot and go into a backup mode, phone home and wait for instructions if it encounters a problem. This is called a safe mode, and it has saved the spacecraft several times before. If it was left unfixed, when the spacecraft hit the comet, it would trigger a special safe mode called FDIR (Failure Detection, Isolation and Recovery) that would keep sending a diagnostic signal back to earth until the mission controllers responded.
But this mission was at an end, and if the probe was left constantly rebooting and transmitting a cry for help, it could interfere with other spacecraft using the same frequency. Even a weak signal could interfere with another spacecraft, so the designers wanted to shut it down completely. So, they used an interesting approach: they patched the software on the spacecraft to stop it phoning home. The day before it was crashed into the comet, they sent it a patch that removed the safe mode and replaced it with a passive mode that hadn’t been used since before launch, where the spacecraft would simply sit and wait for instructions if it hit a problem. A few hours before the crash, this patch was activated, and the probe was now without a backup plan. So, when it hit the comet, it entered this passive mode, and it will stay in this mode for as long as the batteries last, forever waiting for a command to restart that will never come…
Thanks to [Daniel] for the tip!Apollo 11 Mission
Science Experiments
In addition to their sample collection activities, the Apollo 11 crew performed several experiments on the lunar surface. The results of some of these experiments were either radioed to Earth by the crew or returned to Earth for laboratory analysis.
The Soil Mechanics Investigation studied the properties of the lunar soil
The Solar Wind Composition Experiment collected samples of the solar wind for analysis on Earth.
Other experiments were deployed by the crew and then monitored from Earth by radio telemetry after the crew departed. This group of experiments was termed the Early Apollo Scientific Experiment Package. It was less extensive than the experiments performed on later missions, both because of time restrictions on the EVA and because of limitations on the payload mass carried on the first landing attempt.
The Passive Seismic Experiment detected lunar "moonquakes" and provided information about the internal structure of the Moon.
The Laser Ranging Retroreflector measured very precisely the distance between the Earth and Moon.
The Lunar Dust Detector studied the effects of lunar dust on the operation of the experiment package.
Apollo 11 Dataset Descriptions
The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) provides data and information on Apollo experiments upon request to individuals or organizations resident in the United States. The same services are available to scientists outside the United States through the World Data Center A for Rockets and Satellites. Normally, a charge is made for the requested data to cover the cost of reproduction and the processing of the request.
Catalog of Apollo Experiment Operations
This Johnson Space Center site catalogs each experiment and equipment item deployed or operated on the lunar surface during the Apollo program. It summarizes some of the general problems encountered with these experiments and provides guidelines for the design of future lunar surface experiments.A possible new approach to treating HIV/AIDS
Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Massachusetts General (MGH) and Boston Children’s hospitals for the first time have used a relatively new gene-editing technique to create what could prove to be an effective technique for blocking HIV from invading and destroying patients’ immune systems.
This is the first published report of a group using CRISPR/Cas technology to efficiently and precisely edit clinically relevant genes out of cells collected directly from people, in this case human blood-forming stem cells and T-cells.
Though the researchers believe that this new approach to HIV therapy might be ready for human safety trials in less than five years, they themselves offered three strong points of caution:
The first and most obvious is that they could run into unexpected complications; the second is that the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic is littered with “cures” that turned out not to be; and finally, even if this new approach works perfectly, it will require additional developments to be applicable in the areas of the world that have been the hardest hit by the epidemic.
The work, led by Chad Cowan, PhD, and Derrick Rossi, PhD, associate professors in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (HSCRB), is featured on the cover of this month's issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell.
HIV specifically targets T cells, a principal portion of the blood-based immune system, and enters via a gene receptor called CCR5 that serves as a doorway into the cells. Once inside the T cells, HIV replicates and kills off the host cells, leaving patients at the mercy of a variety of opportunistic infections.
Using the CRISPR/Cas gene-editing technology, the Cowan and Rossi teams knocked the CCR5 receptor out of blood stem cells that they showed could give rise to differentiated blood cells that did not have CCR5. In theory, such gene-edited stem cells could be introduced into HIV patients via bone marrow transplantation, the procedure used to transplant blood stem cells into leukemia patients, to give rise to HIV-resistant immune systems.
“We showed that you can knock out CCR5 very efficaciously, we showed that the cells are still functional, and we did very, very deep sequencing analysis to show that there were no unwanted mutations, so it appears to be safe,” Cowan said, adding that “there is obviously much more work to do."
“The next step is animal trials in collaboration with the Ragon Institute at Mass General,” Cowan said. “There are excellent mouse models you can give a human immune system and then infect with HIV. We can give our cells to the mice and see if they're protected from HIV.”
Once those studies are completed, and if they are successful and complications do not arise, the next step would be to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to launch Phase I human trials, which are designed solely to test the safety of new treatments. Cowan said it is too early to predict how soon such trials might begin.
David Scadden, MD, a hematologist/oncologist who is both co-director of HSCI and director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at MGH, called the new work “a tremendous first step in editing out what makes human cells vulnerable to HIV. It makes possible the idea that a person's own immune cells can attack HIV without being susceptible to it. Since this was done in stem cells, the entire immune system may be durably brought to bear on the virus. That's a powerful concept."
“This is something we absolutely have to pursue all the way to the clinic," said Scadden, who is also co-chair of HSCRB. He noted that “related studies to improve the safety and ease of stem cell transplant will be needed to bring this work to a broad group of patients, but a generous gift by an MGH philanthropist has brought the gene editing and stem cell transplant teams together to accomplish just that.”
What makes this work especially promising is that it may create a way to do for a large number of patients what was done for Timothy Ray Brown, the “Berlin patient.” Physicians in Berlin gave Brown, who was suffering from both HIV/AIDS and leukemia, a transplant of bone marrow harvested from someone with a rare genetic defect that left the person free of the CCR5 receptor. For the six years since he received the transplant, Brown has reportedly been HIV free, and is thought to be the only patient ever “cured” of HIV/AIDS. If successful, the gene therapy treatment proposed by Cowan and Rossi might accomplish the same thing.
Cowan said the experiment was typical of work performed at HSCI. The stem cell biologist’s group had just “started playing with the CRISPR system, and I was talking to Derrick, who’s a blood stem cell expert, and we decided we should try this.” So Cowan and his group did the gene editing in T-cells, while Rossi’s group focused on the blood-forming stem cells.
"CRISPR has been used a lot for almost two years, and report after report note high efficacy in cell line A or cell line B. Nobody had yet reported on the efficacy or utility of CRISPR in primary blood stem cells," said Rossi, whose lab is in Boston Children’s Hospital’s Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine. "But most researchers would agree that blood will be the first tissue targeted for gene editing-based therapies. You can take blood-forming stem cells out of a patient, edit them, and transplant them back."
In their Cell Stem Cell paper, Rossi and Cowan showed they could edit β2M out of T-cells and CCR5 out of hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs) efficiently, predictably, and precisely. They further showed that edited HSPCs could go on to produce the normal portfolio of blood and immune cells.
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the facility allegedly told the miner manufacturer that they did not rush the installation of new miners and that they had used the cables provided with the SP30 machines.
Arson not ruled out
The cause of the fire remains unclear, with local media reports suggesting it could have been a simple short-circuit.
Arson is another possibility that has not been ruled out, however. One facility operator indicated that it might have been an “external source” and that no short-circuit had occurred, saying:
“There was absolutely no failure anywhere, no wiring failure. It wasn’t damaged, it was fine. The only cables you see are the power cables of the miners themselves … The electrical system was working, there was no short and there is no short even now.”
The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, said the miners continued running even as the buildings were engulfed in flames – failing one by one. He also indicated that the adhesive holding the acoustic foam in place may have helped propagate the blaze:
“It is the only reason the fire could spread. We left a huge empty space, 30–40 metres with no miners at all and then another 10–15 metres to the next building.”
The operator also suggested that ventilation inlets could have fueled the fire and helped it spread. In all, three buildings were engulfed, two of which subsequently collapsed.
The facility and the machines, which had been paid for in bitcoin generated from the mining operation, was not insured. However, the representative said it has enough resources to get back on its feet.
“We had zero insurance. Everything is our own money,” he said. “We are early adopters and we are not new to mining.”
Images courtesy of Spondoolies-Tech, Cowboyminers collectiveBut, apparently, Comcast doesn't agree. "Our records indicate that the cable modem, which you currently use for your XFINITY internet service, may not be able to receive the full range of our speeds," reads the notice sent to BB, claiming action was needed on his service. "To ensure you're receiving the full benefits of your XFINITY internet service, please replace your cable modem." In response, BB notes that "we stream Netflix and YouTube and our internet speed is great for everything we need."
Consumerist spoke to an unnamed Comcast executive, who says the goal isn't to upsell a modem to users. Instead, it wants to provide an "educational tool" to advise them that their third-party modem may be too old to support its maximum internet speeds, as well as inform about software updates and bug fixes they're missing out on. Sure, the situation could just be about upgrading BB's home network to DOCSIS 3.1, the gigabit tech Comcast is in the process of rolling out, but this doesn't seem like the best way to go about it -- nobody appreciates spam.
BB adds, "If they want me to upgrade my modem so badly they can send me a new one, or put a credit on my bill to pay for one that I buy myself." If not, he says he'll keep using until it no longer works.
Update: A Comcast representative reached out to us with the following statement:
This program is a thoughtful effort by our engineers to ensure our customers are getting the speeds, performance, and security they are paying for. We have a list of approved modems customers can purchase here [at] http://www. mydeviceinfo.comcast.net/. It's really important to us that our customers enjoy the best online experience possible and that means alerting them if the device they have is either nearing the end of its life or is too old to support faster speeds.
[Image credits: Consumerist (screenshot)]As technology generally continues to advance, one thing you can be sure of is the criminal justice system’s use of innovative new “tools” will grow exponentially. This can be a good thing, but it can also be a very dangerous thing. Pennsylvania’s new law that permits the use of data showing whether people are “deemed likely to commit additional crimes” in criminal sentencing, is a perfect example of how an over reliance on technology can be a threat to liberty and due process.
– From the post: Pennsylvania to Become First State to Use “Precrime” Statistics in Criminal Sentencing
Welcome to the future, ladies and gentleman.
From ZDNet:
A driver allegedly involved in two hit-and-run incidents was tracked down after her car alerted the police. As reported by local news outlets, an unusual 911 call to emergency services took place on Friday in Port St. Lucie, Florida. You would usually expect a human voice on the end of the line, but in this scenario, a Ford vehicle alerted the police to a collision. 57-year-old woman Cathy Bernstein allegedly hit a truck before ploughing into a van on Prima Vista Boulevard, fleeing the scene after each collision. While Bernstein allegedly ran for the hills, her car had already recorded the crash and automatically contacted 911 after recording the time and date of the collision. The car’s safety features, used by by Ford, BMW and other automakers, make use of sensors and Internet connectivity to shave down the time emergency responders take to get to the scene of an accident. As an example, Ford’s SYNC‘s Emergency Assistance portal pushes the car to send a direct call to emergency services when the airbag is deployed or the fuel pump is deactivated — such as when a car suffers a sudden jolt against an object. The system also gives 911 information including the car model, time, and GPS coordinates. Usually, this would mean that drivers involved in an accident who are knocked out or cannot reach for their phones can be assisted as quickly as possible. However, in the case of hit-and-run drivers there will be nowhere to hide — as their car may snitch on them. You are automatically linked to a record of a collision’s time, the vehicle involved — and therefore the accompanying registration details — and the location. By 2018, every new vehicle sold within the grasp of the European Union must have this kind of emergency responder technology installed. While originally planned for 2015, despite delays, the EU says eCall emergency responder technology could save up to 2,500 lives a year.
It’s a brave new world out there.
For related articles, see:
“Minority Report”-esque Big Brother Billboards are Coming to England
Video of the Day – Watch Google’s Humanoid Robot “Atlas” Stomp Around a Forest
Iris Scanners are Coming to College Campuses
Turning Humans Into Algos – The Trend of Employees Wearing “Biosensing Wearable Devices” at Work
Pennsylvania to Become First State to Use “Precrime” Statistics in Criminal Sentencing
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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Follow me on Twitter.HOUSEHOLDERS will be forced to pay a flat-rate charge for their water for at least three years.
HOUSEHOLDERS will be forced to pay a flat-rate charge for their water for at least three years.
The Government will begin installing meters in homes from next year, but said yesterday that all households would pay a flat-rate charge until 2014.
That means homes which have a meter installed before then will have no incentive to reduce consumption. This is because they will have to pay a flat charge -- likely to be €175 a year -- instead of being billed on the basis of use.
Pressure mounted on the Government to set out how it would charge households for water after Environment Minister Phil Hogan refused to say how much the annual charge would be.
He also admitted that not until meters to measure consumption had been installed in the State's 1.4 million homes would households be encouraged to reduce their usage.
This means that a person living alone will have to pay the same annual charge as a family of six for the foreseeable future.
It comes after the Irish Independent revealed last month that a flat-rate charge would be introduced from next year, despite Fine Gael having promised that water charges would not be in place until a meter was in every home in the country.
Mr Hogan confirmed that the roll-out of water meters would begin early next year, but he could not say how much families would pay.
"What we're doing next year is introducing a water-metering programme and it will be rolled-out over three years," he said. "There will be one charge, a household charge.
"We're obliged under the EU/IMF agreement to bring in a household charge. I'm not going to speculate on what figures (for the charge) will be ultimately decided. Over and above a generous, free, domestic allowance, they (households) will be paying more money if they waste water."
It is not yet clear if low-income households will get a waiver and the charges will not be decided on for at least three years.
It is also unclear how the €500m water-meter programme will be funded, with Mr Hogan saying it could be financed either by the National Pension Reserve Fund or the Department of the Environment.
Ireland is one of the only countries in the EU not to charge for domestic water.
The Government will face stiff opposition to putting a charging system in place.
Collection
Already, the collection of commercial water rates, which are charged to businesses, schools and state bodies, is as low as 27pc in some counties. Unpaid bills of €90m are outstanding.
Dublin City Council engineer Tom Leahy told a water-metering conference that average household water bills could be as much as €400 per year. Bills in the UK averaged at around €400 per annum, he said.
Professor Richard Tol of the ESRI said households should be encouraged to switch to meters to save money.
"You pay for the water you use with a meter or a flat charge which is high enough -- and increasing over time -- to encourage people to change to meters," he said.
"The current plan of meters in every home is a major logistical operation. It's unclear that the Government has the right skills and people to do this."
Fianna Fail environment spokesman Niall Collins said the Government should "come clean" on what households would be expected to pay.
Irish IndependentThe nights are getting in. The temperature's dropping. It's now far more socially acceptable to sit inside all day playing video games. Yay.
To help you plan out your next month of being a hermit, here are 15 iOS and Android games that will keep you going through the chilly months. Long RPGs, quick fire getaways, and spooky Halloween-flavoured treats.
As always, you should not take these dates as fact. Games get delayed and release dates get lost. So all schedules and platforms are subject to change, and don't come crying to us if some slip into November.
Undefeated
By Adorlea Games - coming to iOS and Android on October 3rd
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For decades, amateur game developers have been using RPG Maker to design their own Dragon Quest-alikes. And a few have ended up on iOS and Android, over the years.
But Adorlea Games's Undefeated - a defiantly retro stat-swapping RPG with chunky pixel art graphics and cute self-referential humour - is the first official mobile port, co-created with RPG Maker makers Enterbrain and Degica.
Read more in Chris's news story.
Inferno 2
By Radiangames - coming to iOS on October 2nd
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Luke 'Radiangames' Schneider says that Inferno 2 is the "largest self-published project" he's ever undertaken. It's longer, more polished, and deeper than his entire catalogue of neon-dipped shmups.
Like the terrific Inferno+, this will once again feature Geometry Wars-style twin-stick shooting inside twisty labyrinthine levels. We look forward to finding out what's new in this sequel.
You can get more - and the skinny on the Android version - in the news story.
Beatbuddy
By THREAKS - coming to iOS on October 2nd
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We've called charming underwater oddity Beatbuddy an interactive music video so many times I've lost count.
But the point still stands: this is a game where entire levels rock out to a looping background song, creating obstacles and enemies that must be avoided or defeated to the rhythm of the beat.
We previewed the game earlier this year during PG Connects in Helsinki.
Card Dungeon
By Playtap Games - coming to iOS on October 2nd
To me, the most exciting thing about Card Dungeon is the gorgeous Card Hunter-inspired visual design where heroes and enemies are little cardboard cut-outs, wedged into tiny plastic stands.
But others might be more interested in the novel mash-up gameplay, which mixes a card game with a roguelike for a dungeon crawler where your movements are limited to the cards in your hand.
Here's more, in the form of a news story.
Hellraid: The Escape
By Techland - coming to Android on October 2nd
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iOS gamers have had this gory game for a while now. And have been stuck solving puzzles in some dank catacombs for months. Now, it's coming to Android.
Of the iPad edition, Harry said "A jumble of gore and old ideas, Hellraid: The Escape is entertaining when it's at its best, and enjoyable when it's not".
Skylanders Trap Team
By Activison - coming to iOS and Android on October 10th
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To date, the mobile Skylanders games have been spin-offs and mini-games. Trap Team, however, is a full-on console game that just so happens to be on your iPad or Android tablet.
You can even buy a portal that hooks up over Bluetooth and let's you import those fancy little figures into the game. It's a bold step for mobile gaming's continuing quest to be a serious gaming platform.
Want more? Peter recently played the game and wrote this delightful preview.
Angry Birds Transformers
By Rovio - coming to iOS on October 15th, Android on October 30th
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If this was just Yet Another Angry Birds game, but with the birds and pigs dressed in robo clobber, I don't think I'd be able to muster the enthusiasm to pen a single word on the subject.
Luckily for you, this isn't that. It's actually a curious mix of auto-runner and physics puzzle where you blast piggy shanty towns in the background, while the birds run and transform into vehicles in the foreground.
A breath of fresh air is just what these agitated birds needed. See more in our preview.
Hail to the King Deathbat
By Subscience Studios - coming to iOS and Android on October 15th
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Musicians and video games have a spotty relationship. From Aerosmith's garbage arcade game Revolution X to Courtney Love's Twitter rampage against Guitar Hero for having Kurt Cobain lip sync to Maroon 5, these two mediums rarely mix.
But hard rock band Avenged Sevenfold is giving it another bash with this fantasy hack and slash adventure that's scored to the sound of their new album. Will it be a good game, or a trumped up advert? We will find out.
Here's a little more info, in news
On the Run
By Miniclip - coming to iOS in October
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If Asphalt Overdrive failed to satisfy your cravings for endless drivers, try this on for size. Once again you're racing down the highway, dodging and weaving between cars to stay in one piece.
There's also a clever risk / reward mechanic where you can get a slipstream speed boost by tailing other cars, but you run the risk of smashing into their bumper. Still, it encourages you to stay in the pack and take your life into your own hands.
Tilt to Live: Gauntlet's Revenge
By One Man Left - coming to iOS in October
This started life as an update for Tilt to Live 2. But then it got bigger, and more complex, and more ambitious. And in the end, One Man Left decided to just spin it off as its own game.
So you get a collection of manic, savage, brutal survival mini-games. It's all a bit Flappy Bird, only if the pipes would smash together like giant green fists and crush the bird into a thin yellow paste.
We've got more, here.
The Drive - Devil's Run
By POLYGAMe - coming to iOS in October
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Here's a driving game that pays homage to a very particular brand of retro racers: the chunky polygonal games from the mid-90s like the early Test Drive and Need for Speed games. Before they went all Hollywood.
It's also got a dashing cel-shaded art style that looks quite swish. Remember when every other game was cel-shaded? You had XIII, Jet Set Radio, Wind Waker, Cel Damage, Auto Modellista. Good times. Good, cel-shaded times.
Spirits of Spring
By Minority Media - coming to iOS in October
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If you don't like arty games with a message to share, move on. This one comes from the guys behind Papo & Yo: a heart-breaking, dreamlike game about a young boy who's hiding from his abusive, alcoholic dad.
Cheery stuff. This follow-up is equally as challenging, and explores bullying. In play, it's an adventure about a young boy, Chiwatin, and his two friends, Rabbit and Bear.
Read Chloi's piece here for more info.
Fighting Fantasy: Caverns of the Snow Witch
By Tin Man Games - coming to iOS and Android in October
The next Choose Your Own Adventure app to come out of gamebook factory Tin Man Games is a classic.
This 1984 Puffin novel, written by Ian Livingstone, casts you as a guard on a merchant's caravan in frozen Allansia, who heads into the tundra to hunt down a killer beast. Start dusting off your dice in anticipation.
Haunt the House: Terrortown
By SFB Games - coming to iPad in October
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You might remember this game from PlayStation Mobile. You might not. You might not remember PlayStation Mobile. Maybe you'd rather forget.
Whatever the case, SFB Games's sandbox puzzle game Haunt the House is coming to iPad. You play as a ghost and it's your job to scare people away by possessing various objects and using them to spook the cartoon inhabitants.
You can see and read loads more in our EGX preview.
Vainglory
By Super Evil Mega Corp - starting global rollout on iOS in October
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Every year, some developer gets the pleasure of standing on stage alongside Tim Cook at the latest iPhone keynote, to explain just how fandabby doozy their new game will look on the latest iThing.
Super Evil Mega Corp had the honour, this year, with its mobile MOBA Vainglory. So if you just got an iPhone 6, or you're running any iOS device capable of Metal-powered graphics, this is one to look forward to.North American anime licensor Funimation Entertainment revealed more of the English dub cast for the One Piece television anime series at San Diego Comic Con on Thursday. The cast for the Thriller Bark arc is as follows:
Andrew T. Chandler as Absalom
Jamie Marchi as Cindry
Jerry Jewell as Hildon
Marcus D. Stimac as Hogback
Ray Hurd as Kumacy
Alex Moore as Lola
Chris Guerrero as Gecko Moria
Felecia Angelle as Perona
Funimation also confirmed that Ian Sinclair will return from the One Piece Strong World film to play Brook.
Funimation is now taking pre-orders for its One Piece Season 6, Voyage 1 release, which will start the Thriller Bark arc. The DVD set will ship on September 30. Funimation is currently streaming a trailer for the release.Editor's Note: A nation’s legal system is integral to how its citizens look upon issues that concern the country in general and their individual lives in particular. Despite having the world’s longest Constitution — not to mention, one that has gone through numerous amendments and the many directives by the Supreme Court that have secured the stature of de facto law, the Indian law books have struggled to evolve at a pace commensurate with the rapid changes society has undergone. As the load of being archaic becomes heavier on our law system, Firstpost introduces a 10-part series titled 'Letter of the Law' to push forward the debate on legal practices and the law itself. The series will explore a variety of aspects pertaining to Indian law through opinion and analyses. *** “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” - Benjamin Franklin Aadhaar, India’s biometric identification system, which is the largest such project in the world, is in the eye of a storm lately. Though Aadhaar has become the focal point of debate on right of privacy, threats to data security and citizens’ rights to privacy go far beyond it. The Constitution of India does not provide privacy the status of a fundamental right, however, the same comes into existence upon widening the horizons of Article 21 of the Constitution ie right to liberty which states that “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law”. Since the Constitution of India does not specifically guarantee ‘right to privacy’, the determination of privacy as a right completely rests upon the interpretation of the judiciary, and has been subject to restrictions under various provisions and judgments of the Supreme Court of India. The recognition of privacy as a right first came up in the case of Kharak Singh versus State of Uttar Pradesh, wherein the Supreme Court interpreted that right to privacy is not guaranteed under the Constitution yet the said right is an essential ingredient of personal liberty which is implicit in Article 21 of the Constitution. Life as we know is something more than one’s mere survival and existence; therefore, the right to privacy is an inherent right to every citizen of the country. As things stand today, where the Government of India is taking a stand that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right and at the same time the government is promoting digitalisation, enacting policies and regulations permitting surveillance in cyberspace, telephones, email, personal messages etc through multiple agencies under the grab of national security, implementing national programmes like Unique Identification Number etc, it is imperative for India to enact stringent privacy laws. Evidentially, there has been a rampant use of technology by the masses on daily basis and as a result, the internet giants like Google, Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp and Microsoft have vast information about us, through malware, covert eavesdropping, and the unwarranted permissions we voluntarily grant social media sites and apps. There is an immediate need for a data protection law which emphasise a person’s rights to her personal data; require her informed consent to collect, process, remove or alter such data; oblige those who deal with data to keep it secure; and have a grievance mechanism to punish violations with hefty fines and imprisonment. Growing challenges of privacy The current laws on privacy are not at par with the growing developments in technology in India. The Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act) and the rules made thereunder, do entail certain provisions pertaining to data protection, however as privacy is not a right per se under any law in force, these provisions appear inadequate in addressing issues relating to sharing of, disclosure and retention of data and leave room for potential abuse. The Privacy Bill, 2010 was introduced by the Department of Personnel and Training, however though the objective of the Privacy Bill was to protect individuals’ fundamental right to privacy, the Privacy Bill primarily focused on provisions pertaining protection against the use of electronic/digital recording devices in public spaces without consent and for the purpose of blackmail or commercial use. Incidentally, the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010, which aimed at establishing a National Identification Authority for issuance unique identification number (called Aadhaar) to every resident of India, which would be linked to a resident’s demographic and biometric information, was also introduced. Neither the Privacy Bill, 2010 nor the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010, were enacted. With a view to conquer growing privacy challenges in the country and in order to effectively address the privacy issues, the erstwhile Planning Commission of India had directed the constitution of a ‘Group of Experts’ to identify the privacy issues and prepare a report on the same to facilitate authoring of privacy bill for India. The Expert Committee, which submitted its report in 2012, analysed various international privacy principles and the existing privacy legislations in India. According to the recommendation of the Committee, the Privacy Act should put into place a regulatory framework for both public and private sector organisations and further aim to harmonise all statutory legislations with respect to privacy laws in India.
Reuters
The report recommended fundamental ‘privacy principles’ in line with global standards including the EU, OECD, and APEC, which included the principle of notice, choice and consent, collection and purpose limitation, disclosure of information, security and accountability. Further, the Expert Committee also recommended the establishment of privacy commissioners, self-regulating organisations and co-regulation, to ensure implementation and enforcement of policies. The draft privacy bill of 2011, was modified based on the recommendations made by the Expert Committee, however, no definite timeline has been provided by the government in relation to the introduction of legislation to protect privacy of individuals. While the enactment of much needed privacy laws seems to be not a priority, the government is uncontrollably enacting policies and regulations for surveillance through systems like the Centralised Monitoring System, NITRA, NATGRID (for collecting data from across databases) in the interest of National Security and linking citizens and databases across the unique identity number in Aadhaar. If we look at the steps being taken by the government in relation to the implementation of these programs and the powers being granted to various governmental authorities under these legislations to monitor data over the telecommunications networks including interception of calls, tracking of IP addresses etc. it becomes evident that a specific privacy legislation is imperative and urgently required in order to safe guard the privacy of individuals. Monitoring and surveillance If we look at the establishment of the Central Monitoring System (“CMS”), which is a centralised telephone interception provisioning system installed by the Centre for Development of Telematics to automate the process of lawful interception; monitoring of telecommunications, there is a lack of clarity on the scope, functions, and technical architecture of the CMS. It is worrying that there is no specific law which mandates or regulates the CMS. Surveillance in India is primarily governed by the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 (“Telegraph Act”) and the IT Act. Section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act which empowers the Indian government to intercept communications on the occurrence of any “public emergency” or in the interest of “public safety”, when it is deemed “necessary or expedient” to do so in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states, public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of an offence. On the other hand Section 69 of the IT Act (as amended in 2008) grants the government with the power to intercept, monitor or decrypt or cause to be intercepted or monitored or decrypted any information transmitted received or stored through any computer resource if it is satisfied that it is necessary or expedient to do in the interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence relating to above or for investigation of any offence. It is relevant to note that prerequisites of ‘public emergency’ and ‘public safety’ which were earlier nearly the same in the IT Act, and the Telegraph Act, have now been removed from IT Act with which the power of the government has become more extensive in relation to interception and monitoring of telecommunications.
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In addition to the implementation of the CMS, the government had also setup the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), which is an integrated intelligence grid connecting databases of core security agencies of the Government of India. NATGRID would provide intelligence agencies real-time access to 21 databanks, including banking, credit card, income tax, election identity card, call records, PAN card and driving licence details. Again, there is no specific law which mandates or regulates the NATGRID. Internationally, the USA, the EU and the UK provide for specific laws in relation to lawful interception and surveillance. However, globally mass surveillance activities are being challenged by Human Right activists as being violative of privacy rights of citizens. The EU had also introduced the Data Protection Directive in 2006, which mandates the retention of metadata of internet and telephone usage, which was struck down by the European Court of Justice in 2014 on the grounds of infringement of privacy.
Similarly, the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 (“Aadhaar Act”), was passed in the Lok Sabha, despite being opposed on numerous grounds including the concerns regarding privacy and protection of biometric information and demographic data of citizens collected by the enrolling agency for issuance of the Aadhaar number. Though the objective of the Aadhaar Act is to provide for efficient, transparent, and targeted delivery of subsidies, benefits and services to individuals residing in India through assigning of unique identity numbers to such individuals, the Aadhaar Act creates a single database, a Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR), holding bio-metric as well as demographic information on every Indian, along with name, address, and phone number. Even though the Aadhaar Act was introduced post submission of the recommendations of the Shah Committee Report, the Aadhaar Act does not address some of the key principles enumerated under the Shah Committee Report. While the question whether there is any right to privacy guaranteed under our Constitution is still pending before the Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court, the government is proposing to make Aadhaar mandatory for obtaining a permanent account number, filing your income tax returns etc. All this while, the Supreme Court, had previously stated that Aadhaar cannot be made mandatory and the production of an Aadhaar card will not be condition for obtaining any benefits otherwise due to a citizen. However, with the Finance Act, 2017, it seems the order of the Apex Court has consciously been disregarded which has negated an individual’s freedom of voluntary enrolment. There is no doubt that people are evading taxes by maintaining multiple PAN. One estimate is that there are 19 million income taxpayers in India, whereas 250 million PAN cards are issued and Aadhaar can be an effective way to de-duplicate the PAN. Further, though the Aadhaar Act prohibits usage of bio-metric information for any other purpose other than generation of Aadhaar number and authentication, under the Aadhaar Act, Section 33(1) permits the disclosure of information including identity information or authentication records, pursuant to a judicial order by a Court not inferior to that of a District Judge. Further, Section 33(2) permits disclosure of information including identity information or authentication records (including bio-metric data) in the interest of national security if so directed by an officer not below the rank of a joint secretary to the Government of India specifically authorised in this behalf. The Section further provides that every such direction shall be reviewed by an ‘oversight committee’ consisting of the Cabinet Secretary and the Secretaries to the Government of India in the Department of Legal Affairs and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, before it takes effect. The Aadhaar Act permits disclosure of information for ‘national security’ purposes but there is no clarity in relation to what extent the surveillance can be exercised by the government under the guise of ‘national security’. The Aadhaar Act, has similarities to the Identity Cards Act, 2006 of United Kingdom, under which national identity cards which were a personal identification document and European Union travel document, linked to a database known as the National Identity Register, were proposed to be issued. As in the case of the Aadhaar Act, when the UK Identity Card Bill was introduced, independent studies in relation to the proposed bill strongly recommended against the centralising storage of information due to privacy concerns. The Identity Card Act, 2006 has been repealed and the National Identity Register has been destroyed, due to privacy and cost concerns. What about Big Data? With the launch of government’s digital India, which aims to transform India into a digitally empowered society and the widespread increase in the number of internet users in India, which has led to a rampant growth in the amount of data and information about an individual that is available in the hands of private enterprises and the government, the concern about privacy and security in relation to ‘big data’ analytics is discernible.
ReutersThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) unleashed a huge controversy two years ago with a paper refuting a slow down in ocean warming. Now a group of researchers have used independent data to prove the notion of a “global warming hiatus” in recent years was in fact not true.
According to Phys.org, the 2015 study by NOAA showed that modern buoys used to measure ocean temperature have a tendency to show slightly cooler temperatures than the previous ship-based systems did, even when measuring the same part of the ocean at the same time. And as the new system replaced the old one, the researchers realized that some of the “real-world warming” was missed in the transition.
After they corrected for what they called a “cold bias,” the NOAA researchers published a paper in the journal Science stating that oceans have actually warmed by 0.12 degrees C per decade since the year 2000 – or nearly twice as fast as the as the 0.07 degrees C per decade in the previous 30 years. This showed that the “global warming hiatus” many thought was happening actually was not.
Related: The oceans stalled global warming, but they’re about to unleash the heat
The findings caused a huge kerfuffle amongst climate change skeptics, who attacked the NOAA researchers – and led a House of Representatives committee to subpoena emails from the scientists involved.
But this recent study, conducted by the University of California, Berkeley and Berkeley Earth and soon to be published as a paper in the journal Science Advances, uses independent data to show that despite the uproar by skeptics, the NOAA’s findings were correct. “Our results mean that essentially NOAA got it right, that they were not cooking the books,” lead author Zeke Hausfather, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, told Phys.org.
Hausfather and his college Kevin Cowtan at the University of York in the UK extended the NOAA’s study by taking into account several different further kinds of water temperature data. The results they got matched the NOAA’s results exactly.
“In the grand scheme of things, the main implication of our study is on the hiatus, which many people have focused on, claiming that global warming has slowed greatly or even stopped,” Hausfather said. “Based on our analysis, a good portion of that apparent slowdown in warming was due to biases in the ship records.”
Via Phys.org
Images via Unsplash and JDmcginley, PixabayImage copyright Getty Images Image caption Shadow chancellor John McDonnell (centre) warns of "dark arts"
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell says "a soft coup" has been launched against Jeremy Corbyn by "elements in the Labour Party".
Mr McDonnell accuses unnamed "plotters" and the "Murdoch media empire" of a "coordinated and fully resourced" coup.
In an article for Labour Briefing, he said "the plotters" were using "an exceptionally well resourced dark arts operation" to "destroy Jeremy Corbyn".
One former Labour minister described Mr McDonnell's comments as "unhinged".
In his article, Mr McDonnell accuses "the coup perpetrators" of "a covert strategy" to destabilise Mr Corbyn because they had failed to dislodge him directly through a leadership election.
He said their tactics included "daily and constant behind-the-scenes non-attributable briefings against Jeremy".
It is understood the article by Mr McDonnell was written before Labour's Copeland by-election loss but posted on the Labour Briefing website on Sunday night.
'Scale of task'
A spokesman for Mr McDonnell said: "This article was written over a week ago in response to the intervention from Tony Blair.
"It was published in print last week and only went online last night.
"However, as John said yesterday, he wants us all to focus on party unity following last week's by-election results.
"And he is looking to reach out in the coming days to those across all sections of the party and none."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jeremy Corbyn: "Now is not the time to run away"
Mr Corbyn, from the left of the party, was the overwhelming winner of Labour's leadership election in 2015, despite having the support of only a small number of the party's MPs.
A challenge to him last year led to another vote of all Labour Party members and affiliated supporters, which he again won overwhelmingly.
But many of the party's MPs have continued to be unhappy with his leadership, and the party trails the Conservatives in opinion polls.
Labour MPs vent anger
BBC political correspondent Iain Watson
At Monday night's Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) meeting, some MPs criticised Jeremy Corbyn's non-attendance, with one telling the BBC they would raise the Copeland defeat each week until the leader addressed it.
A party spokesman said Mr Corbyn had given his apologies for being unable to make the meeting and didn't attend every time.
Andrew Gwynne - the joint elections co-ordinator (with Ian Lavery) - oversaw the Copeland campaign and was supportively shouted down by MPs when he suggested taking responsibility for the defeat himself.
He was applauded for praising local activists and the neighbouring MP John Woodcock - a long-standing opponent of Jeremy Corbyn - for their efforts in the campaign.
He also said he looked forward to working with the PLP on the forthcoming local elections - the main issues would be health, housing and jobs.
Sources at the meeting suggested one of the more amusing questions came from former shadow transport secretary Lilian Greenwood, who read out a long list of reasons given over the weekend by party spokespeople for the loss of Copeland, and which hadn't included the party leadership.
She then asked: "Have I left anything off that list?"
Some MPs were critical of shadow attorney general Baroness Chakrabarti, who had outlined some of those reasons on television over the weekend but who hadn't attended the PLP.
A picture of her drinking with shadow home secretary Diane Abbott in the nearby Pugin room while the meeting was taking place had been tweeted and was raised by MP Neil Coyle. One MP told reporters: "Shami had a lot to say at the weekend. It's a shame she had nothing to say at the meeting."
On Sunday, Mr Corbyn said Labour's by-election loss showed "the scale of how hard our task is to persuade people of our message".
In a speech, he urged his party to "remain united" and not to "give up".
Labour lost the seat of Copeland, in Cumbria, to the Conservatives last week - the first by-election gain by a governing party in 35 years.
However, Labour managed to hold off a
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avoid banning zero rating, instead stating it would act on a "case by case basis" to determine what's anti-competitive, and what's just creative marketing and pricing. That has opened the door to companies being allowed to brutally violate net neutrality, provided they're just marginally clever about it.Comcast, for example, is now exempting its own streaming service from its usage caps, claiming that it doesn't violate net neutrality because it's "delivered over Comcast's managed IP infrastructure" and not the actual Internet. T-Mobile's now throttling every video service that touches its network by default (and lying about it), but claims this is ok because. AT&T and Verizon, meanwhile, are simply letting giant companies pay if they want to gain an utterly unfair competitive advantage over smaller, more shallow-pocketed competitors.And so far the FCC's response to these practices has ranged from praising them to weak-kneed promises that the agency is conducting notably informal inquiries. And while it's entirely possible the FCC wants to see if its neutrality rules withstand ISP lawsuits before leaning on them too heavily, it's also entirely possible the regulator is simply too timid to actually enforce the rules the public demanded it pass.
Filed Under: data caps, fcc, freebee, net neutrality, sponsored data, zero rating
Companies: verizonNHS teams not checking up on thousands of patients within week of discharge and breaching guidelines, Mind survey finds
Thousands of vulnerable people are being left at increased risk of suicide because NHS mental health teams in England and Wales are not checking up on them within a week of their discharge from hospital.
At least 11,000 people a year who have recently been in mental health inpatient care are not followed up within a week of coming home, despite guidelines requiring the NHS to contact them.
People discharged after hospital treatment for a mental health crisis should receive a visit or phone call to assess their needs, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) says. But figures obtained under freedom of information laws by the charity Mind show that one in 10 such people are not contacted.
“Patients should only be discharged from specialist mental health services when there are ongoing care arrangements in place for them. Failure to do so can put the person at risk of harm, their condition can relapse and it can mean they are more likely to go going back into hospital,” said Dr Paul Lelliott, the Care Quality Commission’s deputy chief inspector of hospitals.
Mind discovered that the Nice guidelines were often breached after receiving information from 54 of England’s NHS 56 mental health trust and one of Wales’s seven health boards.
What we need is a national social care service | Anne Perkins Read more
“If you don’t get the right care after you leave, if you’re left to cope alone, you end up in a revolving door, going straight back into hospital or being at risk of taking your own life,” said Sophie Corlett, Mind’s director of external relations.
The widespread lack of follow-up “is not good enough. It’s a tragedy so many people so very recently leaving the care of hospitals are losing their lives,” she added.
Separate research by Mind, among 850 patients about their experience of after-hospital care, found that those who were not followed up were twice as likely to attempt to take their own lives and a third more likely to harm themselves.
They are also more than twice as likely to end up back in A&E suffering another crisis, the survey found.
Natalie, 26, from Somerset, who ended up in hospital after trying to take her own life, said the crisis team did not visit her for a week afterwards.
“When you’re that unwell, it’s hard getting through each day. Each hour is tough, so just 24 hours can feel like such a long time. I needed someone to talk to, to help me understand my thoughts and feelings. To see someone only after a week, it’s not enough,” she said.
The CQC’s Lelliott said pressure on mental health services, including to discharge patients to free up beds, should not compromise the aftercare they received.
“We know that hospitals are under increasing pressure to discharge patients as soon as possible but providers must not compromise their ongoing care responsibilities to their patients. It is vital that when they discharge patients into community, it is done in a safe way that ensures people get the continuity of care they deserve and have every right to expect,” he stressed.
What can the UK learn from Finland's approach to mental health? Read more
Nice guidelines say all such patients should be contacted within a week, and those thought to be at risk of suicide within 48 hours. Last year’s National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide found that most suicides occurred on the third day after release.
“Patients leaving hospital can feel unsupported as they return to the problems that may have led to their admission. Those first few days are the time of greatest risk,” said Prof Louis Appleby, the director of the confidential inquiry.
Barbara Keeley, the shadow minister for mental health, said: “Mind’s research is yet more evidence of the gap between rhetoric and reality with this government. We are seeing people in some of the most vulnerable positions with their mental health being put at further risk.”
The Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb, who was the mental health minister in the coalition government, backed Mind’s call for all discharged patients to be contacted within 48 hours. “The moral case for this proposal is overwhelming. When we know that the risk of loss of life through suicide doubles if there is no timely follow up, the government and NHS England have an absolute duty to act. But this requires investment in community support which is so often lacking.”
Prof Mark Baker, director of the Nice Centre for Guidelines, said it was reviewing its recommendations to see if they needed to be updated in the light of Mind’s findings.
NHS England said: “Improved access to mental health support for people in the community where they live is part of our plans for the biggest expansion of mental health services in Europe.”MOSCOW/ NOVOAZOVSK Ukraine (Reuters) - On Monday, a resident of Novoazovsk in south-eastern Ukraine said she saw a column of armored vehicles approach the town and start shooting.
A crater made by a shell which, according to a fighter of the Ukrainian volunteer Dnipro battalion was fired from the territory of Russia, is seen near the town of Novoazovsk, eastern Ukraine, August 24, 2014. REUTERS/Maria Tsvetkova
“It all started at 8:00 this morning, tanks appeared, no fewer than seven of them,” the woman, who gave her name only as Lyudmila, told Reuters by telephone. “Right now I can hear rumbling, explosions... the residents are hiding.”
In Kiev later that morning, Ukrainian officials said the column was an incursion by Russian troops which it alleges are fighting alongside pro-Moscow separatists, a claim Russia quickly dismissed as disinformation.
That is a now-familiar ritual: the five-month conflict over eastern Ukraine is one of claim and counter-claim by opposing sides, often centering on what role Russia is playing. With the battlefield mostly too dangerous for reporters to safely move around, verifying who is doing what is usually impossible.
On Tuesday, in a continuation of the pattern, Kiev said it had captured a group of Russian soldiers who had entered Ukraine on a “special mission”, while Moscow said they were there by mistake.
However, the armored column that appeared on Monday in the far south-eastern corner of Ukraine, where it abuts the Russian border, was unusual because the spot was far removed from any territory held by the separatists.
It was therefore difficult to see how the column could have appeared in Ukraine without having come across the Russian border, unless it made an amphibious landing from the nearby Azov Sea which is improbable given the number of heavy vehicles witnesses said they saw.
A Reuters reporter was able to observe the situation in the area where the column was seen, first at the start of August and then most recently on Sunday afternoon, a few hours before the first sightings of the column were reported.
Those observations, combined with interviews with rebel leaders, Ukrainian soldiers, and other research, indicated two things.
First, that until late on Sunday there were no rebel formations within about 30 km (20 miles) of the area where the armored column first appeared, and had not been for weeks beforehand.
And secondly, that before the armored column appeared, the area had come under artillery fire at times when the nearest rebel positions were beyond the range of most types of weapon that could have delivered the strike.
It was not possible to establish whether the people driving the column and firing the artillery were Russian soldiers or separatist rebels. But there were strong indications that whoever it was doing those things operated out of Russian territory - something very unlikely to have happened without Moscow’s consent.
The question of Russian involvement is at the core of Western governments’ response to the Ukraine crisis, and could be crucial to how the conflict plays out.
The European Union and United States have already imposed sanctions on Russia in part based on allegations Moscow is arming the rebels. The West has warned of more sanctions if Russia provides further help.
ARTILLERY FIRE
A Ukrainian national guard unit stationed on the outskirts of Novoazovsk, on the road towards the Novoazovsk-Veselo-Voznesenka border crossing, showed a Reuters reporter a crater left by an exploding munition near their position.
They said the artillery fire was coming from over the border inside Russia, about 10 km (six miles) to the east.
“There were about 500 salvos from Grad (multiple rocket system) and mortars. There have been and are no rebels here whatsoever. They’re just firing straight from Russia,” Roman, the commander of a Ukrainian national guard unit, said on Sunday, before the armored column appeared in the same area.
Reuters saw no direct evidence of this, and Russian officials have repeatedly denied that their military is in any way involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, between pro-Moscow separatist rebels and government forces.
A spokesman for the Russian border guard service, when asked to comment, said: “This is stupid. Russia doesn’t fire at anyone.” The Russian defense ministry did not respond to a faxed request for comment.
But with no rebel presence within range inside Ukraine, it was not clear what other source there could have been for the artillery fire.
Even if rebels has somehow snuck into the area and fired the artillery, it seemed impossible they could have done that without using Russian territory to move about, given the distance from the nearest rebel-held locations.
CRATER
The crater seen by the Reuters reporter on Sunday, before the clashes with rebels, was in the corner of a field behind a defensive trench dug by the Ukrainian national guard unit. A metal fragment that appeared to come from a munition was found in the hole.
Reuters showed the photographs of the crater to four European weapons experts who said the crater was either made by an artillery rocket, most probably a Grad, or by a shell from a self-propelled 122 mm gun.
According to one of the experts, Konrad Muzyka, Europe and CIS Armed Forces Analyst with IHS, a consultancy, the maximum range for the 2S1 Gvozdika, the Soviet-designed self-propelled 122 mm gun in use in ex-Soviet states, is 15.3 km. That is extendable to 21.9 km when rocket-assisted projectiles are used, he said.
Muzyka said the maximum range for the most commonly used Grad rocket, designated as 9M22U, was 20.33 km. He said other variants have ranges of up to 40 km, but they are less widespread.
The rebels’ self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) says its forces are pushing south from their main stronghold in the city Donetsk, but the settlements they said they had taken by Monday which were closest to the Novoazovsk-Veselo-Voznesenka crossing were Telmanovo, about 30 km (20 miles) away as the crow flies, and Novokaterinovka, about 60 km (40 miles) away.
That may have overstated the rebels’ reach: a Reuters reporter who drove through Telmanovo twice on Sunday saw no sign of a rebel presence in or near the town.
One of the experts who reviewed the photographs, British-based independent weapons researcher Eliot Higgins, said he believed the crater was caused by a Grad rocket. He said the shape of the crater suggested the munition was fired from the north-east, the direction of the border with Russia.
The Ukrainian unit said most of the artillery struck in the area between their post and the border. Reuters was unable to inspect the other craters left behind by the strikes because of the risk the artillery fire could start up again.
Members of the unit said Russian artillery had been landing on the Ukrainian side overnight from Thursday to Friday, and again on Friday night.
On a previous visit to the area, on Aug. 1. Ukrainian border guards at the crossing point between Russia and Ukraine showed a Reuters reporter broken windows and holes in the roof of their building.
A fighter of the Ukrainian volunteer Dnipro battalion shows the remains of ammunition in front of a crater made by a shell, which he believes was fired from the territory of Russia, near the town of Novoazovsk, eastern Ukraine, August 24, 2014. REUTERS/Maria Tsvetkova
They said the damage was caused by mortar rounds fired from Russian territory. “There isn’t a single insurgent around here for 50 km,” said one of the border guards, Artur Zakharov. “A mortar can travel 6 (km).”
Asked by Reuters on Monday how the rebels could fire artillery so far from their positions, Andrei Purgin, DNR deputy prime minister, said: “In the conditions of modern warfare, 20 km is no kind of distance for artillery.”
“This is not a war of fronts, it’s a civil war. Movements of troops can take place here practically instantaneously. All of us here are insurgents. You come home, you grab your weapons and you go and shoot.”This article is about the letter J of the alphabet. For other uses, see J (disambiguation)
J is the tenth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its normal name in English is jay or, now uncommonly, jy.[1][2] When used for the palatal approximant, it may be called yod ( or ) or yot ( or ).
History
Children's book from 1743, showing I and J considered as the same letter
The letter J was used as the swash letter I[citation needed], used for the letter I at the end of Roman numerals when following another I, as in XXIIJ or xxiij instead of XXIII or xxiii for the Roman numeral representing 23. A distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German.[3] Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478–1550) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana ("Trissino's epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language") of 1524.[4] Originally, 'I' and 'J' were different shapes for the same letter, both equally representing /i/, /iː/, and /j/; but, Romance languages developed new sounds (from former /j/ and /ɡ/) that came to be represented as 'I' and 'J'; therefore, English J, acquired from the French J, has a sound value quite different from /j/ (which represents the initial sound in the English word "yet").
Use in writing systems
English
In English, ⟨j⟩ most commonly represents the affricate /dʒ/. In Old English, the phoneme /dʒ/ was represented orthographically with ⟨cg⟩ and ⟨cȝ⟩.[5] Under the influence of Old French, which had a similar phoneme deriving from Latin /j/, English scribes began to use ⟨i⟩ (later ⟨j⟩) to represent word-initial /dʒ/ in Old English (for example, iest and, later jest), while using ⟨dg⟩ elsewhere (for example, hedge).[5] Later, many other uses of ⟨i⟩ (later ⟨j⟩) were added in loanwords from French and other languages (e.g. adjoin, junta). The first English language book to make a clear distinction between ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩ was published in 1633.[6] In loan words such as raj, ⟨j⟩ may represent /ʒ/. In some of these, including raj, Azerbaijan, Taj Mahal, and Beijing, the regular pronunciation /dʒ/ is actually closer to the native pronunciation, making the use of /ʒ/ an instance of a hyperforeignism.[7] Occasionally, ⟨j⟩ represents the original /j/ sound, as in Hallelujah and fjord (see Yodh for details). In words of Spanish origin, where ⟨j⟩ represents the voiceless velar fricative [x] (such as jalapeño), English speakers usually approximate with the voiceless glottal fricative.
In English, ⟨j⟩ is the fourth least frequently used letter in words, being more frequent only than ⟨z⟩, ⟨q⟩, and ⟨x⟩. It is, however, quite common in proper nouns, especially personal names.
Other languages
Germanic and Eastern-European languages
Pronunciation of written in European languages
The great majority of Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, use ⟨j⟩ for the palatal approximant /j/, which is usually represented by the letter ⟨y⟩ in English. Notable exceptions are English, Scots and (to a lesser degree) Luxembourgish. ⟨j⟩ also represents /j/ in Albanian, and those Uralic, Slavic and Baltic languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Latvian and Lithuanian. Some related languages, such as Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, also adopted ⟨j⟩ into the Cyrillic alphabet for the same purpose. Because of this standard, the lower case letter was chosen to be used in the IPA as the phonetic symbol for the sound.
Romance languages
In the Romance languages, ⟨j⟩ has generally developed from its original palatal approximant value in Latin to some kind of fricative. In French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Romanian it has been fronted to the postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ (like ⟨s⟩ in English measure). In Spanish, by contrast, it has been both devoiced and backed from an earlier /ʝ/ to a present-day /x ~ h/,[8] with the actual phonetic realization depending on the speaker's dialect/s.
In modern standard Italian spelling, only Latin words, proper nouns (such as Jesi, Letojanni, Juventus etc.) or those borrowed from foreign languages have ⟨j⟩. Until the 19th century, ⟨j⟩ was used instead of ⟨i⟩ in diphthongs, as a replacement for final -ii, and in vowel groups (as in Savoja); this rule was quite strict for official writing. ⟨j⟩ is also used to render /j/ in dialect, e.g. Romanesque ajo for standard aglio (–/ʎ/–) (garlic). The Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello used ⟨j⟩ in vowel groups in his works written in Italian; he also wrote in his native Sicilian language, which still uses the letter ⟨j⟩ to represent /j/ (and sometimes also [dʒ] or [gj], depending on its environment).[9]
Basque
In Basque, the diaphoneme represented by ⟨j⟩ has a variety of realizations according to the regional dialect: [j, ʝ, ɟ, ʒ, ʃ, x] (the last one is typical of Gipuzkoa).
Non-European languages
Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin script, ⟨j⟩ stands for /ʒ/ in Turkish and Azerbaijani, for /ʐ/ in Tatar. ⟨j⟩ stands for /dʒ/ in Indonesian, Somali, Malay, Igbo, Shona, Oromo, Turkmen, and Zulu. It represents a voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ in Konkani, Yoruba, and Swahili. In Kiowa, ⟨j⟩ stands for a voiceless alveolar plosive, /t/.
⟨j⟩ stands for /dʒ/ in the romantization systems of most of the Languages of India such as Hindi and Telugu and stands for /dʑ/ in the Romantization of Japanese.
In Chinese Pinyin, ⟨j⟩ stands for /tɕ/, the unaspirated equivalent of ⟨q⟩.
The Royal Thai General System of Transcription does not use the letter ⟨j⟩, although it is used in some proper names and non-standard transcriptions to represent either จ [tɕ] or ช [tɕʰ] (the latter following Pali/Sanskrit root equivalents).
In romanized Pashto, ⟨j⟩ represents ځ, pronounced [dz].
Related characters
Computing codes
Character J j ȷ Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER J LATIN SMALL LETTER J LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS J Encodings decimal hex decimal hex decimal hex Unicode 74 U+004A 106 U+006A 567 U+0237 UTF-8 74 4A 106 6A 200 183 C8 B7 Numeric character reference J J j j ȷ ȷ EBCDIC family 209 D1 145 91 ASCII 1 74 4A 106 6A
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Unicode also has a dotless variant, ȷ (U+0237). It is primarily used in Landsmålsalfabet and in mathematics. It is not intended to be used with diacritics since the normal j is softdotted in Unicode (that is, the dot is removed if a diacritic is to be placed above; Unicode further states that, for example i+ ¨ ≠ ı+¨ and the same holds true for j and ȷ).[13]
In Unicode, a duplicate of 'J' for use as a special phonetic character in historical Greek linguistics is encoded in the Greek script block as ϳ (Unicode U+03F3). It is used to denote the palatal glide /j/ in the context of Greek script. It is called "Yot" in the Unicode standard, after the German name of the letter J.[14][15] An uppercase version of this letter was added to the Unicode Standard at U+037F with the release of version 7.0 in June 2014.[16][17]
Wingdings smiley issue
In the Wingdings font by Microsoft, the letter "J" is rendered as a smiley face (note this is distinct from the Unicode code point U+263A, which renders as ☺). In Microsoft applications, ":)" is automatically replaced by a smiley rendered in a specific font face when composing rich text documents or HTML email. This autocorrection feature can be switched off or changed to a Unicode smiley.[18] [19]
Other uses
Other representations
ReferencesThis amazing artist (watch out Picasso and other dead guys) drew me a Dragonite! Like how awesome is that?!
Level: Hyper Beam awesome.
And then there's more Pokemon, kitties, sweets, and it's just all SO thoughtful! It seriously made me grin like an idiot. I had no idea what to expect and this just proves how cool strangers can be. The handwriting was legible and fun, so that's another awesome thing to happily note. And then they included a great Robert Frost quote which I hadn't heard before, so that was a cool treat. And then I got a joke AND a pun! I'm not gonna letter get away without a big thank you!
THANK YOU!!!
I also laughed a bit too much at the Bristol joke. Thanks again, Florida! (gotta thank all of FL, I see haha) And yes the rooster saves my secret identity.NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The financial crisis has weighed heavily on American households, and millionaires are no exception, according to a report released Wednesday.
The number of American households with a net worth of $1 million or more, excluding the value of their primary residence, fell 27% to 6.7 million in 2008 from an all-time high of 9.2 million the year before, according to a report from market research firm Spectrem Group.
"America has a lot fewer millionaires than when this economic crisis began," said George Walper, president of Spectrem Group, in a written statement.
But don't weep only for the 2.5 million fewer millionaires. The report, which is based on surveys of 3,000 affluent households, also showed the number of both multi-millionaires and aspiring millionaires plummeted last year.
Affluent households, defined as those with a net worth of $500,000 or more, declined 28% to 11.3 million from 15.7 million.
Even the very rich have not been immune. Households worth $5 million or more, excluding primary residence, fell 28% to 840,000 last year from 1.16 million households in 2007.
"The culprit is not just the stock market, which we all know has dropped precipitously, but broad declines in the asset classes available to the nation's wealthiest investors," Walper said.
Respondents said the average value of investments in their principal residence, mutual funds, managed accounts and IRAs all fell in 2008 versus 2007, according to the report.
Millionaire households estimated that the financial crisis dented their net worth by between 30% and 40%. And the survey's measure of investor attitude fell to an all-time low.
With such a grim economic outlook, about 45% of respondents said they have made changes to their investment portfolios.
A majority of respondents said they are shifting capital into safer assets such as cash. But about 30% of those surveyed, mostly younger households, indicated that they are still buying stocks.
The report did not bode well for financial advisers. Only 36% of those surveyed said they have a satisfactory relationship with their primary financial adviser. That's down from 85% last year.You must be kidding. Snow?
Start cursing the weather gods, Chicago.
Snow could be coming to town as early as this weekend. That’s right, snow. Flurries and flakes.
The forecast says that Saturday night rain will turn into the white stuff early Sunday morning.
If the snow sticks, it would be the earliest recorded measurable snowfall in Chicago. The record was set just three years ago when it snowed on Oct. 12.
Sassy or Trashy? Halloween Costumes
But it won’t be a complete anomaly – Chicagoans are accustomed to strange, disappointing weather.
Chicago has played host to October snowstorms before. Back in 1989 we got hit with 6.3 inches for the month.
What’s worse than the snow is the below freezing temperatures that are expected to accompany it.
Cool Weather Blows into Chicago
It's not too late to get out of town for the Columbus Day Weekend!Did the state-run news agency misquote DILG Assistant Secretary Epimaco Densing III?
Published 6:11 PM, May 20, 2017
MANILA, Philippines – The Philippine News Agency (PNA) reported on Monday, May 15, that Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) Assistant Secretary Epimaco Densing III said 95 nations were convinced there are no extrajudicial killings (EJKs) in the Philippines during the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva, Switzerland.
Densing did not make such a claim.
Contrary to the May 15 PNA report, Densing only said that members of the Philippine delegation in the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva were “very confident" that other countries were convinced by the presentation delivered by now Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano. (Read: Cayetano to UN: No new wave of killings in PH)
“After Senator Alan Peter Cayetano made also an overview of the true situation of the human rights situation in our country, including the anti-illegal drugs campaign. We were very confident that the 109 countries who attended the interaction, the UPR interaction with the Philippines, were convinced,” Densing said.
PNA also reported on May 15 that according to Densing, other countries told him that "it was the first time they heard that the figures reaching them were'spoiled and rotten information,'" referring to reports by local media and human rights organizations.
In a text message sent to Rappler, the DILG official denied that he described as "spoiled and rotten" the information supposedly released by Philippine media and human rights groups on the drug war in the country.
“I never mentioned those words,'spoiled and rotten,'" Densing said.
Densing also acknowledged that countries expressed concern about drug-related killings in the country.
“Out of the 109 countries, there were 95 who made interventions. When we say interventions, the term intervention means they made comments and recommendations,” he said.
“They only mentioned there that we should review the EJKs happening in our country at least in the last 9 months, but they never expressed concern that we should stop with the anti-illegal drugs campaign,” Densing said.
Nonetheless, the DILG official did claim – as reported by PNA – that all the 95 countries who presented their intervention “congratulated" the Philippines for improving the human rights situation in the past 5 years.
Densing also reiterated what Cayetano said in his presentation – that the term "extrajudicial killing" has been misused.
Since August 2016, murders outside police operations were called deaths under investigation.
PNA revised the story to reflect Densing's clarification, but only days later. The revised story has been retitled "PHL's human rights situation commended at UPR" from "95 nations in 3rd UPR convinced no EJKs in PHL". Among the revisions in the story is the removal of the supposed "spoiled and rotten" quote of Densing.
Spot the difference between the original story and the revised report:
– Rappler.comOur recent article “NULL is Not The Billion Dollar Mistake. A Counter-Rant” got us a lot of reads, controversial comments, and a 50/50 upvote / downvote ratio pretty much everywhere a blog post can be posted and voted on. This was expected.
Objectively, NULL is just a “special” value that has been implemented in a variety of languages and type systems, and in a variety of ways – including perhaps the set of natural numbers (a.k.a. “zero”, the original null – them Romans sure didn’t like that idea).
Or, as Charles Roth has put it adequately in the comments:
Chuckle. Occasionally a mathematics background comes in handy. Now we could argue about whether NULL was “invented” or “discovered”…
Now, Java’s null is a particularly obnoxious implementation of that “special value” for reasons like:
Compile-time typing vs. runtime typing
// We can assign null to any reference type Object s = null; // Yet, null is of no type at all if (null instanceof Object) throw new Error("Will never happen");
The null literal is even more special
// Nothing can be put in this list, right? List<?> list = new ArrayList<Void>(); // Yet, null can: list.add(null);
Methods are present on the null literal
// This compiles, but does it run? ((Object) null).getClass();
Java 8’s Optional
The introduction of Optional might have changed everything. Many functional programmers love it so much because the type clearly communicates the cardinality of an attribute. In a way:
// Cardinality 1: Type t1; // Cardinality 0-1: Optional<Type> t01; // Cardinality 0..n: Iterable<Type> tn;
A lot of Java 8’s Optional ‘s interesting history has been dug out by Nicolai Parlog on his excellent blog.
Be sure to check it out:
http://blog.codefx.org/tag/optional
In the Java 8 expert groups, Optional wasn’t an easy decision:
[…] There has been a lot of discussion about [Optional] here and there over the years. I think they mainly amount to two technical problems, plus at least one style/usage issue: Some collections allow null elements, which means that you cannot unambiguously use null in its otherwise only reasonable sense of “there’s nothing there”. If/when some of these APIs are extended to primitives, there is no value to return in the case of nothing there. The alternative to Optional is to return boxed types, which some people would prefer not to do. Some people like the idea of using Optional to allow more fluent APIs.
As in
x = s.findFirst().or(valueIfEmpty)
vs
if ((x = s.findFirst()) == null) x = valueIfEmpty;
Some people are happy to create an object for the sake of being able to do this. Although sometimes less happy when they realize that Optionalism then starts propagating through their designs, leading to Set<Optional<T>> ’s and so on. It’s hard to win here. – Doug Lea
Arguably, the main true reason for the JDK to have introduced Optional is the lack of availability of project valhalla’s specialization in Java 8, which meant that a performant primitive type stream (such as IntStream ) needed some new type like OptionalInt to encode absent values as returned from IntStream.findAny(), for instance. For API consistency, such an OptionalInt from the IntStream type must be matched by a “similar” Optional from the Stream type.
Can Optional be introduced late in a platform?
While Doug’s concerns are certainly valid, there are some other, more significant arguments that make me wary of Optional (in Java). While Scala developers embrace their awesome Option type as they have no alternative and hardly ever see any null reference or NullPointerException – except when working with some Java libraries – this is not true for Java developers. We have our legacy collections API, which (ab-)uses null all over the place. Take java.util.Map, for instance. Map.get() ‘s Javadoc reads:
Returns the value to which the specified key is mapped, or null if this map contains no mapping for the key. […] If this map permits null values, then a return value of null does not necessarily indicate that the map contains no mapping for the key; it’s also possible that the map explicitly maps the key to null. The containsKey operation may be used to distinguish these two cases.
This is how much of the pre-Java 8 collection API worked, and we’re still using it actively with Java 8, with new APIs such as the Streams API, which makes extensive use of Optional.
A contrived (and obviously wrong) example:
Map<Integer, List<Integer>> map = Stream.of(1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8).collect(Collectors.groupingBy(n -> n % 5)); IntStream.range(0, 5).mapToObj(map::get).map(List::size).forEach(System.out::println);
Boom, NullPointerException. Can you spot it?
The map contains remainders of a modulo-5 operation as keys, and the associated, collected dividends as a value.
We then go through all numbers from 0 to 5 (the only possible remainders), extract the list of associated dividends, List::size them… wait. Oh. Map.get may return null.
You’re getting used to the fluent style of Java 8’s new APIs, you’re getting used to the functional and monadic programming style where streams and optional behave similarly, and you may be quickly surprised that anything passed to a Stream.map() method can be null.
In fact, if APIs were allowed to be retrofitted, then the Map.get method might look like this:
public interface Map<K,V> { Optional<V> get(Object key); }
(it probably still wouldn’t because most maps allow for null values or even keys, which is hard to retrofit)
If we had such a retrofitting, the compiler would be complaining that we have to unwrap Optional before calling List::size. We’d fix it and write
IntStream.range(0, 5).mapToObj(map::get).map(l -> l.orElse(Collections.emptyList())).map(List::size).forEach(System.out::println);
Java’s Crux – Backwards compatibility
Backwards compatibility will lead to a mediocre adoption of Optional. Some parts of JDK API make use of it, others use null to encode the absent value. You can never be sure and you always have to remember both possibilities, because you cannot trust a non- Optional type to be truly “ @NotNull “.
If you prefer using Optional over null in your business logic, that’s fine. But you will have to make very sure to apply this strategy thoroughly. Take the following blog post, for instance, which has gotten lots of upvotes on reddit:
Day 4 — Let’s write Null free Java code
It inadvertently introduces a new anti-pattern:
public class User { private final String username; private Optional<String> fullname; public User(String username) { this.username = username; this.fullname = Optional.empty(); } public String getUsername() { return username; } public Optional<String> getFullname() { return fullname; } // good--------^^^ // vvvv--------bad public void setFullname(String fullname) { this.fullname = Optional.of(fullname); } }
The domain object establishes an “ Optional opt-in” contract, without opting out of null entirely. While getFullname() forces API consumers to reason about the possible absence of a full name, setFullname() doesn’t accept such an Optional argument type, but a nullable one. What was meant as a clever convenience will result only in confusion at the consumer site.
The anti-pattern is repeated by Steven Colebourne (who brought us Joda Time and JSR-310) on his blog, calling this a “pragmatic” approach:
public class Address { private final String addressLine; // never null private final String city; // never null private final String postcode; // optional, thus may be null // constructor ensures non-null fields really are non-null // optional field can just be stored directly, as null means optional public Address(String addressLine, String city, String postcode) { this.addressLine = Preconditions.chck
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the most hurtful thing for me to watch during the campaign was [that] she touted herself as a champion of women. She is a destroyer of women should they get in her way'
Tripp said it was her 'lifelong dream to work in the White House' but things soured when Bill Clinton took over the Oval Office in 1993
Tripp worked for, and admired, George Bush Sr but, when Clinton took office in 1993, her excitement at having a President 'of her generation,' quickly soured.
She said: 'It was a lifelong dream to work in the White House. I pinched myself every day that I was allowed to work [there] in any capacity…to be allowed to be a small part of it was such an honor and a blessing.'
But with the arrival of the Clintons that 'changed very, very quickly.'
Tripp said: 'I think we just approached life differently but that really didn't appall me because we're all people of different viewpoints.
'It was something far more sinister than that. They are completely unscrupulous.'
I can only say it was a marriage the likes of which I had never seen. When he was in the doghouse, which was routinely, she became stronger
As far as she is concerned, Bill's sexual appetite is tantamount to 'an addiction.' She said: 'To me he is a predator and always will be a predator.
'He sees women as a sort of enormous smorgasbord…and he takes what he wants and it's something to which he feels entitled.
'He was the leader of the free world and she was an intern, a kid, who happened to be extremely emotionally young for her age.
'To them it was presented as a) it didn't happen and b) if it did happen it was consensual and nobody's business.'
Tripp has dismissed the change of heart expressed by Clinton allies now saying Bill should have stood down over the scandal as, 'a day late and a dollar short.'
She added: 'We should have had this dialogue then and I think a lot of things would have been different in the ensuing years.
'The congressmen, all of the folks you are hearing about now with women coming out so many years later makes you realize that when the President gets a pass for something that egregious, he essentially gave tacit permission to all those who followed to do the same.'
Tripp said she never witnessed a marriage like the Clintons'. She added: 'When he was in the doghouse, which was routinely, she became stronger. And with that strength came power. She was able to act as the de facto President until his behavior improved'
Looking back, Tripp said, she 'underestimated' the Clintons and 'the power of a joined force.' Pictured: Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton at a White House Christmas party in 1996
It marks almost exactly 20 years since the career civil servant made secret recordings of conversations in which Lewinsky shared intimate details of her relationship with Clinton who, at 49, was 27 years her senior.
According to Tripp, the biggest lie of all was that what happened between Lewinsky and Clinton was an 'affair.'
She said: 'I think the largest misconception would be that this was a consensual affair, or that it had some sort of romantic element to it which it didn't.
She continued: 'This was part of his pattern where women are a means to an end. It was almost a servicing agreement but she romanticized it.
'I always say that Monica was 14. Look, she fancied herself in love. He fancied himself entitled.'
Tripp's decision to hand the tapes over to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in return for immunity was seen, almost universally, as an act of betrayal.
In the furor that followed Tripp was depicted as the bitter older woman who had vindictively skewered her trusting 'best friend' and a President in whose politics she did not believe. She had inserted herself into a situation that, however unsavory, was a private matter between husband, wife and mistress.
She received death threats. She was branded ugly inside and out - famously mocked on SNL in which John Goodman portrayed her in unflattering skits.
Speaking at the time Donald Trump, then freshly divorced from Marla Maples, described Tripp as 'evil personified.'
Tripp, now 68, outed the young Lewinsky as Bill Clinton's mistress through secretly taped conversations with the 22-year-old Washington intern. Pictured: Clinton and Lewinsky
Clinton's impeachment in December 1998 was overturned in February of the following year. Today Tripp's disdain for Clinton is palpable. As far as she is concerned his sexual appetite is tantamount to 'an addiction.' She said: 'To me he is a predator and always will be a predator'
Yet, Tripp said: 'He was no different than so many others who believed the news as it was presented to them. And I can't fault them for that.
'Had I not known the situation and exactly what had happened, I would have thought I was evil personified.'
But she said: 'I didn't just wake up one day and decide to go after a sitting President.'
Nor, she insisted, did she decide to go after her 'best friend.' In fact describing her relationship with Lewinsky as friendship at all is, Tripp said, a'stretch.'
Instead, she has revealed that her actions were driven by values ingrained in her Roman Catholic youth - 'right and wrong, black and white with very little grey' - and came as the devastating climax to her time working in the White House and Pentagon.
They are completely unscrupulous. Most politicians speak with forked tongues but this was something quite different. There are no rules, no laws that apply to them.'
Other women came and went through the Oval Office, Tripp said. She may not have approved, but it never occurred to her to speak out because 'they were all consensual adults.'
'Most of them were married. Most of them thought that it was completely cool,' she said. 'And several of them talked openly about it.'
What really bothered Tripp, who worked first for the Oval Office and then with Vince Foster for the Counsel to the President, was what she witnessed from her ring-side seat of the inner workings of a scandal-ridden administration.
First came Whitewater when the Clintons' financial contributions to real estate deals in Arkansas during Bill's governorship came under scrutiny, then Travelgate in 1993 when seven members of the travel office were fired allegedly to make way for Clinton cronies.
Then in 1993 White House Counsel, Clinton's childhood friend and Hillary's former law partner Vince Foster was found shot in the head. The death was ruled suicide but questions and conspiracy swirled.
Lewinsky's obsession was such, Tripp said, that she would call Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie as many as 20 times a day, trying to get back into the Oval Office
Although Tripp said she was the'most hated woman in America' she would do it all over again and was 'compelled' to act because she felt Bill was a'sexual predator,' with an 'addiction'. Pictured: Tripp and Lewinsky
Tripp added: 'She was obsessed with Bill Clinton. And what she was reading as a romance was something completely different to him. I knew how he operated, this was nothing new to me'
Tripp was 'front and center' and saw, she said, 'things that were reported publicly in a way that bore no resemblance to what was really happening.'
In 1994, Tripp was promoted out of the White House to a role in the Pentagon's public affair's office.
By then, she said, 'it was clear there was going to be a parting of ways.'
That might have been that - Tripp was back in her 'comfort zone' - had Monica Lewinsky not been 'dumped' in the Pentagon in April 1996 when Hillary learned about her relationship with Clinton.
'At first I found her a little on the bimbo side but I came to realize that none of that is true. She is a smart, witty, caring, giving person who happened to be in the throes of an enormous obsession.
Tripp said: 'We all wondered how on earth she had landed that job. It became clear [that] she was having an affair with somebody of significance.'
It was only after Clinton's 50th birthday celebrations at Radio City Music Hall in New York that Lewinsky told Tripp that the person of significance was the President himself.
Tripp believes the reason Lewinsky singled her out as a confidante was because she had 'jumbo pictures' of Clinton in her office as part of a project she was working on.
She said: 'I wish I could find words to explain that dynamic [between us]. Monica looked like a young woman. She was lovely. She's smart and witty. But she was a child in every sense.
'She was obsessed with Bill Clinton. And what she was reading as a romance was something completely different to him. I knew how he operated, this was nothing new to me.'
Lewinsky's obsession was such, Tripp said, that she would call Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie as many as 20 times a day, trying to get back into the Oval Office.
Tripp said: 'Monica was so obsessed that there was absolutely no possibility of changing that. She believed that they would grow old together.'
Today, Tripp maintains that what she went on to do was about protecting, not destroying, Lewinsky - though she knew in her heart the 22-year-old was too infatuated with her older lover to comprehend that
Tripp said that she knew Lewinsky would never forgive her but: 'To me it was worth that risk - to have her hate me for life - if it would come to an end.' Pictured: Lewinsky in 2015
She continued: 'She believed that the 15 minute interludes [of oral sex] was all he could spare and Hillary was still hanging around so she hoped that she would somehow disappear. It was all fantasy.'
According to Tripp, the only time Clinton actually spoke to Lewinsky or appeared to take any interest in her beyond physical acts was, 'when he became aware she may have shared the information [of their relationship] with someone else.'
Clinton began giving Lewinsky little gifts, Tripp recalled - including a copy of Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass,' a book he gave to Hillary during their courtship.
Tripp said: 'Monica found significance in it. I knew what he was doing. He needed to keep her on the reservation and this was now a danger.'
Today Tripp maintains that what she went on to do was about protecting, not destroying, Lewinsky - though she knew in her heart the 22-year-old was too infatuated with her older lover to comprehend that.
Tripp, then a divorced mother-of-two, said: 'My children were close in age to Monica.
'Her mother was in New York, Monica was living alone in an apartment in the Watergate, so she had ample time to obsess continually.
'At first I found her a little on the bimbo side but I came to realize that none of that is true. She is a smart, witty, caring, giving person who happened to be in the throes of an enormous obsession.
'I became fond of her and it pained me to do what I did. But I knew I had to do it.'
After all that she had witnessed during her tenure at the White House, Tripp said, 'I desperately wanted there to be some accountability for what he was doing.
'With Monica, it just put me over the edge. The kind of abuse of a kid was just so unconscionable. It was horrible, even for him.'
The 68-year-old has dismissed the change of heart expressed by Clinton allies now saying he should have stood down as, 'a day late and a dollar short'
Tripp said: 'The congressmen, all of the folks you are hearing about now with women coming out so many years later makes you realize that when the President gets a pass for something that egregious, he essentially gave tacit permission to all those who followed to do the same'
Tripp added: 'When the President gets a pass for something that egregious, he essentially gave tacit permission to all those who followed to do the same'. Pictured: Bill Clinton with the 1995 class of White House interns, with Lewinsky circled in the back
Tripp continued: 'I knew I would destroy her fantasy but I always said to myself the measure of whether this is something I can do or not was whether I would want that done to my daughter.
'By that I mean documenting evidence and exposing it and the answer was always a resounding, 'Yes.' I would have wanted an adult to put an end to it.
'Monica was threatening suicide on a regular basis - we're talking histrionics the likes of which you've never seen.
'She called me hundreds of times a week, literally. So yes, I knew it was going to be very painful for her. But I also knew it was the best thing I could do for her.'
And after Lewinsky told Clinton that Tripp knew of their affair, on July 4th weekend 1997, Tripp said: 'I am not so certain that Monica would not have been at some risk.'
'I am not so certain that Monica would not have been at some risk. We were dealing with unscrupulous people with no boundaries, no rules that apply to them.
Tripp was reluctant to specify just what she means by 'risk.'
When pressed she said: 'We were dealing with unscrupulous people with no boundaries, no rules that apply to them.'
At the very least, she reasoned, Lewinsky was at risk of having her credibility destroyed.
This was part of her motivation in persuading Lewinsky not to send a blue dress bearing a semen stain from the President to be dry-cleaned. She wanted there to be irrefutable evidence - insurance for whatever might come their way.
For Tripp's part, her decision to document her conversations with Lewinsky was cemented by the Paula Jones case.
In May 1994, Jones filed a suit alleging that three years earlier Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, had tried to force himself on her during a hotel room meeting in Little Rock. She worked for the state's industrial commission at the time.
Tripp said: 'I knew instinctively based on his pattern that Paula Jones was telling the truth but I knew that this was a lawsuit that she would lose.'
Today, Tripp is a very different figure from the woman who made headlines all those years ago. Her extraordinary physical transformation was part of a process of reclaiming her life
If she has any regret today it is not that she acted, but that she did not act sooner. She said: 'Had I taken notes during that year and a half, he would have been impeached successfully'
Tripp now lives in her charming farmhouse home set amid the rolling horse country of Northern Virginia (pictured)
She wanted Jones to 'have her day in court' and she wanted Lewinsky to be deposed because everything that Lewinsky had shared with Tripp seemed, to her, to support Jones' assertions.
Tripp said: 'I hadn't documented anything she had said in real time. I hadn't taken notes while she was crying obsessively or planning obsessively or bemoaning his lack of response obsessively.'
Pausing, Tripp admitted: 'The betrayal for me was that I had to have her recreate that year and a half in conversations.
'It was manipulative without a doubt. But it wasn't done to hurt her.
'It was done to make him unable to lie and unable to destroy others while lying.'
Tripp said that she knew Lewinsky would never forgive her but: 'To me it was worth that risk - to have her hate me for life - if it would come to an end.'
As hard as it may be for many to understand, Tripp said, she felt 'protective' towards Lewinsky.
The last conversation Tripp and Lewinsky ever had was at the Ritz Carlton in Washington.
By then Tripp had handed her evidence over to Kenneth Starr and he had her wear a wire to the meeting.
Tripp's tape recordings of Monica Lewinsky led to an investigation of an alleged presidential affair. Pictured: Lewinsky and Clinton
Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky looks at President Clinton at the White House on November 6, 1996, as they chat briefly during a ceremony gathering the White House interns
But, Tripp recalled. 'She was cagey. I think she knew something was going on.
'It was an extremely stressful horrific time and none of it was positive.
'Because even though I knew I was doing the right thing, I knew how it would hurt her.'
Again and again Tripp returned to the point that, for her, there was simply no choice but to act.
If she has any regret today it is not that she acted, but that she did not act sooner.
She said: 'Had I taken notes during that year and a half, he would have been impeached successfully.'
Clinton's impeachment in December 1998 was overturned in February of the following year.
He was the leader of the free world and she was an intern, a kid, who happened to be extremely emotionally young for her age.
Today she says she was 'complicit' in her depiction as the villain of the piece. She said, 'When I saw the pictures [of myself] I realized how far I had fallen because when I worked at the White House I looked human and okay but my way of dealing with stress is just to eat.'
Hoards of unflattering images of Tripp flooded the newly minted 24-hour news cycle.
She said, 'Seeing these images a gazillion times a day was horrifying.'
Today Linda is a very different figure from the woman who made headlines all those years ago. She quite rightly suspects that people will be amazed by how different she looks. Twenty years on she appears more youthful, glamorous and comfortable in her own skin.
Looking back, she feels she was somehow 'complicit' in making herself an easy figure to hate. She responded to the pressure of the scandal by over-eating and gained a great deal of weight.
She 'lost herself' and let herself go and the criticism she received was brutal and wounding. She said her children found it particularly hard because 'children always think their mother is beautiful.'
Tripp said: 'I always say I did the right thing; I did it the wrong way. But there is no manual for exposing a sitting President. There is no-one to tell you how to do it'
She added: 'For me it wasn't about left and right. It was about right and wrong. Sometimes things are too important not to talk about'
Her extraordinary physical transformation was part of a process of reclaiming her life – she had cosmetic surgery, she lost the weight she had gained, she found a loving and supportive husband in Dieter Rausch, she became herself again and she did it all out of the glare of the spotlight.
She lives with second husband, German architect Rausch, 63, - a childhood sweetheart who reached out to her during her darkest days, offering support and ultimately rekindling their romance. Home is a charming farmhouse set amid the rolling horse country of Northern Virginia.
They have seven grandchildren, who she described as 'the joys of our lives' and, for the past 16 years she and Dieter have run a successful year-round Christmas store in picturesque Middleburg, Virginia.
Tripp was not destroyed nor was she defined by the scandal she exposed. She said: 'It was painful. It still is painful when I think about it.
'I didn't want the 15 minutes of fame or infamy. I didn't choose to extend it. I'm a behind the scenes person on a good day.'
But it saddens her that the events of so many years ago have defined Lewinsky, now 44.
She said: 'I wish that her name didn't conjure an image that is so false.
'But she wanted to protect the President because she thought they might still have a future.'
Tripp now lives with second husband, German architect Dieter Rausch, 63, - a childhood sweetheart who reached out to her during her darkest days, offering support and ultimately rekindling their romance
The couple have seven grandchildren and for the past 16 years she and Dieter have run a successful year-round Christmas store in picturesque Middleburg, Virginia (pictured)
She continued: 'She believed they were star struck lovers. I think she needed to believe that. My hope was that one day, when she grew up, she would understand that that in fact was not true and that maybe, just maybe, I did this for the right reason.'
Tripp no longer harbors that hope. When Lewinsky testified before the grand jury and was asked if she had anything to add she said simply, 'I hate Linda Tripp.'
Tripp has no reason to think that Lewinsky's view has changed; but the national conversation has.
She said: 'I think 20 years ago I just wanted to hide. I did not want to expose my family to more pain. I do believe though that my children and my grandchildren deserve to hear the other side of the story.
'More than that, even on a global scale my small part to that extent that I can share what really happened 20 years ago may help in the future.
'Maybe it will give people pause…in terms of what people will put up with of men, specifically in positions of power.
'I desperately wish that the outrage had been there years ago. [Now] I just feel compelled to talk about things that should have been addressed head on back then and I was too naive and shell-shocked to do it.
'I always say I did the right thing; I did it the wrong way. But there is no manual for exposing a sitting President. There is no-one to tell you how to do it.
'For me it wasn't about left and right. It was about right and wrong.
'Sometimes things are too important not to talk about.'It was with a sense of relief that I attended the amazing, postdoc-driven Future of Research Conference at Boston University last week. This fantastic city-wide effort was led by two amazing postdocs, Kristin Krukenberg and Jessica Polka from Harvard Medical School and a long list of supporters from all of the research centers in Boston. I was relieved because it finally feels to me like the postdocs are taking some steps to control their own future in science (see my previous blog on this). Indeed, that was a primary message delivered by many of the speakers. As Dr. Polka said as she started things off, “We are all capable of contributing to change.”
Check out Joanne's Reddit AMA
The keynote speaker, Dr. Henry Bourne (shown in photo), has been speaking out and writing about issues in our science training infrastructure for some years. He spoke eloquently and vehemently about the need for change. Dr. Bourne strongly believes this is an amazing time of promise for science—we have powerful tools, beautiful questions, and smart scientists. At the same time, he pointed out, academic research has some big problems resulting from past practices and mores. His list is dire: The current system is unsustainable, hypercompetition is corroding values, we are shifting away from PI driven basic research, there is resistance to change, public support is weak, government support is “feckless”. So what can be done? He charged the postdocs to “Grab ahold of your destinies” and also suggested some concrete actions that can be taken now to solve some of the more “tractable” problems.
We must better define the postdoc (and even the grad student) trainee experience and how it feeds into a workforce. The soft money system needs to be addressed. We should tackle the issues with rules and practices of indirect costs. The peer review and grant awards systems need to be radically overhauled. Finally, the science publishing system needs to be changed. Dr. Bourne charged the audience to use their useful energy and to choose institutions with allies engaged in training excellence to begin effecting change.
Panelists Call for Action
Each of the speakers in the panel had interesting words of experience and encouragement. Dr. Sibby Anderson-Thompkins, Director of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at UNC, called her presentation “Disequilibrium, Disillusion and The Postdoc Dilemma” which pretty much said it all. She cited the oft quoted statistic that only 15% of current postdocs will be academic principal investigators. She also pointed out promising new practices such as new training programs (like at the Keck Graduate Institute), funding for training (such as the NIH BEST award) and availability of career tools (such as the National Postdoc Association Core Competencies and the Science Careers’ myIDP).
Dr. Galit Lahav, Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, titled her presentation “How to Train Your PI”. She focused her talk on the issues involved with the fact that the PhD and Postdoc advisors only know about academia and alternate training needs to be provided to take advantage of all the possible science careers. She advocated for increasing the value and priority put on good mentoring and applauded the new requirement for PIs to include in their annual NIH progress reports information on the Individual Development Plans (IDPs) for the graduate students and postdocs in their labs.
Dr. Richard Roberts, CSO of New England Biolabs, gave examples of how you don’t have to be in academia to make change. He talked about his own unique way of funding basic research at NEB and got some applause when he talked about how he boycotts publishing in all but open access journals. Dr. David Glass, Global Head Muscle Diseases at Novartis, opened with a discussion of the Novartis industry postdoctoral program. His strongest comments were about the astounding lack of reproducibility being recognized in published work even in the “best” journals. He pushed for drastic change in the way we train scientists to start addressing this problem. Finally, one point made by Dr. Graham Walker, Professor of Biology at MIT, was the need to pay postdocs more.
What Will the Future of Research Be?
The second day of the conference included workshops which were framed in advance by the conference organizing team. The topics were Training, Structure of the Workforce, Metrics and Incentives and Funding. I can’t wait to see what solutions these talented postdocs will come up with to push for change in their opportunities. Scientists must do science to be happy so the beginnings of solutions can’t come too soon. Watch the Future of Research Website for news and updates on the outcomes. Join the conversation and take action.
More Reading:I’m not an expert on guns. I don’t even own one. For this post I do not want to get into the question of which sorts of regulations of guns are reasonable or constitutional.
I do see a lot of very weak arguments being used in current debates. I’ll focus just on the very concerning one that the No Fly List ought to be used to deny substantive rights beyond flying. It’s a shoddy list as it is and raises significant concerns in the travel context. The last thing we should do is expand its use.
President Obama has been pushing this idea:
Right now, people on the No-Fly list can walk into a store and buy a gun. That is insane. If you’re too dangerous to board a plane, you’re too dangerous, by definition, to buy a gun
Fundamentally the list is pre-crime profiling. Not even based on science. And it’s also done very very poorly. People get on the list by mistake, because they’re related to someone who is on it, or because they visited the wrong country in the wrong year..
It’s a secret list that people haven’t been entitled to know they are on, how they got on, or to confront the evidence relied upon to put them on it. Legally there is very little recourse, and when challenged the government claims ‘state secrets.’
What we actually need are robust due process protections for the No Fly List. People wind up on the list arbitrarily, by mistake, and without significant evidence.
The list is an absolute affront to the right to travel, an example of government run amok during the George W. Bush administration. This isn’t a partisan point – the list was begun under a Republican administration, its use is proposed for expansion under a Democrat administration, but it’s terribly broken and antithetical to American liberty. It’s both frightening and surreal to see it used to deny rights beyond even travel.
Formal responsibility for the list rests with the TSA and under 49 U.S.C. § 46110 inclusion is only reviewable by circuit courts in which judges are required to defer to the TSA’s judgment about all alleged facts and are permitted only to review the administrative record created by and provided to them by the TSA itself.
Until this year the TSA wouldn’t even tell people whether they were on the list (making it difficult to sue to get off the list when you can’t prove you’re on it). The TSA does not tell people why they are on the list.
they are on the list. Decisions to put someone on the no fly list are based on predictive pre-crime profiling rather than actual evidence about the individual’s actions or intentions. This is a huge leap in our justice system.
Whatever regulations of guns are put in place, they should be implemented on the basis of understanding what in the world we’re talking about. The No Fly List is about declaring people guilty without proving them so, or affording a mechanism to confront the evidence against them and clear their name.
Remember that the San Bernadino shooters weren’t on the No Fly List (here’s a photo of them entering the US last year, hat tip Greg R.).
After events like this we want the government to do something. And (whether you believe for good reason or not) gun rights are currently less popular than some other rights. Other rights fall out of favor at other times. Same sex marriage was unpopular until very recently. Speech has been unpopular at times. Using unreviewable, secret and often arbitrary pre-crime profiling as a basis for denying any kind of right is a huge departure for our system of justice and should be well understood before it’s undertaken.
Being on the no fly or terror watch list shouldn’t be used to forbid working in a mosque. It shouldn’t be used to limit one’s right to a jury trial. Finding oneself on the No Fly List ought not let the government quarter soldiers in your home. Or to take away any other right.REPORT: ISIS Executes Nine More 'Gay' Men
The radical Islamist group has reportedly thrown another nine men accused of being gay from the top of the tallest building in Mosul, Iraq.
The self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has executed another group of men for allegedly being gay, reports The Washington Blade.
Iraqi TV station Al-Sumaria reported that ISIS militants threw nine men from the top of a tall building in Mosul on Sunday after a "Sharia judge" found them guilty on "charges of sexual perversion," according to the Blade.
As has been the case in similar executions reported in ISIS-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq throughout the past year, a crowd of locals reportedly gathered at the base of the building to watch the men die. In other instances, victims who survived the fall were subsequently stoned to death. Still other victims have been beheaded by ISIS militants who found them guilty of engaging in "sodomy."
A spokesperson with the U.S. State Department stressed to the Blade that the department is "deeply troubled" by such reports, but spotty access to reliable information in the region makes the reports and subsequent death toll "difficult to confirm."
But U.S. diplomats have acknowledged that the radical militants are targeting people perceived to be LGBT, most recently at the United Nations Security Council's first-ever meeting regarding LGBT rights. During that meeting, held at the New York U.N. headquarters on Monday and hosted by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power and her Chilean counterpart, Ambassador Christian Barros, diplomats heard from two refugees who had been targeted by ISIS for being gay.
"My own family turned against me when [Islamic State] was after me," Adnan, an Iraqi man who fled his home, said at the meeting. "If [Islamic State] didn't get me, members of my family would have done it."
Militants affiliated with ISIS have executed at least 30 LGBT people, Jessica Stern, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, reported at Monday's meeting. That total presumably does not include the nine men allegedly murdered in Iraq just one day before the U.N. meeting.Jewish Heraldry Contents Introduction
Middle Ages
Modern Times
Italy
France
England
The Court Jews (16th-18th c.)
The Rothschilds
Titled Jews in Great Britain
Titled Jews in Continental Europe
A grant of arms to a Canadian congregation
References Introduction Jews in Europe used heraldry, like everyone else. Indeed, it is a striking counter-example to the misconception that heraldry was ever the preserve of the nobility or the knights, that Jews have been using coats of arms as far back as the 14th century, not only privately but also in their official dealings with Gentiles (e.g., seals on legal documents). This page does not describe "Jewish heraldry" as some distinct species of heraldry: although there are charges, such as stars of David, Jew's hats and menorahs which specifically refer to the Jewishness of the bearer, Jews used heraldry the same way others did. They used it in their homes, on their belongings, on their tombs. They used canting devices. They used lions, eagles, ordinaries, and all sorts of charges. They occasionally adopted or modified some famous Gentile family's coat, either as a mark of allegiance, or to claim a connection. Over time, Jews started entering the ranks of the European nobility, as early as the 17th century. Thus, this page is an illustration of how heraldry came to be adopted by Jews, and enriched their cultural tradition: thus the lion of Judah often takes the appearance of a heraldic lion rampant. In the Middle Ages That Jews in the Middle Ages used heraldic emblems can be ascertained from the study of their seals (Friedenberg 1987). Most show emblems which could be interpreted as heraldic, and a few show proper arms, that is, heraldic designs on shields. One example is found in early 14th century Narbonne (France), where Kalonymos bar Todros, nasi or head of the Jewish community, used a lion rampant. His presumed son Todros bar Kalynomos uses the same device. The seal of Benoît, Jew of Dôle (France), was placed on a loan document at the request of the borrowing knight in 1286 (the seal shows a lion contourné). A manuscript of 1383 shows the arms of Samuel, son of Doctor Samuel of Venice, per fess a lion issuant and a fess wavy. A number of Jewish or converted Jewish families used three Jews' hats on their arms, either arranged two and one or in pairle conjoined by their straps. One amusing example is the seal of Byfegin, from Koblenz (1397) which bears a lion rampant "crowned" with a Jew's hat. Nostradamus, the famous 16th c. astrologer who settled in France, bore: Gules, a wheel broken between each spoke or. Since the color of the charge was too clear a reminder of the bearer's origins, a descendant had the arms changed to quarterly, 1 and 4 Argent a wheel sable; 2 and 3 Argent an eagle's head erased sable (Mathieu 1946, p. 41). Several seals were those of the Jewish community of a city: early 13th century examples in France show that the Jews of Paris used an eagle rising on a semis of fleurs-de-lys. Jewish communities also had flags which they used in processions; the synagogue in Prague has a 16th c. example, showing a Jew's hat within a star of David. Several Hungarian Jews were mintmasters in the 13th centuries and issued coins on behalf of the king with their Hebrew initial letter on the reverse. Some of them are also known in official documents as "counts of the treasury", and seem to have formed part of the Hungarian nobility. They disappear in the last quarter of the 13th century (Friedenberg 1987). In medieval Italy, Jews were not allowed to graduate with the title of doctor, although they were allowed to take courses in medicine, pass the exams, earn the degree of "Master" and practice as physicians. But the restrictions were relaxed in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1406 three Roman Jews, among them Elia di Sabbato who was physician to Pope Boniface IX, were authorized to earn a doctorate. Several Jews (in Milan, 1487, Florence, Perugia, Napoli in the 2nd half of the 15th c.) were qualified "doctor et miles", doctor and knight (Bascapè and Del Piazzo 1983). The trend accelerated in the 16th century, and several Jews actually obtained chairs at universities (Perugia, Ferrara, Bologna in 1528, Rome in 1539), which in some cases carried with them personal nobility and the title of count palatine. One Jew of Bologna received a knighthood from Charles V (the Golden Spur). But the Counter-Reformation brought this trend to a halt, and even in Piedmont, a 1603 decision to open the doctorate to all Jews was rescinded. Jews did like everyone else: they assumed arms or were granted arms. The earliest known example in Italy is from Forli in 1383: per fess a lion issuant and barry of six or and azure, with a helmet and crest of a lion issuant (on a manuscript in the British Museum, which had belonged to Daniele di Samuele). A manuscript of Exodus from the mid-15th c. shows per fess gules two stars argent and vert 1 star of the second, another manuscript from 1475 shows per fess vert two stars, and purpure 1 star, with a crest of the lion of Juda holding a pennant. A manuscript of 1494 belonging to Menahem di Salomone of Terracina shows per pale a branch and azure a rooster sable; a Pentateuch of the 15th c. was marked in 1585 with the arms of its owner Giacob di Mose Gutierrez: per pale, lozangy argent and sable, gules a lion rampant or holding a palm and a lamp in dexter, in chief a sun and a moon or. A 15th c. manuscript Mahzor in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana
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Impressions and Review
While I understand the desire to make the mech good at what it's supposed to do in canon, I am a bit miffed that every other role for the mech was kneecapped. Particularly in the current state of the game, where LRMs still run on their stupid anti-fun mechanic (no, I'm not gonna rant about LRMs again). With all that said, the ARC-5W and Tempest are interesting enough to still be fun without having to LRM all day.
ARC-2R
The ARC-2R has 6 energy hardpoints and 3 missile, spread out aaaall over the mech. It has the best quirks of the bunch, but they're still mostly geared towards LRMs. And its other quirks are mainly about agility, with just 11 structure on the CT.
This is my main LRM build on it. I've played it a few times to make sure it works, and it does. You can also run things like the laser vomit build I'll talk about with the Tempest, or some other types of missile builds, but there's nothing really spectacular available. As such, I feel like this might be the worst variant of the bunch, but the laser build might put it a bit ahead of the ARC-5S.
ARC-5S
The ARC-5S has 5 missile hardpoints and 4 energy, which makes it like a super-Kintaro. As far as quirks go, it's got 10% to energy range and laser duration, and then a bunch of agility quirks and structure on the arms and legs (yay...).
This is a pretty sweet brawler, but the convergence is a bit of an issue. You can also run a similar build with
ARC-5W
Alright, the ARC-5W has a whopping 9 missile hardpoints, and even though it only has LRM quirks offensively, its tiny CT and side torso structure quirks do help. The mobility quirks are sorta nice, too.
There are faster versions, ones with more heatsinks and ammo, even 6 6s with artemis works great. But this is the one I like best. And all these different options make this the most exciting variant for me, but I fear that it is a smidge worse than the Tempest.
Tempest
The Tempest has 6 energy and 3 missile hardpoints like the ARC-2R, but the CT has 2 energy and 1 missile in it and obviously you can't use all of those. Quirk-wise, it has 5% to medium laser cooldown and missile heat gen, and a bit of extra structure all over. The big selling point, though, is the ECM.
This mech can do a few different builds, including even some LRM and brawling options, but the laser sort is your best bet. The ECM helps with this a lot and almost makes up for all of the terrible things about the mech, and make it a bit better than the ARC-5W.
Verdict
The Archer is definitely not my type of mech. If you love LRMs or SRM brawling, you may find that it captures your heart like none other, but if you're more of the ranged trading sort of player, it's not too fun. But the diversity of builds that it can run is fantastic, and building these things in Smurfy's has been quite fun. And it's gotta be said - I don't use many camos that often, but the Archer's default model and camo pattern are absolutely beautiful - probably my favorite of any mech. Mad props to the people that worked on those.
If the quirks are fixed to provide it with extra structure, or maybe some generic missile heat gen and velocity, the brawling builds could be amazing (they're pretty good as is, but not as good as I feel they should be), but I fear that the more meta builds will never be great on this chassis. Which isn't the end of the world, and if you don't care about those things, that shouldn't be an issue for you. Indeed, if you hate the meta and love your brawler, LRM, or bracket builds, this may be your fantasy!
But I need to take some time out to rant about the bay doors. They do provide 10% damage reduction while closed, but only if you have missiles equipped in those hardpoints - if you don't, they provide no benefit at all. And when you open the doors, they make it super-duper obvious when you're about to crest the hill, so hill-humping with SRMs is not doable at all, despite the mounts being at the top of the mech. I would really like it if they reworked it to the 10% damage reduction being there even without having to use missiles.
So at the end of the day, this is roughly how I feel about the mech:
Off: 8/10
Def: 3/10
Mob: 5/10
Fun: 4/10
OVR: 5
GMan129 is an officer of the The latest "classic" mech to be introduced, the Archer is certainly an unusual mech. In lore, the Archer was a LRM boat through and through, and this seems to have been applied to MWO as well. Not only are the missile quirks centered around LRM launchers (only the Tempest has missile quirks not related to LRMs, and it is the least suited to missile builds), but many other features of the mech hurt it in any other role. The low cockpit and inability to run truly asym builds hurts its ability to poke with direct fire. The lack of defensive quirks and the nature of the bay doors make it ill-fitted for brawling. On top of that, the side torsos are very vulnerable (I'm not sure if I've yet been CT'd before losing a side torso), and very few builds can be run well with a STD. And, well, there's not a whole lot else it gets to do!While I understand the desire to make the mech good at what it's supposed to do in canon, I am a bit miffed that every other role for the mech was kneecapped. Particularly in the current state of the game, where LRMs still run on their stupid anti-fun mechanic (no, I'm not gonna rant about LRMs again). With all that said, the ARC-5W and Tempest are interesting enough to still be fun without having to LRM all day.The ARC-2R has 6 energy hardpoints and 3 missile, spread out aaaall over the mech. It has the best quirks of the bunch, but they're still mostly geared towards LRMs. And its other quirks are mainly about agility, with just 11 structure on the CT.This is my main LRM build on it. I've played it a few times to make sure it works, and it does. You can also run things like the laser vomit build I'll talk about with the Tempest, or some other types of missile builds, but there's nothing really spectacular available. As such, I feel like this might be the worst variant of the bunch, but the laser build might put it a bit ahead of the ARC-5S.The ARC-5S has 5 missile hardpoints and 4 energy, which makes it like a super-Kintaro. As far as quirks go, it's got 10% to energy range and laser duration, and then a bunch of agility quirks and structure on the arms and legs (yay...).This is a pretty sweet brawler, but the convergence is a bit of an issue. You can also run a similar build with LRMS, but that's super lame. Problem is, there aren't many builds that use the quirks well, since it only has 4 energy hardpoints. Well, that's one of the problems. So yeah, it's not that good, but a bit better than the ARC-2R.Alright, the ARC-5W has a whopping 9 missile hardpoints, and even though it only has LRM quirks offensively, its tiny CT and side torso structure quirks do help. The mobility quirks are sorta nice, too.There are faster versions, ones with more heatsinks and ammo, even 6 6s with artemis works great. But this is the one I like best. And all these different options make this the most exciting variant for me, but I fear that it is a smidge worse than the Tempest.The Tempest has 6 energy and 3 missile hardpoints like the ARC-2R, but the CT has 2 energy and 1 missile in it and obviously you can't use all of those. Quirk-wise, it has 5% to medium laser cooldown and missile heat gen, and a bit of extra structure all over. The big selling point, though, is the ECM.This mech can do a few different builds, including even some LRM and brawling options, but the laser sort is your best bet. The ECM helps with this a lot and almost makes up for all of the terrible things about the mech, and make it a bit better than the ARC-5W.The Archer is definitely not my type of mech. If you love LRMs or SRM brawling, you may find that it captures your heart like none other, but if you're more of the ranged trading sort of player, it's not too fun. But the diversity of builds that it can run is fantastic, and building these things in Smurfy's has been quite fun. And it's gotta be said - I don't use many camos that often, but the Archer's default model and camo pattern are absolutely beautiful - probably my favorite of any mech. Mad props to the people that worked on those.If the quirks are fixed to provide it with extra structure, or maybe some generic missile heat gen and velocity, the brawling builds could be amazing (they're pretty good as is, but not as good as I feel they should be), but I fear that the more meta builds will never be great on this chassis. Which isn't the end of the world, and if you don't care about those things, that shouldn't be an issue for you. Indeed, if you hate the meta and love your brawler, LRM, or bracket builds, this may be your fantasy!But I need to take some time out to rant about the bay doors. They do provide 10% damage reduction while closed, but only if you have missiles equipped in those hardpoints - if you don't, they provide no benefit at all. And when you open the doors, they make it super-duper obvious when you're about to crest the hill, so hill-humping with SRMs is not doable at all, despite the mounts being at the top of the mech. I would really like it if they reworked it to the 10% damage reduction being there even without having to use missiles.So at the end of the day, this is roughly how I feel about the mech:Off: 8/10Def: 3/10Mob: 5/10Fun: 4/10OVR: 5GMan129 is an officer of the Steel Jaguar competitive team, he is the owner of and writer for MetaMechs, and he does some writing for NGNG as well. He has been playing MechWarrior Online since the early days of closed beta, and has spent far too much time and money on this crap. If you're interested in supporting his self-destruction, consider contributing to his PayPal or Patreon Print
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Archer First Impressions and ReviewYou might have a crazy aunt. She makes trouble at Thanksgiving, gives you a paltry $5 at Christmas, and still pinches your cheek. Stingy or not, she fights a brave battle against mental illness. But should they get their way, socialized healthcare might one day euthanize her (see OPINION: Charlie Gard: 0, Death Panels: 1 and Counting and Dutch Doctor Forcibly ‘Euthanized’ Elderly Patient. But it Gets Worse…).
Here’s the scoop: psychiatric patients with persistent mental health conditions are currently being euthanized in Belgium.
The Belgian branch of the Brothers of Charity, also called the Brothers of Love, issued a statement Tuesday that they will continue offering euthanasia in each of their 15 psychiatric hospitals, despite receiving orders from the Vatican to reverse their euthanasia policy by the end of August, according to Crux Now. The Belgian branch’s current policy allows for doctors to euthanize non-terminal mentally ill patients upon request, so long as the doctor determines that the patient’s suffering is “unbearable” and that there is no reasonable chance of improvement with treatment. Belgian law has no definition of unbearable suffering, however, which opens the door for mentally ill patients with a chance of improvement being euthanized instead, according to Professor Raphael Cohen-Almagor, Chair of Politics at England’s Hull University. Regardless of potential loopholes in Belgian law, the Catechism of the Catholic Church remains clearly, opposed to euthanasia as evidenced in paragraph 2277, which states: “Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable.”
Translation? Socialized healthcare is a slippery slope of death for sick babies and sick minds. If socialists like Bernie Sanders gets their way, your relative or friend struggling with mental illness could breathe their last courtesy of one bad day, a litany of bad laws, and a few willing doctors.
This is socialist compassion. It looks like death. The irony here is that leftists accuse anyone right of Bernie Sanders of being Nazis. Yet they’re the ones currently “purifying” the human race by eliminating Down syndrome through abortion and mental illness via euthanasia.
It all sounds rather Hitlery.
NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT! IT’S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE.Yepoka Yeebo / Business Insider Trash and Vaudeville, a legendary store in New York's East Village, has been a shrine to rock and roll fashion for almost 40 years. They put the Ramones in those skintight black jeans, and helped Madonna's stylists put together her Super Bowl look.
While every other store that sold Dr Martens boots and screen-printed band t-shirts succumbed to the brutal combination of New York real estate prices and changing tastes, Trash and Vaudeville became the only place you could find Beatle boots, that Kurt Cobain shirt and the Slash hat, under the same roof. "It's a major compliment to be the only one left," store manager Jimmy Webb told us during a recent visit.
Opposite the store's changing rooms, a series of customers examined themselves in a vast, floor-to-ceiling mirror. When a portly German tourist wearing a cravat and a waistcoat strutted up and posed in front of the mirror in a dramatic black frock coat and a top hat, Jimmy told him, "You look awesome. But the shape of the hat is not good. I want to see you in the 'Slash' hat." Jimmy's remarkable eye for what works helped make the store indispensable to stylists and designers.
Wiry, energetic and wrapped in leather, denim and clanking silver bracelets, Jimmy is fast becoming a New York legend. "I wandered in here when I was like 16 and I just fell in love with the place; a lot of people still do," says Jimmy, perched on a wooden crate set in front of the store's floor-to-ceiling mirror. "Many, many years later, after being a customer and living your classic New York City runaway life, I really wanted to work here."
Jimmy says the feeling he got when he first walked into the store in 1975 was the feeling that kept people coming. "You have to be that piece of New York history, that little destination, that little Mecca," he said. "That's what keeps it going." It doesn't matter that teenybopper chain store Hot Topic sells bondage pants or the New York Dolls classic striped shirt, he said. "It's been hanging here and selling here with its authenticity for 33 years. You smell it, the history in the walls."
Trash and Vaudeville had a very authentic start as a Jersey City head shop and clothing store in 1972. Owner Ray Goodman was still in high school, and the original store lasted just six months, but the seeds were sewn. Three years later, Goodman took over a hippy boutique, Limbo, on St Mark's Place. "Behind all of this was my love for rock and roll," said Goodman in a phone conversation. " I [thought] 'I've got to figure out how to stay part of the scene.'"
By the time the East Village renaissance rolled around in the early 1980s, Trash and Vaudeville was a defining feature of the scene. "We never really said we were a punk store, we never said we were a vintage store, we never said we were a Goth store, or a Teddy store," said Goodman explaining his buying style. "If it was good, and if it had a rock and roll vibe to it, we went with it."
Goodman fondly remembers a picture of Mick Jones from British punk band The Clash, leaning against a lamppost in St Mark's place, clutching a bag from Trash and Vaudeville. And there was the time Bruce Springsteen came in and bought a vintage pink and black plaid shirt off Goodman's back. It ended up on the cover of 'The River' album. "From early on we started developing a clientele for entertainment people, of music people," said Goodman. "All these people I admired were coming in as my customers."
Even when styles fell out of fashion everywhere else, Goodman saw demand and kept them in stock. When designers stopped making these things, he took over, manufacturing pink and black plaid men's shirts, and those iconic, unrelentingly tight black jeans. The operation evolved into Tripp, a fashion label that sells around the world, run by Goodman's wife Daang.
For the first 15 years, everything was made within a 10-mile radius of the store, in factories in Chinatown, Brooklyn and New Jersey. Then the factories started closing down and prices started soaring. "It got so expensive that our market couldn't afford what we were making for them anymore," says Goodman.
He had to chose between price hikes that would put the clothes they made way out of the reach of the never-ending throng of 18-year-olds who had kept the store going for decades, or move production to China. Goodman decided to do whatever it took to keep the kids coming. "I understand that 18-year-old kid. I understand that kid's mentality," says Goodman. "I was that kid."Advertisement
When a phone is released only to a select few enthusiasts, you wonder whether or not the hype is genuinely worth it. And when that phone is running Ubuntu, a mobile operating system that is yet to take the mobile world by storm (despite many promises from developers Canonical) you begin to suspect that these devices probably aren’t going to be worth the investment.
So is the phone worth it? Let’s find out…
Why an Ubuntu Smartphone?
Before we go on, you might want to give a bit of thought to whether a smartphone powered by Ubuntu is really something that you want – especially when there is an Android variant of the same phone with the Flyme5 UI on top.
However, the Ubuntu edition is a smartphone that comes with its own set of advantages. For a start off, it’s the first mobile device that can be synced natively to any Linux distribution (Ubuntu, naturally). This in itself is a bit of a triumph.
But there’s another reason: a great cause. Windows Phone/Mobile 10 has more or less failed MakeUseOf Says Goodbye To Windows Phone MakeUseOf Says Goodbye To Windows Phone This is going to be a tearful goodbye, buddy, but it has to happen. MakeUseOf will soon be parting ways with Windows Phone. Read More. Android and iOS stand proud as the great bastions of smartphone operating systems. If you’ve found yourself dissatisfied with either or both, then perhaps you’ve mulled over the idea of whether a Linux-powered smartphone (genuine Linux, not the Android variety) is a viable alternative.
Along with BQ and Aquaris, Meizu are at the forefront of development of Ubuntu Touch/Ubuntu Phone devices, and while India and China are the territories currently being targeted (where Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems are more widely used), Meizu’s Pro5 Ubuntu Edition is now on sale in the USA and European Union.
So, if you’re looking for some Linux flavored simplicity and a new approach to smartphone UIs, an Ubuntu smartphone might be your next move…
What’s Inside the Meizu Pro5 Ubuntu Edition?
In a world of high end Android and iPhones, an Ubuntu Phone device needs to have a few hardware advantages to get attention. Given that the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition is also available as an Android device; it should come as no surprise that both devices are equipped with the same hardware.
But what’s inside?
Well for starters, you’ve got 32GB of internal storage, 3GB RAM, and an 8-core Exynos 7420 processor and MALI T760 GPU. The 168g device sits at 156.7 x 78 x 7.5mm, with a 5.7 inch 1080p AMOLED screen, protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 3.
On the right-hand edge of the impressive unibody design are three hardware buttons: power, volume up and volume down. Meanwhile, on the left, the expansion door, where you’ll find slots for two micro-SIM cards (or a micro-SIM plus microSD card), which allow the phone to be used across multiple networks — useful if you’re travelling through different territories.
Meanwhile, Bluetooth, NFC, wireless networking, GPS and all of the usual connectivity options are present. It’s worth reporting that the OS was unable to detect my correct location even with the Wi-Fi/mobile option selected in place of GPS (it was out by around 150 miles!) but this is likely a software bug, rather than the hardware.
What About the OS?
The Ubuntu Phone operating system is pretty much an unknown quantity at this point. It comes with all of the tools you would expect to find natively: settings, an update tool, reset etc., calendar, messaging and email support, as well as a couple of well-known apps (Facebook, eBay, Twitter), and media playback (see below).
The main Ubuntu Unity menu bar 3 Dead-Wrong, Yet Common Complaints About Unity & Ubuntu 3 Dead-Wrong, Yet Common Complaints About Unity & Ubuntu Do you hate Ubuntu's new interface, Unity? Do you think Ubuntu is making a huge mistake by changing things, and will inevitably crash and burn because of this? There are good reasons to dislike Unity... Read More is opened by swiping in from the left, or pressing the home button (on Android devices, this has thumbprint reader abilities, but this is currently not available on Ubuntu Phone). The information presented on what would otherwise be a “Home” screen in fact feels more like an app, which is swiped through. Here you find Scopes, each focusing on relevant calendar, date, time and weather information at first, while apps, popular music and video and your photos can be found by swiping back and forth.
It can take a while to get used to, but the simplicity of having your apps listed in the same place as your calendar updates and so forth is quite refreshing. As a shortcut, you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen to quickly find an app to switch to, while the notification area displays everything you would expect. Swiping from the right edge, meanwhile, displays the open apps; simply browse between them to switch, and swipe upwards to close.
Data can be easily copied from the phone using a USB Type-C data cable connect to your computer, like any standard USB storage device.
Are There Any Apps and Games?
Mobile platforms, rightly or wrongly, live and die on the quality of their apps and games. As mentioned, several popular apps are included in the OS, and support for others is also provided via integrated login (such as Instagram).
New apps can be found in the Ubuntu Store, where tools as useful as flashlights, two factor authenticators, and even a Terminal can be found. Organization of the store need development though – it’s hard to filter apps based on their type, for instance. Games are available – mostly puzzles – but a few popular options are there, such as Cut the Rope (which you can play on other devices, even in your browser).
There’s certainly enough to keep you entertained and use your phone as a new tool. In many ways, the selection of apps feels like the early days of Android; in less optimistic terms, it also feels a little like WebOS So You Bought A TouchPad: 5 Uses For Your "Dead" Tablet PC So You Bought A TouchPad: 5 Uses For Your "Dead" Tablet PC The dust has settled and by now you should either be bitterly disappointed or overjoyed at the bargain you just snagged. If you were lucky enough to grab yourself a firesale HP TouchPad or are... Read More …
Media Playback and Camera
As you would expect, the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition ships with front-facing 5 MP and immense 21 MP rear cameras, with a Sony sensor chipping in to make your captures even better. Sadly, while the hardware is good for snapping, the editing software needs some work, although with a new mobile platform that might not come as a surprise.
The following shots show results from the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition compared with the Sony Xperia Z5 Sony Xperia Z5 Review Sony Xperia Z5 Review You're looking for a new phone. Something reasonably powerful, big screen, great sound. A handset to blow your iPhone loving friends out of the water. The Sony Xperia Z5 might just be it. Read More :
As you can see, there is a bit more color in the Meizu snap. Both photos were taken within seconds of each other on a sunny day at Edinburgh Castle, Scotland.
Media playback, meanwhile, is possible via the videos section of the Home screen, where your own videos and trending YouTube videos can be enjoyed on the device’s full HD 1920x1080p display. It’s a crisp picture, too, but videos recorded on the device don’t tend to be as impressive as the photos (there’s some sample footage in the video review).
Convergence? What Convergence?!
Much has been made of the Convergence feature, Ubuntu’s answer to Microsoft’s Continuum (found in the recently-reviewed Lumia 950 Microsoft Lumia 950 Review Microsoft Lumia 950 Review This could be Microsoft's final flagship phone. With many declaring Windows 10 Mobile dead on arrival, just what is the point of the Lumia 950? Read More ). It’s essentially support for hardware that enables you to turn the phone into a desktop computer, with the addition of a keyboard, mouse, and display.
While Bluetooth is supported, the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition doesn’t ship with a HDMI port, and the USB Type-C port doesn’t seem to be adequate at this stage for an adaptor. What this means is that one of the main selling points of Ubuntu Touch is unavailable in the most anticipated device since the OS launched.
That’s a poor showing, whichever way you look at it.
How Does the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition Benchmark?
Benchmarking the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition is a bit tricky, thanks to the shortage of satisfactory testing software. As a result, any such assessment can only be based on usage.
For a device that shares a processor (the Exynos 7420 processor) with one of the top phones on the market (the Samsung Galaxy S6), the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition feels lackluster. Perhaps this is down to the inclusion of just 3 GB of RAM instead of the usual 4 GB? Software stability issues mitigate this, with basic games such as Cut the Rope proving buggy, laggy, and ultimately crashing.
Not an ideal mobile gaming experience!
Additionally, while the new gestures can take a bit of time to learn, the OS doesn’t seem to be quite quick enough to pick them up in many cases. When you’re feeling your way through a new user interface, this is far from ideal. On the other hand, battery life is good, offering around 30 hours per charge with average use.
Has Ubuntu’s Time Come in the Mobile Space?
A new operating system on any popular device will take time to take hold. Realistically, outside of the target markets in China and India, Ubuntu Phone has little chance of surpassing even Blackberry and Windows Phone/Mobile 10, never mind Android and iOS.
Ubuntu Phone has its strengths; it has some failings, too. But the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition is a solid piece of hardware that should appeal to any Ubuntu desktop user and smartphone owners disillusioned with the way things are going with iOS and Android. If Convergence can be brought into the mix on this device, and app stability issues addressed, the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition could prove an attractive alternative to the marketplace-focused worlds of iOS and Android.
Retailing at $369.99, the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition is available to buy now. Or you could win one.
Our verdict of the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition :
A quick phone with a superb camera, let down by a challenging operating system that’s short on apps. Remember, there is an Android model if you prefer. 6 10An Android gaming handheld with physical controls that can also wirelessly stream PC gameplay, Nvidia's Project Shield is the surprise package of this year's CES show - a portable games machine that supports a massive range of games, from the most basic 2D Android titles through to the power and majesty of top-end AAA epics like Battlefield 3 and Crysis 2 via its innovative in-built local cloud gaming technology. Nvidia's Project Shield reveal was important for a number of reasons - not only did we see the company's first foray into handheld gaming territory, but we also witnessed the capabilities of its latest mobile hardware. Nvidia reckons that its new Tegra 4 chip is the most powerful mobile processor in the world, and one more step towards closing the gap with the current-gen console standard set by the Xbox 360's Xenos graphics core. Demos showing Dead Trigger 2 and eagerly anticipated free-to-play title Hawken looked a cut above most of the mobile titles we've seen, although they still fall some way short of the current-gen standard. Performance looked a bit wobbly, with Dead Trigger regularly dipping under 30 frames per second, but as we've discovered from iOS devices and indeed Tegra 3 hardware, HDMI mirroring appears to incur something of a performance hit, presumably owing to bandwidth limitations on mobile hardware. Until we get the device in our hands, we're not going to be able to ascertain exactly what this new hardware is capable of. Nvidia's claims of 6x performance in relation to Tegra 3 will be quite some achievement though. CPU-side, the Tegra 4 boasts a quad-core implementation of ARM's next-gen A15 CPU architecture which it claims is a first. To illustrate the computational power, it compared a series of web pages being loaded on a Google Nexus 10 next to a prototype Tegra 4 tablet. The result was remarkable - Tegra 4 completing the tasks in 27 seconds while the Nexus 10 lagged home in a somewhat less impressive 50 seconds. While we have no doubt that the quad-core A15 configuration packs some serious power, we were a little disappointed that Nvidia chose to compare the Nexus running Chrome while its own tablet appeared to be running the standard Android browser - this was not an "apples to apples" comparison with many believing that Chrome runs more slowly than the older browser [Update: error corrected]. "Nvidia's new Project Shield aims to combine cutting-edge mobile and high-end PC gaming in one must-have, console controller-sized package." See the complete Nvidia Project Sheild presentation from the CES keynote, available here for viewing in 720p resolution. Other elements of the Tegra 4 chipset also impressed (though we don't know if we'll find them in Shield) - particularly the CPU/GPU-assisted HDR photography mode, which includes panorama support. Definitely in is the ability to play back 4K video via HDMI, and you should expect to hear a lot more about this extreme 3840x2160 resolution specification from CES this week. There have already been rumours that Sony's next-gen console may support it, and 4K gaming is something we'll be looking into in due course. In terms of the Shield itself, the physical controls aspect warrants some discussion. Nvidia's contention is that gamers are lugging wireless pads along with them so that they can enjoy the benefits of physical controls on their smartphone and tablet games. Its solution is to build a controller with a flip-top 5-inch LCD panel. The controller itself is clearly shaped with the Xbox 360 pad in mind and replicates all of its primary functions, adding Android buttons to the centre cluster in addition to the start, select and shield buttons (the shield replicating the function of the Xbox 360's 'Guide' button). Speakers are integrated, which Nvidia says possess excellent sound quality particularly in terms of bass reproduction. All of the controls are recessed in order to allow the screen to sit flush with the rest of the casing once the unit is closed, with the lid allowing for the addition of custom decals. In terms of bulk, Nvidia aimed to design a unit that isn't much larger than the standard Xbox 360 pad and while it obviously looks a little larger owing to the integrated touch-screen, the firm's size comparisons to the 360 and Wii U GamePads looks fairly favourable. Also of interest is the teardown video (rendered in real-time on PC using Unreal Engine 4) giving us some hint of the innards. What stands out is the meaty hintsink attached to the Tegra 4 processor. Our analysis of Tegra 3 proved inconclusive, and according to hackers who contacted us, the full power of the hardware is held back by extreme power management - battery life being more important than games performance. The inclusion of the heatsink, plus the fact that this is games hardware from Nvidia, makes us hope that this isn't so much of an issue. It's also worth pointing out that the Ouya Tegra 3 devkits feature an active cooling element, so the firm's claims of improved performance may well hold water. In terms of design, console controllers have typically been dominated by a Japanese-style approach, whereas Project Shield owes more to the bright 'n' brash Alienware aesthetic. It's not the most compelling element of the hardware from what we've seen so far, but we'll reserve judgement until we've been hands-on. "In terms of its form-factor, Shield looks like a bulkier Xbox 360 controller with Alienware-style design." At this point it's difficult to get a grip on the size of Project Shield and how it relates to existing game controllers. However, this illustration from Nvidia offers up some idea of how the controller stacks up against the 360 pad and the Wii U GamePad.
Localised cloud gameplay A genuinely exciting element of Project Shield is the ability to utilise its onboard video decoder for streaming gameplay from PC systems equipped with Kepler GTX graphics cards - the entry-level offering being the surprisingly capable GeForce GTX 650, currently available at the £85-£90 mark (we'll be running a feature assessing all the major £90-£130 graphics cards soon). This feature is Kepler-only, owing to the onboard h.264 video encoder incorporated into the silicon. Instead of rendering out completed frames to the display, Kepler encodes them at the driver level with no hit to CPU performance and the PC beams out the video feed to Shield. The new handheld decodes the stream and transmits control inputs back to the PC, the whole process taking place over Wi-Fi. The result is a gameplay experience similar to what we find with the Nintendo Wii U, and in theory every game available on your PC should be able to be streamed over to the Shield (Nvidia taking time to point out that the Steam library in particular is compatible). In essence, what we are seeing here is a localised rendition of cloud gaming, with Nvidia utilising the higher bandwidths and lower latencies inherent in a home network to overcome the genuine quality issues we witnessed with OnLive in terms of dodgy picture quality and muggy controls. We have high hopes for Shield's streaming performance considering the overall hardware and software set-up. First up, there's the fact that the device has a 1280x720 screen. PC-side, there's no apparent on-screen rendering meaning that the software can pour all of its resources into a native 720p framebuffer, so even the entry-level GTX 650 should be able to produce decent visuals and frame-rate on virtually every game. Secondly, the resolution limit means that vast amounts of bandwidth won't be required to maintain excellent image quality - 15-20mbps would be lavish by OnLive standards and unattainable on the majority of broadband internet connections, but should be easy to work with on any modern router. "Numerous Tegra 4 titles were shown during Nvidia's keynote. There's clearly a significant boost to detail and effects but we still seem to be some way off the current-gen console standard." Dead Trigger 2 running on Tegra 4 demonstrates that the scale and complexity of mobile 3D titles is increasing significantly. A potential concern with Shield is that the rate of increase in gaming performance could potentially limit the shelf-life of a single hardware platform. In the home, we should see massive improvements to latency over the OnLive experience too, not just because of the more localised environment, but also owing to the way that the h.264 encoder will have access to the completed framebuffer without having to scan-out from the video output. Provided the panel chosen by Nvidia for the Shield is fast enough, there's every reason to believe that the whole process could be completed with latencies close to that of the average HDTV. Nvidia also hinted heavily that in the future we should expect to see the streaming experience strike out from the home, presumably owing to the LTE modem contained in the new Tegra 4 processor (though previously we'd been led to believe that LTE would end up in a separate Tegra 4 revision). Previously, Gaikai's David Perry had ruled out streaming gameplay over existing 3G networks, suggesting that the latencies were just not good enough for decent response, citing the new 4G standard as the best platform for mobile cloud gaming. Obviously performance here in terms of Nvidia's set-up is going to be dictated not just by the network, but also by the upstream connection at the user's
|
ing of the ways with producer Joel Silver.
Either way, I’m not sure it was a project with too much on its side. Probably better for all involved to move on.
And… having said that, yes, I’m aware that Johnson’s next film is Brett Ratner’s Hercules. I mean… we have copies of The Family Man and Tower Heist in this house and they’re not on fire or anything. I’m just not going to blanket hate everything Ratner ever looks at before he’s even made it even if that does seem to be part of the Online Film Writer job description.
(Last Updated )
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None foundBack in May, EMC announced a new initiative at EMC World called Project OnRack which had an ambitious goal of providing a new software abstraction layer that would sit on top of existing "industry standards" for server out-of-band management. Standards such as IPMI, CIM, SMI-S and CIM-SMASH to just name a few were supposed to help IT administrators manage and operate the life-cycle of their physical servers. Instead, we ended up with even more complexity and inconsistency due to the different implementations of these "industry standards" across vendors and sometimes even within the same vendor. Trying to keep firmware, BIOS, hardware drivers, etc. up to date across different hardware platforms from the same vendor in a consistent and automated fashion was already painful enough. As If this was not already challenging enough, try doing this for a mix of hardware platforms across different vendors and you have just given your operational and datacenter team a never ending nightmare.
Frankly, I am pretty surprised that it has taken us this long to finally tackle this problem. This is something we have needed for quite some time now and I still remember the early days as an admin trying to script around the inconsistencies of IPMI to configure things like asset tags and serial numbers across different hardware platforms.
OnRack http://t.co/I6dpMSPgSB Interesting initiative from EMC. Something we've needed for a LONG time! Reminds me of few startups doing same — William Lam (@lamw) May 7, 2015
In my opinion, having a consistent and programmable interface to this low level of hardware is a critical component to a Software-Defined Datacenter and has often been overlooked. Kudos to EMC for taking on this initiative and more importantly driving this change through open-source and the community in mind.
Since the announcement back in May, things have been been pretty quiet about OnRack, until recently that is. I was listening to a recent episode of The Hot Aisle Podcast with guest Brad Maltz of EMC talking about Hyper-Converged Infrastructure. Among the different topics discussed, OnRack was brought up along with dis-aggregated hardware/infrastructure where individual compute resources can scale up independently of each other. There were a couple of nice tidbits mentioned on the podcast. First, it looks like OnRack which was the internal EMC project name has now been renamed to RackHD as the external project name. Second, it looks like the RackHD repo is already on Github with some initial content including some pretty detailed documentation on the architecture and components which can be found here.
The OnRack project looks to be made up of the following sub-projects per the documentation:
on-tftp - NodeJS application provided TFTP service integrated with the workflow engine
on-http - internal HTTP REST API interfaces integrated with the workflow engine
on-syslog - syslog endpoint integrated to feed data into workflow engine
on-taskgraph - NodeJS application providing the workflow engine
on-dhcp-proxy - NodeJS application providing DHCP proxy support integrated into the workflow engine
onserve - OnServe Engine
core library - Core libraries in use across NodeJS applications
task library - NodeJS task library for the workflow engine
tools - Useful dev tools for running locally
webui - Initial web interfaces to some of the APIs - multiple interfaces embedded into a single project
integration tests - Integration tests with code for deploying and running those tests, as well as the tests themselves
statsd - A local statsD implementation that makes it easy to deploy on a local machine for capturing application metrics
Brand mentioned that many of the Github repos are still marked private as they are still working through the process of releasing RackHD to the public. It looks like RackHD and all relevant repos are now all open source as of Monday Nov 2nd, for more details please visit the Github repo here. I am definitely excited to see how this project will evolve with the larger community and some of the new innovations which will be unlocked due to this barrier being removed. Hopefully we will see positive collaboration from other hardware vendors which will help us move forward and finally solve this problem once and for all! I can already see huge benefits for software only vendors like VMware who can integrate RackHD directly into provisioning tools like Auto Deploy or configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef and Ansible for example. It will also be interesting to see how other startups in this area like NodePrime and another stealth company, who is also working on solving a similar problem and whether they would leverage RackHD or not."With the thirty-fourth pick in the 2015 NBA Draft, the Los Angeles Lakers select Anthony Brown from Stanford University."
He may not have been the best player on the 2014-2015 Stanford Cardinal NIT Championship team, but he was the only one drafted on Thursday night as small forward Anthony Brown will be taking his talents five and a half hours south of Palo Alto, California to Los Angeles to begin his NBA career for the purple and gold.
The six foot, seven inch, sharpshooter was the second collegiate Senior to be selected by the Lakers in a string of eight picks (twenty-seventh to thirty-fourth) as they took Larry Nance Jr. from Wyoming with the twenty-seventh pick.
Although Anthony Brown has average athleticism compared to others at his position, he is a spectacular three point shooter as he shot 44.1% from beyond the arc (better than lottery picks D'Angelo Russell and Frank Kaminsky). In fact, a little over forty-three percent of his points last season came from made three pointers! With his accuracy from downtown comes Brown's ability to rebound the basketball. In sixteen of the California native's thirty-seven games during his Senior season, he grabbed eight or more rebounds, including twelve pulled down in the 2015 NIT Championship against the University of Miami (Florida) and thirteen ripped down against conference rival Colorado on the road.
A concern in Brown's game rises at his inconsistency on a gamely basis and offensive passiveness during the course of a game. Even though there will be times next year that he will need to allow guards Kobe Bryant and D'Angelo Russell to penetrate and score the basketball, Brown must always be ready to catch a pass and knock down the open trey as a three point specialist.
2015-2016 Projected Starting Lineup
PG-Jordan Clarkson
***2014-2015 All-Rookie First Team
---11.9 PPG, 3.2 RPG, & 3.5 APG.
SG-Kobe Bryant
---22.3 PPG, 5.7 RPG, 5.6 APG, & 1.3 SPG.
SF-Nick Young
---13.4 PPG & 2.3 RPG.
PF-Julius Randle
---15.0 PPG & 10.4 RPG. (At University of Kentucky)
C-Jordan Hill
---12.0 PPG & 7.9 RPG.
6th-D'Angelo Russell
---19.3 PPG, 5.7 RPG, 5.0 APG, & 1.6 SPG. (At Ohio State University)With diabetes and cancer on the verge of turning into epidemics, the recent discovery by 21-year-old Sumit Pawar, a final-year student of the integrated MSc course at the University of Pune’s (UoP) Institute of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology (IBB), opens a whole new horizon in the field of medicine.
Sumit has discovered a way to extract the medicinal properties from the plant, Dioscorea bulbifera (Air potato, a species of yam), without destroying the plant and thus helping in preserving it. The plant, which is found in abundance in the forests of the Western Ghats, has been known to have medicinal properties that can help cure diabetes and cancer.
Sumit has also bagged the second prize at a poster competition at an international conference on ‘Current trends in medicinal plant research’, held on the university campus from January 10 to 12.
Speaking about the discovery, Sumit said, “In the past, the plant in its entirety has been used to extract medicines. The new discovery makes room for using the microorganisms in the plant for deducing the medicinal properties, keeping the plants intact and hence preserving them.”
Sumit’s discovery would not only help conserve the plant, but would also help in large-scale production of drugs. “Through this process, the plant’s destruction can be stopped and the production can be increased as well. The microorganisms also enable in protecting the plant from infection,” he said.
Sougata Ghosh, a PhD scholar at UoP, who was the chief instructor for the project said, “The discovery will serve a dual purpose of plant growth promotion, as well as to find an alternative to over-exploitation of medicinal plants.”
Director of the IBB, BA Chopade, who was the principal investigator of the project, said that such discoveries at UoP promote and exchange knowledge about recent developments in the field of herbal drugs throughout the globe.
“We concentrate on nurturing young talent to convert their innovative ideas into reality. The microbes after the discovery will be further investigated for producing medicinal compounds,” Chopade said.Long back, I happened to talk with Beau Simensen about stackphp on #auraphp channel. It was hard for me to digest when I noticed it need symfony/http-kernel and its dependencies.
After a few months, I started to like the middleware approach of slim framework and wanted to push it to aura. But nothing happened there.
Conduit to rescue
Conduit is a Middleware for PHP built by Matthew Weier O’Phinney lead of Zend framework. Conduit supports the current PSR-7 proposal. I believe like the many PSR’s, PSR-7 will be a revolution in the PHP world. Conduit is really a micro framework and can grow with your project.
Starting your project
I hope you know about the tool composer and know about PHP 5.3 to follow the tutorial.
1 2 3 4 mkdir sample-project cd sample-project composer require "phly/conduit:0.10.*" mkdir web
We have created an extra web folder, so it acts as the document root. Create an index.php file in the web folder and lets start serving our first Hello conduit! message.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 <? php require dirname ( __DIR__ ). '/vendor/autoload.php' ; use Phly\Conduit\Middleware ; use Phly\Http\Server ; $app = new Middleware (); $app -> pipe ( '/', function ( $request, $response, $next ) { return $response -> write ( 'Hello conduit!' ) -> end (); }); $server = Server :: createServer ( $app, $_SERVER, $_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIE, $_FILES ); $server -> listen ();
Start your web server, or fire your built in PHP server.
1 php -S localhost:8000 web/index.php -t web
Point your browser to http://localhost:8000 and you can see Hello conduit!.
Middlewares
Conduit route is very limited and will not handle dynamic routing. So we need a router middleware to resuce. Let us build our first router middleware. If you check the docs middleware can be a closure, invokable objects, array callback etc. We will stick with closure in the examples.
The idea is same even if you are using a different library.
Get the path via $request->getUri()->getPath() Check router if the path is matching If no call the next middleware in stack. ie return $next()
call the next middleware in stack. ie yes execute the controller and return back the response
Be sure that if you change something you need to return the response. Because Request and Response are immutable.
In-order to build something like the above, we need a router library which can handle routing, and a dispatcher library which can handle the necessary operation when a route is found.
Install the dependencies.
1 composer require "aura/router:~2.0" "aura/dispatcher:~2.0"
The router middleware will look like as below.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 <? php $router = new \Aura\Router\Router ( new \Aura\Router\RouteCollection ( new \Aura\Router\RouteFactory ), new \Aura\Router\Generator ); $dispatcher = new \Aura\Dispatcher\Dispatcher ( array (), 'controller', 'action' ); $app -> pipe ( function ( $request, $response, $next ) use ( $router, $dispatcher ) { $path = $request -> getUri () -> getPath (); $route = $router -> match ( $path, $request -> getServerParams ()); if (! $route ) { return $next (); } $params = $route -> params ; $params ['request' ] = $request ; $params ['response' ] = $response ; $result = $dispatcher -> __invoke ( $params ); if ( $result instanceof \Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface ) { $response = $result ; } else { $response = $response -> write ( $result ) -> end (); } return $response ; });
Now your router middleware can handle dynamic things. You can see the full example over gist.
You may need an authentication middleware to check whether the user is authenticated, or a content negotiation middleware to set the corresponding Content-Type header in the response.
I have created a skelton project which have a router middleware, authentication middleware and negotiation middleware with the help of a few libraries. Less libraray means less code to maintain, easy to understand and debug the code behind the scenes.
Today, I noticed one question over reddit Moving to a real framework.. need help with the migration wrote my suggestion how conduit + aura can help.
Play and enjoy!A sign advertising a Marijuana dispensary appeared on an abandoned building in Fayetteville April 1. Photo: Dustin Bartholomew
This might be the best April Fools’ joke you’ll see today.
A sign for what would be Arkansas’ first marijuana dispensary appeared on an abandoned EZ Mart location Wednesday. Of course, marijuana is still illegal in Arkansas. It is also likely no coincidence that the banner appeared on April 1.
The ten-foot banner placed on the front of the building, located at 2341 N. College Ave., advertises “Arkansas grown” marijuana dispensary will open on April 20 (4/20 Get it?).
According to the sign, the business would serve “Madison County’s finest” crops for both “medicinal and recreational” use.
We don’t have a clue who hung the sign there, and according to Flyer reader Ashley who sent us the tip, the building owner has no idea where it came from, either.
Nice work, prankster. Happy April Fools’ Day.Basic Example
Let’s do a snapshot assertion for a simple string, “foo”.
public function test_it_is_foo() {
$this->assertMatchesSnapshot('foo');
}
The first time the assertion runs, it doesn’t have a snapshot to compare the string with. The test runner generates a new snapshot and marks the test as incomplete.
>./vendor/bin/phpunit
There was 1 incomplete test:
1) ExampleTest::test_it_matches_a_string
Snapshot created for ExampleTest__test_it_matches_a_string__1
OK, but incomplete, skipped, or risky tests!
Tests: 1, Assertions: 0, Incomplete: 1.
Snapshot ids are generated based on the test and testcase’s names. Basic snapshots return a var_export of the actual value.
<?php return 'foo';
Let’s rerun the test. The test runner will see that there’s already a snapshot for the assertion and do a comparison.
>./vendor/bin/phpunit
OK (1 test, 1 assertion)
If we change actual value to “bar”, the test will fail because the snapshot still returns “foo”.
public function test_it_is_foo() {
$this->assertMatchesSnapshot('bar');
}
>./vendor/bin/phpunit
1) ExampleTest::test_it_matches_a_string
Failed asserting that two strings are equal.
--- Expected
+++ Actual
@@ @@
-'foo'
+'bar'
FAILURES!
Tests: 1, Assertions: 1, Failures: 1.
When we expect a changed value, we need to tell the test runner to update the existing snapshots instead of failing the test. This is possible by adding a -d --update-snapshots flag to the phpunit command.
>./vendor/bin/phpunit -d --update-snapshots
1) ExampleTest::test_it_matches_a_string
Snapshot updated for ExampleTest__test_it_matches_a_string__1
OK, but incomplete, skipped, or risky tests!
Tests: 1, Assertions: 1, Incomplete: 1
As a result, our snapshot file contains “bar” instead of “foo”.
<?php return 'bar';
Methods
Assertions are done using the assertMatchesSnapshot method.
public function it_matches_something()
{
$something = new Something();
$this->assertMatchesSnapshot($something);
}
If you’re working with JSON or XML data, you’re better off using a dedicated assertMatchesJsonSnapshot or assertMatchesXmlSnapshot method, which will save snapshots as.json of.xml files, and provide a better diff when the snapshot doesn't match.
public function it_matches_something_json()
{
$something = new Something();
$this->assertMatchesJsonSnapshot($something->toJson());
}
Snapshot files
Be default, snapshots are stored in a __snapshots__ directory at the same level of the test class.
__snapshots__/
ExampleTest__test_it_matches_a_string.php
ExampleTest.php
Snapshot ids and the snapshot directory’s name can be changed in by overriding getSnapshotId and getSnapshotDirectory. Take a look at the readme for a more detailed explanation.
Drivers
Drivers make the package extendable, without the Driver interface snapshot assertions would be limited to JSON, XML and generic values with var_export. A driver handles serializing and matching snapshot data. For example, if your application would make extensive use of YAML files, you could write a YamlDriver to save snapshots as real YAML files and improve PHPUnit's diff output.
Custom drivers can be applied by passing them to assertMatchesSnapshot.
public function it_matches_yaml()
{
$order = new Order();
$this->assertMatchesSnapshot(
$order->toYaml(),
new YamlDriver()
);
}
If you’re interested in a detailed explanation on writing custom drivers, they have a dedicated section in the readme.
Road To v1.0
We’ve decided to tag v1.0 already since we’re using this package without issues in a few projects already. The missing features can be added in a a later release.
Cleaning Up Unused Snapshots (#17)
At the moment, there’s no way to determine which snapshots aren’t used and can be deleted. Old snapshots need to be deleted manually, a “cleanup” task would be welcome to automate this.
Hack-free Update Flag (#22)
The --update-snapshots flag needs to be specified after -d, which is meant to set custom php.ini values. PHPUnit doesn't support custom CLI options, but it might be added in a future release (sebastianbergmann/phpunit#2271)
Despite not having a stable version number, there most likely won’t be any large breaking changes anymore heading to v1.0.FBI Pick Is A Republican With Deep Roots In Law Enforcement
Enlarge this image toggle caption Mark Wilson/Getty Images Mark Wilson/Getty Images
From 'Morning Edition': NPR's Carrie Johnson talks about James Comey Listen
"Name any high office in federal law enforcement... odds are Jim Comey's had it over the years."
That's some of what NPR's Carrie Johnson had to say early Thursday on Morning Edition about the man who she has been told, by two sources with knowledge of the decision, will be President Obama's choice to be the next director of the FBI.
Carrie broke the news about Comey on Wednesday evening. Then on Morning Edition, she added more details about the 52-year-old former deputy attorney general. For instance:
-- In 2004, when Comey was the No. 2 official at Justice during the George W. Bush administration, he rushed to a Washington-area hospital to be by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's bedside. Comey helped thwart White House counsel Alberto Gonzales' attempt to pressure Ashcroft into reauthorizing a controversial wiretapping program.
As Carrie and The Atlantic Wire remind us, Comey later testified before Congress that, "I was angry. I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man who did not have the powers of the attorney general." At one point, he threatened to resign.
-- It was Comey who expanded the mandate of a special prosecutor appointed to investigate the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. That probe led to the prosecution and conviction of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, for lying to investigators.
-- Comey's career also includes stints as the top prosecutor in New York City. While in that post, he prosecuted home styles guru and TV personality Martha Stewart for lying about stock trades. Before that, while working as a prosecutor in Virginia, Comey worked to take guns off the streets of Richmond.
If nominated and confirmed, Comey would replace FBI Director Robert Mueller, who is scheduled to depart in September. Mueller's 10-year term expired in 2011, but was extended for two years when finding a replacement proved too difficult.
Some of Thursday's related stories focus on the political angles related to the choice:
-- "By choosing Mr. Comey, a Republican, Mr. Obama made a strong statement about bipartisanship at a time when he faces renewed criticism from Republicans in Congress and has had difficulty winning confirmation of some important nominees. At the same time, Mr. Comey's role in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Bush administration — in which he refused to acquiesce to White House aides and reauthorize a program for eavesdropping without warrants when he was serving as acting attorney general — should make him an acceptable choice to Democrats." (The New York Times)
-- "The expected nomination would bestow an exceedingly important and sensitive post on a registered Republican who twice served as an appointee of President George W. Bush: first as U.S. attorney in Manhattan and second as deputy attorney general. However, Comey is widely viewed as an apolitical prosecutor and is best known for rebuffing pressure from Bush's White House to approve the reauthorization of a terrorist surveillance-related program in 2004. (Politico)
-- "The expected nomination of Comey, a Republican, was seen in some quarters as a bipartisan move by a president besieged by Republicans in Congress. But Chuck Hagel's prior service as a Republican senator from Nebraska did not spare him from a bruising nomination battle for secretary of defense." (The Washington Post)
As for issues that might raise questions about a Comey nomination, Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley said Wednesday that "if he's nominated, he would have to answer questions about his recent work in the hedge fund industry.... The administration's efforts to criminally prosecute Wall Street for its part in the economic downturn have been abysmal, and his agency would have to help build the case against some of his colleagues." As The Associated Press notes, "Comey was general counsel to Connecticut-based hedge fund Bridgewater Associates from 2010 until earlier this year and now lectures at Columbia Law School."A Dune Guide To Business
Posted by Steve Spalding in Featured | View comments
Today, I decided to throw together a little mashup. The idea, what wisdom can digital entrepreneurs gain from famous works of literature. So of all the works of literature available to me, which did I choose? How about one of the most densely written, socio-political treatises ever written – Frank Herbert’s, Dune.
Sit back, pull up a chair and let’s see what this rich cast of characters can teach us.
Self confidence
“Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.” –from The Humanity of Muad’Dib by the Princess Irulan
One of the hardest parts of building a business is learning all of the new skills required of you. Harder still is getting over the belief that you are incapable of learning. Learn to learn, it’s in you.
Humility
“The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.” –from Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib by the Princess Irulan
Greatness and humility must sleep in the same bed. Mangers who don’t understand that half of their job is acting as a listening ear rarely excel. Without excellence, there is only failure.
Common Sense
“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” –from The Sayings of Muad’Dib by the Princess Irulan
Wake up and smell the Latte. Common sense is neither common nor does it ever make sense. While there is a small chance logic will lead you to glory. True leadership comes from marked purpose and applied intuition...
Leadership
“A world is supported by four things … the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing … without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!” –Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, to Paul Atreides
Don’t you get it? The art of leadership is strength! Manage through action. Manage through force of will. Disagreement should be met with wisdom and dissent crushed beneath your jack boot.
The Art Of Living.
“Bless the Maker and all His Water. Bless the coming and going of Him, May His passing cleanse the world. May He keep the world for his people.” –Fremen saying
The spice must flow...
(Image) (RSS)THE Scottish Secretary has been accused of profiting from his government’s austerity cuts after accepting thousands of pounds in donations derived from a pawn shop.
Tory MP David Mundell took £10,000 earlier this year from Glasgow-based landlord Stridewell Estates Ltd, some of which helped bankroll his general election campaign.
Stridewell owns a single “investment property”, on Cowdenbeath High Street, which for the last four years has been leased to the Look@Me Pawn Shop.
According to its accounts, Stridewell’s entire turnover is derived from renting out the unit, which public records show is leased at £6000 a year.
Situated next to bookmakers, charity shops and bargain food stores, Look@Me currently charges 25 per cent interest on a one-month loan.
Labour said Mundell’s donations amounted to “making money out of the poor”.
Pawnbroker loans, secured against jewellery and other goods for quick cash, are classed as a form of “high-cost credit” along with payday loans and home collection credit.
In 2013, the Tory-LibDem Coalition government published a report on “Credit, Debt and Financial Difficulty in Britain” warning they were used by “more vulnerable consumers”.
Households with pawnbroker loans were more likely to have an adult who had lost their job in the past year: 30 per cent compared with 19-23 percent for other users of high-cost credit.
The same year, the Parliamentary Commissioner on Banking Standards said the surge in payday lenders and pawnbrokers showed access to affordable credit “remains a problem for many”, concluding: “We believe that this problem is greater in deprived communities.”
Despite the origin of Stridewell’s income, Mundell accepted £2500 from the firm in January, then another £2500 in March and a further £5000 in May.
The payments are recorded in his parliamentary register of interests.
Electoral Commission records also show Stridewell Estates Ltd gave £10,000 to the UK Conservative Party ahead of the general election.
Stridewell is owned by Singapore-based developer Brian Gillies, who has been a regular donor to Mundell and the Conservatives.
Since 2010, another Gillies firm, Alchemist Estates Ltd, has given the UK Tories £63,000, plus £16,000 to Mundell’s Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale constituency party.
Alchemist Estates also gave £12,500 to Ruth Davidson when she ran for the leadership of the Scottish Tories in 2011 - she was later fined £200 for failing to declare the cash on time.
Glasgow-born Gillies was a chartered surveyor in London before being made redundant in the 1990s - he started a property firm with his £40,000 pay-off and is now a millionaire.
He bought the Cowdenbeath property for £65,000 in 2006.
In 2013, Gillies relocated to Singapore where he is now a “private wealth manager”.
Although he lives overseas, he is still able to donate via his companies, as they are registered and do business in the UK.
Cowdenbeath MSP and deputy leader of Scottish Labour Alex Rowley, whose constituency office is near the pawn shop, said: “David Mundell is supporting policies that are driving more and more people in my constituency into hardship.
“At the same time, Fife Council is trying hard to support these people and keep them away from money lenders and having to pawn their goods out of desperation. So while others are looking to support people in need, the Tories are making money out of the poor.”
An SNP spokesman said: "It is for Mr Mundell to judge which companies he deems it appropriate to receive donations from – but many people will be surprised to learn that his cash flow is partly dependent on a pawnshop and its trade."
Gillies did not respond to a request for comment.
Andrew Stevenson, who rents the Cowdenbeath shop from Stridewell, said he had no idea that the money from the company went to Mundell.
“I just pay them the rent every quarter. That’s a sickener. I’m not a fan of the Tories.”
He defended pawnbroking, saying his interest rate was a maximum of 300 per cent a year, compared to 2000 per cent for some payday lenders. He also said he was giving up the lease and closing next year because the business was “failing”.
The Scottish Conservatives declined to comment.Laser printing is being trialled on various types of fruit and vegetables.
Tattoos on fruit are set to replace stickers as farmers seek out environmentally-friendly alternatives to labels for produce that already comes in its own natural packaging.
Fruits with printed skins are already on supermarket shelves in Spain, Sweden, and the UK, but in Australia stickers, wax and plastic wrap are still the most common ways fresh produce is branded.
Plastic labels are set to become a thing of the past, though, as farmers listen to consumer demand for less packaging.
Among those pursuing alternatives is Matthew Abbott from Rabbits Organics banana farm at Mena Creek in far-north Queensland.
"One of the big problems that we have at the moment is being able to brand our fruit so we can sell conventional and organic side-by-side in the shop," Mr Abbott said.
"At the moment most of the organic fruit that is sold in a shop is wrapped in plastic and we are really trying to get away from that."
Share Rabbits Organics banana farm at Mena Creek in far north Queensland has been trialling different tattooing methods.
Inked banana skins
The banana farmer has tried using elastic bands to brand his fruit but has found printing logos directly onto the skins is the most promising option.
Mr Abbott has trialled two types of ink but the process has had its faults.
"We're trying to find a solution that we can do in our shed when the fruit's green," Mr Abbott said.
"When it ripens it goes into a cold room and it gets moisture on the fruit and the ink. If it's touched when it's wet, rubs off."
Looking to laser technology
He is now looking further afield and recently took part in a worldwide Nuffield Australia scholarship study tour, during which he came across a similar but more effective method.
"One of the things I found was a machine that uses laser technology to write on the fruit," Mr Abbott said.
Share Inks so far have proven problematic because the logos can rub off when exposed to moisture.
"It's got a conveyor belt that feeds the machine so the fruit gets lasered and then gets packed out the other end."
It takes about a fifth of a second to print each piece of fruit and Mr Abbott said as long as the laser was set up at least 30 centimetres from the produce, the branding does not penetrate the skin or affect shelf life or eating quality.
"It's burning the skin of the fruit but when you cut open the banana it just looks like ink on the surface," he said.
The laser technology is already being used on melons and citrus fruits and Mr Abbott is now working with its maker, Spanish-based Laser Food, to develop a system suitable for banana packing sheds.
"The technology can be there but if you haven't got a system around it that can be functional when it goes into your shed it can be just too hard to make it work," he said.
"We're talking to them about that, so let's see where that goes."
He said the initial outlay for a laser machine was expensive, but over time it would prove more cost effective than stickers or plastic.From Siemens to Salesforce, the 2017 Global LinkedIn Top Companies represent the firms around the world that are wooing today’s top talent. They are respected brands and innovators—and all attract outsize attention by global job seekers.
The Top Companies list is based on the billions of actions taken by LinkedIn's millions of members and looks at three main pillars: interest in a company's jobs, interest in a company's brand and employees, and employee retention. (We exclude LinkedIn and Microsoft from all LinkedIn Lists. You can learn more about our methodology here.)
Share the list and join the conversation using #LinkedInTopCompanies.
Here are this year's top 25 global companies. (To see the top companies in the U.S., UK, Australia, India and more, click here.)
Creating the future: For those who want to tackle big issues, some division of Alphabet is working on it: from putting self-driving cars on the road to fighting extremism online. As CEO Larry Page says: “You need to stay a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.”
Global headcount: 72,000
Innovation focus: More than 27,100 employees globally work in research and development, and Alphabet devoted $13.9 billion last year to R&D. That dedication has produced new products like Google Home and cutting-edge research like a deep learning algorithm that can detect a specific eye disease.
The everything store: Amazon is transforming how the world shops and consumes entertainment. This past year, Amazon delivered its first package by drone in the UK, launched Prime Video in India and opened brick-and-mortar stores in the U.S.
Global headcount: 341,400
“The best place to fail”: “People are often surprised to hear that working at Amazon is much like working for a series of startups. We’re constantly piloting, testing and launching new products, businesses and services,” Amazon told LinkedIn. “We take risks and make big bets, and when we fail, we apply the lessons learned and keep moving.”
The global network: Facebook believes it’s only ever 1 percent done, an ethos physically reflected by its headquarter offices. The unfinished look is “on purpose,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “When you enter our buildings, we want you to feel how much left there is to be done in our mission to connect the world.”
Global headcount: 17,000
Application advice: "Know or explore your passion around connecting the world, because it is at the heart of every single thing we do here," says Miranda Kalinowski, Facebook’s Global Head of Recruiting. "Once you know it, be able to demonstrate it.”
Driving forward: Uber is one of the most valuable startups, worth some $68 billion. While culture issues have plagued the company over the last several months, it still attracted outsize attention from global job seekers looking to boost their careers. LinkedIn’s Caroline Fairchild talked to experts as well as former and current employees to find out why Uber keeps attracting top talent even as its culture faces questions. Check out her latest update.
Global headcount: 12,000
Get acquainted: Worldwide nUbers, as new employees are dubbed, descend on the company’s headquarters for the three-day Uberversity program where they get to meet directly with the leadership team.
The work: Apple designs and develops some of the world’s most-popular gadgets, and it’s not done innovating yet. CEO Tim Cook recently debuted the company’s newest innovation: the HomePod. He also plans on doubling the size of Apple services, like iTunes, Apple Pay and more, over the next four years.
Global headcount: 110,000
Retail reach: Nearly 67,000 of Apple’s employees work in its 463 stores around the world. These positions don’t lack the perks of a traditional corporate gig: They get the same benefits, including shares in the company and education aid.
The work: Salesforce is famous for bringing customer relationship management to the cloud, and now it’s pushing CRM further into the future by pairing it with artificial intelligence via its new Einstein AI. It’s creations like this and Einstein Vision (which enables image recognition) that reflect CEO Marc Benioff’s drive for ongoing innovation.
Global headcount: 25,000
Island life: Benioff’s fascination with Hawaii informs Salesforce’s “Ohana” culture. (It means "family" in Hawaiian.)
Worldwide influence: From healthcare to retail, McKinsey staffs employees who are the best fit, regardless of location. About
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*It’s not quite free
I’m using the free tier of Azure Search, and Azure Functions allows 1 million function calls and 400k Gbs of execution for free. In theory, there is no charge unless it gets a lot of use.
But it’s still not quite free. I have been charged $.03. Looking at this, it turns out that some of that is from a couple of days when my function wasn’t compiling but was getting called by one of my Application Insights Web Tests. That caused the function to be reloaded from the Function App’s Storage Account racking up $.02.
The other $.01 has come from the App Service behind my Function App, but I can’t see where. There is no single day where there is a $.01 charge, so I’m guessing it’s the cummulation of fractions of a cent per day.
I’d like this to be 100% free, but I’m not going to spend my time finding out why I’m being charge $.03/month.
Addition resources
Source code for the Azure Functions that are handling search on this site, included is a Jekyll folder with most of what you’ll need to get it running on your site. The only things missing are the search box and the category displays that would like to /search?cat=[category name]
If you get stuck, I’d love to help. Feel free to contact me through any method available on my about page.Justin “Jay” Starrett, known only as Justin during our phone conversation on the Survivor: Millennials vs Gen X press day, wants to make sure the record is very clear about what’s going to happen in roughly 39 days.
“I won,” he tells me. “I already won. If you want to write that down somewhere and sign it, I promise you, it’s going to happen.”
No, the Florida bartender and real estate agent doesn’t have Minority Report style precog abilities. What he has is confidence in his ability to make it all the way to the end of Survivor, thanks to his skills as an outdoorsman, his willingness to flirt with any woman or man in order to get his way, and what he believes is an ideal fusion between the play styles of Russell Hantz and Woo Hwang, two losing finalists with a combined three Final Tribal Council losses between them. Best to let Justin explain that one for you.
Click here to read Justin’s bio, and read on for our full chat.
Wigler: How’re you feeling, Justin?
Justin: I’m excited, man. I’m super stoked here. I’m waiting around and ready to get shipped out.
Wigler: How did you get involved with Survivor?
Justin: I used to watch the show with my aunt when I was a kid. She’s super obsessed with the show. I’m always outside, I’m an active person. I surf, skate, do all of that fun stuff. She’s Spanish — we’re Peruvian, my family — and she was like (impersonating his aunt): “Oh! You should go and do the show!” So I tried, I auditioned, and I made it. So I’m super blessed.
Wigler: Wow. Done in one shot? You auditioned, and you made it onto the show?
Justin: Um… (Pauses.) I took two shots. (Laughs.) If we want to get technical, let’s get technical.
Wigler: You’re a bartender. Does that lend itself well to what’s ahead?
Justin: Most definitely. Meeting different groups of people and different kinds of people from all aspects of life, you always have to be able to blend into their situation, if you want to make a tip or if you want to make a sale. I just got my real estate license, too, so I’m also a realtor. If you want to go further with people, you have to learn how to mold yourself and be friends with these people and learn how to adapt and go with the flow.
Editor’s Note: Justin’s bio has been updated since this interview. His occupation has changed from “bartender” to “real estate agent.”
Wigler: I have your bio in front of me, and you describe your mother as your inspiration in life. Can you tell me more about her, and what you’re taking from her as you embark on Survivor?
Justin: Definitely strength, and a lot of wisdom. She’s had eleven brain aneurisms. She’s gone through nine or ten multiple surgeries… I can’t even remember how many because there have been so many. Through thick and thin, no matter what, she pulls through and refuses to give up. These are hard things to go through, and she’s pushing through everything she can go through. And she got a divorce on top of that. She’s trying to get back on her feet. It’s beautiful to see her not give up. Most people would just give up.
Wigler: You’re a physically active guy. Is that aspect of the show, the physicality of it, one of the big draws for you?
Justin: I would definitely say yes. Watching the challenges, I’ve always been intrigued. Dude, I’m a very competitive person as it is. If you want the numbers of my friends, I’ll give them to you, because they’ll definitely agree with me. (Laughs.) They get pissed, because I hate losing.
Wigler: Well, this is a game where even the winner loses sometimes. How are you going to handle that? Let’s say your tribe loses a challenge. Are you losing your temper, or can you keep your cool?
Justin: In all honesty, I’ll probably just start to cry. (Laughs.) No, man. There’s always someone better and stronger and faster than you. There are a million people in this world who are ten times better than me at anything. You have to just go with the flow. And some challenges, you can’t win them all, otherwise I’m going to get a huge target on my back and the next thing I know, I’m out.
Wigler: You say the contestants you’re most like are Russell and Woo. Those two cannot be further apart in my mind in terms of gameplay, so talk me through how this works.
Justin: Woo, because he’s a very laid back dude. He’s kind of like Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee is one of my inspirations. He’s go-with-the-flow, see what happens and mold yourself to what comes to you. And Russell Hantz, he’s more of a guy who goes out there and he’ll do what he has to do: “I gotta find these idols, I gotta be strategic, I gotta work hard, I can’t take no s— from nobody. I gotta do what I gotta do.” I would say I’m a mixture of both. It’s like I’m schizophrenic. (Laughs.) I’m ready to work hard and bust my ass to do what I need to do to a certain point, but you also need to know — and Russell didn’t have this — when to Woo out, when to just chill out and Woo down.
Wigler: Following the Russell thing further, are you planning on going out there and being aggressive in looking for idols?
Justin: I’m always going to have an eye out, looking for idols. If Russell Hantz can find two or three in one season, then I have to try and find four or five. You can’t be noticed. You can’t be like Tai and get caught midway through. I’m going to go out there focused, looking for idols when I need to look for idols, when I have the opportunity, and also learn how to play the game and mold with people so I can have a good alliance and go further in the game — not just because of idols, but because people want to take me along.
Wigler: And who are you hoping to work with? What kinds of people are you hoping to see out there?
Justin: Honestly, everyone would say people who are trustworthy and loyal, because that makes life easy. But I want to see hardworking people. People who don’t want to give up. “Oh, I lost, so I’m just going to give up, and that’s it.” I don’t like that. I don’t like people who sit back, relax, and wait for things to be handed to them. You have to go out there and you have to make things happen for you. You can’t sit on your ass.
Wigler: You describe yourself as mentally strong, and that you’ll push your body to any limit it has to go. Are we going to see you passing out in the middle of a challenge, then?
Justin: Uh, no. Because my body’s not going to do that. (Laughs.) The thing is with Caleb, this was definitely a big thing when he passed out, because he’s a fit dude and ripped — but I don’t think the team really thought it through. They weren’t fighting for immunity. They were fighting for salt and pepper.
Wigler: Listen, salt and pepper might be a really big deal out there. You don’t know yet!
Justin: Well, salt in my life? I don’t eat salt, so I’m good. I don’t cook with it. So I’m happy trying to cruise. Obviously, you want to win the challenges. You want to fight. But you have to be strategic. You can’t put the whole team on your back and expect you’re not going to pass out, because it’s hot out there. It’s a different environment.
Wigler: You describe yourself as “a flirtatious, outgoing, good looking guy.” Are we going to see the flirt card come out?
Justin: Oh, for sure. (Big laugh.) There’s some chicks here I’ll definitely flirt with, and dudes too. I don’t mind.
Wigler: Have you seen any of the other players yet? I know you’re on lockdown and can’t speak to them yet, but…
Justin: I’ve seen two chicks, who are definitely good looking. There’s this one huge blond dude who looks like the Hulk. He’s definitely an attractive dude; the first time I saw him, he had an iPhone watch and a suit, so who wouldn’t want to be with that guy? (Laughs.) But I’m into girls, so, make sure to write that down.
Wigler: It’s in the transcript.
Justin: Good, good.
Wigler: Overall, feeling confident?
Justin: I’m just super excited. I feel so blessed from the universe to get this opportunity to go and experience something that not really anyone gets to experience. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for me, so I’m feeling super confident and super ready to go. I’m looking forward to being myself and seeing how far I can go.
Wigler: Are you good with this, win or lose? As long as you have a good experience out there, are you happy?
Justin: I’m definitely going to be happy with the experience, but there is no lose. I won. I already won. If you want to write that down somewhere and sign it, I promise you, it’s going to happen.
Check back every day for another Survivor 33 pre-game interview.
NEXT: Rachel Ako
PREVIOUSLY: Jessica “Figgy” Figueroa
Josh Wigler is a writer, editor and podcaster who has been published by MTV News, New York Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Comic Book Resources and more. He is the co-author of The Evolution of Strategy: 30 Seasons of Survivor, an audiobook chronicling the reality TV show’s transformation, and one of the hosts of Post Show Recaps, a podcast about film and television. Follow Josh on Twitter @roundhoward.
Survivor: Millennials vs Gen X premieres on September 21.
Continue to the next page to read Justin’s bio.Recently a friend of mine told me that she thinks she is sensitive to Hyaluronic acid, and asked me if I knew any kbeauty products without hyaluronic acid and alcohol. So I started searching for the products without those ingredients and decided to make a post with list of products. There will be a series of posts without HA and alcohol and this post is dedicated to hydrating toners. You can find the list for essences and serums here.
1. Sidmool Calendula Spray Toner:
This toner is specially formulated for sensitive skin people. It is formulated with minimum ingredients and contains 47% Calendula Officinalis flower extract which has great anti inflammatory and healing properties. It comes in a spray bottle which is very convenient to use.
Ingredients:
Calendula Officinalis Flower Extract (47%), Water, Propanediol, Glycerin, Lonicera Japonica (Honey Suckle) Flower Extract, Zanthoxylum Piperitum Fruit Extract, Pulsatilla Koreana Extract, Citrus Paradisi Fruit Extract
Available at Gmarket
2. Innisfree Green Tea Balancing Skin:
In Korean beauty, toners are usually referred as skin. This toner from Innisfree is for combination skin, and contains 86.9% Green Tea extract.
Ingredients:
Camellia Sinensis Leaf Extract(86.9% Green Tea), Propanediol, Glycereth-26, Hydrogenated polyisobutene, Butylene Glycol, Betaine, Camellia Japonica Leaf Extract(Japanese Camellia), Orchid Extract(Orchid), Citrus Unshiu Peel Extract(Satsuma Orange), Opuntia Coccinellifera Fruit Extract(Opuntia), Citrus Paradisi Fruit Extract(Grapefruit), Citrus Aurantium Dulcis Fruit Extract(Orange), Citrus Tangerina Extract(Tangerine), Citrus Aurantium Bergamia Fruit Extract(Bergamot), Ethylhexylglycerin, Glyceryl caprylate, Glycerin, Behenyl Alcohol, Ammonium Acryloyldimethyltaurate/ VP Copolymer, Carbomer, Tromethamine, Disodium EDTA, Fragrance
Available at Roseroseshop
3. Innisfree Green Persimmon Pore Toner:
A pore-treatment toner that contains pure Jeju green persimmon and clove flower extract to moisturize the skin and control sebum. It is alcohol free and has pH value of 5.5.
Ingredients:
Water, Butylene Glycol, Diospyros Kaki Fruit Extract(Persimmon), Salix Alba Bark Extract(Willow), Eugenia Caryophyllus Flower Extract(Clove), Camellia Japonica Leaf Extract(Japanese Camellia), Orchid Extract, Opuntia Coccinellifera Fruit Extract(Prickly Pear), Citrus Unshiu Peel Extract(Satsuma Mandarin), Camellia Sinensis Leaf Extract(Green Tea), Polysorbate 20, Propanediol, Glyceryl caprylate, Ethylhexylglycerin, Disodium EDTA, PEG-60 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Fragrance
Available at Roseroseshop
4. Labno Cherry Blossom Amino Toner:
This toner is formulated with EWG green grade ingredients. It contains Cherry blossom extract to make skin radiant and arginine to prevent dryness of the skin.
Ingredients:
Water, Methylpropanediol, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Prunus Serrulata Flower Extract, Propanediol, Niacinamide, Glycereth-26, Portulaca Oleracea Extract, Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Juice, Trehalose, Camellia Japonica Flower Extract, Acer Saccharum Extract, Rose Extract, Soluble collagen, Octyldodeceth-16, C12-14 pareth-12, Allantoin, Phenethyl alcohol, Butylene Glycol, Arginine, Ceramide NP, Elastin
Available at Gmarket
5. Apieu Madecassoside Fluid:
The key ingredient in this product is Madecassoside which helps to repair damaged skin, and strengthens skin barrier.
Ingredients:
Water, Centella asiatica Leaf water, Glycerin, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Niacinamide, Bis-PEG-18 Methyl Ether Dimethyl Silane, Madecassoside, Dioscorea Japonica Root Extract, Ceramide NP, Adenosine, Glycereth-26, PEG/PPG-17/6 copolymer, PEG-60 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Styrene/VP Copolymer, Tromethamine, Butylene Glycol, Acrylates/ C10-30 alkyl acrylate crosspolymer, Allantoin, Carbomer, Propylene Glycol, Hydrolyzed corn starch, Beta-Glucan, Asiaticoside, Citrus Grandis Peel Oil, Sucrose, PVM/ma copolymer, Lemon Peel Oil, Sodium Polyacrylate, Hydrogenated lecithin, Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride, Lavandula Hybrida Oil, Pelargonium Graveolens Flower Oil, Citrus Nobilis Peel Oil, Juniperus Mexicana Oil, Disodium EDTA, Chlorphenesin
Available at Jolse
6. Missha Near Skin Simple Therapy Mist Toner:
This toner contains simple and minimum ingredients which is suitable for sensitive skin types and provides mositure to the skin.
Ingredients:
Water, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Butylene Glycol, Chondrus Crispus Extract, Saccharum Officinarum Extract, Peucedanum graveloens Extract, Caprylyl Glycol, Tromethamine, Carbomer
Available at Jolse
7. TONYMOLY The Black Tea London Classic Toner:
This toner contains premium black tea extract which provide moisture to the skin and improves elasticity.
Ingredients:
Camellia Sinensis Leaf Extract, Glycereth-26, Dipropylene glycol, Water, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Niacinamide, Helianthus Annuus Seed Oil, Citrus Aurantium Bergamia Fruit Oil, Melaleuca alternifolia leaf oil, Biosaccharide Gum-1, Theobroma Cacao Extract, C12-14 pareth-12, Trehalose, Hydrolyzed Jojoba Esters, Hydroxyethyl Acrylate/Sodium Acryloyldimethyl Taurate Copolymer, Cyclomethicone, Acrylates/C10-30 alkyl acrylate crosspolymer, Tromethamine, Adenosine, Glycerin, Phenyl Trimethicone, Dextrin, Disodium EDTA, Glyceryl caprylate
Available at Jolse
8. Scinic Coconut Moist Toner:
This toner from Scinic contains 10% coconut water and 0.01 ppm of extra virgin coconut oil to provide deep moisture to the skin.
Ingredients:
Water, Cocos Nucifera Water, Glycerin, Butylene Glycol, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Polyglyceryl-10 laurate, Carbomer, Arginine, Hydroxyacetophenone, Chlorphenesin, Styrene/VP Copolymer, Disodium EDTA, Cocos Nucifera Oil, Fragance
Available at 11street.my
9. SKINRX LAB Madecera Essence Toner:
This toner contains madecassoside and ceramide which helps to soothe, repair, and gives moisture to the skin.
Ingredients:
Water, Dipropylene glycol, Butylene Glycol, Niacinamide, Betaine, Lactobacillus ferment, Curcuma Longa Root Extract, Biosaccharide Gum-1, Dimethicone, Dimethicone/PEG-10/15 Crosspolymer, Lauryl PEG-9 Polydimethylsiloxyethyl Dimethicone, Dimethicone/Vinyl Dimethicone Crosspolymer, Cyclopentasiloxane, Polyquaternium-51, Ceramide NP, Hydrogenated lecithin, PEG-10 Rapeseed Sterol, Glyceryl Stearate, Glycereth-20, Xanthan Gum, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Phenoxyethanol, Tromethamine, Hydroxy Ethyl Cellulose, Asiaticoside, Madecassic acid, Asiatic acid, Madecassoside
Available at MochiBeaute
10. The Face shop Dr. Belmeur Daily Repair Toner:
This toner is targeted for sensitive skin people which helps to soothe and hydrate skin.
Ingredients:
Water, Dipropylene glycol, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Propanediol, Glycerin, Panthenol, Betula Alba Juice, Corchorus Olitorius Leaf Extract, Monarda Didyma Leaf Extract, Salvia Officinalis Leaf Extract, Phytosphingosine, Beta-Glucan, Hydroxyethylcellulose, Carbomer, PEG-40 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Octyldodeceth-16, Tromethamine, Trisodium EDTA, Ethylhexylglycerin, Fragance
Available at Roseroseshop
11. Huxley Extract It Toner:
A hydrating and boosting antioxidant powered toner infused with Sahara Cactus extract to balance and prep skin for treatment.
Ingredients:
Opuntia Ficus-indica Stem Extract, Propanediol, Dipropylene glycol, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Opuntia ficus-indica seed Oil, Lagerstroemia Indica Flower Extract, Rosa Centifolia Flower Extract, PEG-60 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Xanthan Gum, Butylene Glycol, Ethylhexylglycerin, Water, Disodium EDTA, Phenoxyethanol, Fragrance
Available at Glowrecipe
12. Banila co Miss Flower Mr Honey Toner:
This toner from banila co hydrates and nourishes the skin with the help of 3 honey extracts — pure honey, royal jelly and propolis. This toner is enhanced with Aureobadisium Pullulans Ferment and Honey Water to keep the skin sleek and smooth.
Ingredients:
Water, Glycerin, PEG/PPG-17/6 copolymer, Pentylene Glycol, Niacinamide, Butylene Glycol, Ethylhexyl Palmitate, Biosaccharide Gum-1, Hydrolyzed collagen, Aureobasidium Pullulans Ferment, Propolis Extract, Royal Jelly Extract, Calendula Officinalis Flower Extract, Anthemis Nobilis Flower Water, Honey, Oenothera Biennis Flower Extract, Sorbitol, Cetyl Ethylhexanoate, Polyglyceryl-10 oleate, Acrylates/ C10-30 alkyl acrylate crosspolymer, Tromethamine, PPG-26-Buteth-26, Hydrogenated lecithin, Adenosine, PEG-40 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Benzophenone-5, Disodium EDTA, Phenoxyethanol, Chlorphenesin, Caprylyl Glycol, Ethylhexylglycerin, CI 19140, Fragrance
Available at Koreadepart
13. 9wishes Rice 72% White Lucent Toner:
This toner contains 72% rice bran water which helps to make skin radiant and moist and keeps skin hydrated all day.
Ingredients:
Oryza Sativa Bran Water, Butylene Glycol, Water, Niacinamide, PEG/PPG-17/6 copolymer, Squalane, Arbutin, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Caprylyl Glycol, Aspergillus/Rice Ferment Extract, Hydrolyzed collagen, Sorbitan Sesquinoleate, Coceth-7, PPG-1-PEG-9 LAURYL GLYCOL ETHER, PEG-40 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Sodium Polyacrylate, Glycine, Glutamic Acid, Serine, Aspartic acid, Leucine, Alanine, Lysine, Arginine, Tyrosine, Phenylalanine, Threonine, Proline, Valine, Isoleucine, Histidine, Methicone, Cysteine, Magnolia Biondii Bark Extract, Propolis Extract, Camellia Sinensis Leaf Extract, Thujopsis Dolabrata Branch Extract, Citrus Paradisi Fruit Extract, Chamomilla Recutita Flower/leaf Extract, Salix Alba Bark Extract, Oryza Sativa Bran Extract, Fragrance
Available at Koreadepart
14. HANYUL Pure Artemisia Watery Calming Toner:
This toner contains Mugwort extracts which has great soothing and anti inflammatory properties. The watery texture of this toner absorbs instantly into the skin without leaving any stickiness.
Ingredients:
Water, Propanediol, Glycerin, PEG-6 caprylic/ capric glycerides, Artemisia Princeps Leaf Water, Angelica Acutiloba Root Extract, Cnidium Officinale Root Extract, Glucose, Lysine, Lecithin, Magnesium chloride, Mannose, Prunus Persica Leaf Extract, Xylose, Hydrolyzed Millet, Histidine, Potassium chloride, Calcium chloride, Copper Tripeptide-1, Arginine, Sodium chloride, Sodium phosphate, Potassium phosphate, Fucose, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Butylene Glycol, Ethylhexylglycerin, Disodium EDTA, Phenoxyethanol, Fragrance
Available at Beautyboxkorea
15. Nooni deep sea water from the east sea:
This toner contains mineral and nutrient rich sea water and provides deep moisture to the skin.
Ingredients:
Seawater, Glycerin, Isohexadecane, Hydrogenated poly(C6-C14 Olefin), Cyclopentasiloxane, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Centella Asiatica Extract, Ficus Carica Fruit Extract, Monascus Extract, Hydrogenated lecithin, Camellia Sinensis Seed Oil, Camellia Japonica Seed Oil, Macadamia Ternifolia Seed Oil, Argania spinosa Kernel Oil, Olea Europaea Fruit Oil, Helianthus Annuus Seed Oil, Simmondsia Chinensis Seed Oil, Sodium chloride, Caprylyl/capryl glucoside, Ethylhexylglycerin, Disodium EDTA, Ceramide NP, Fragrance
Available at Gmarket
16. Sidmool Madagascar Centella Asiatica Skin:
This additive free toner contains 97% Centella asiatica extract to soothe and repair damaged skin and strengthens skin barrier.
Ingredients:
Centella Asiatica Extract (97%), Butylene Glycol, Asiaticoside, Asiatic Acid, Madecassic Acid, Madecassoside, Allantoin, Dipotassium Glycyrrhizate, Paeonia Suffruticosa Root Extract, Scutellaria Baicalensis Root Extract
Available at Gmarket
17. So natural 92.8% Plant Sprouting Toner:
This toner contains wheat sprout extract that helps to make skin soft and smooth.
Ingredients:
Triticum Vulgare Sprout Extract, 1, 2-Hexanediol, Butylene Glycol, Water, C12-14 pareth-12, Hydrolyzed Jojoba Esters, Glycine Soja Seed Extract, Avena Sativa Kernel Extract, Olive Fruit Oil, Citrus Medica Vulgaris Peel Oil, Rosemary Leaf Oil, Fennel Oil, Galbanum Resin Oil, Carum Carvi Seed Oil, Artemisia Vulgaris Oil, Daucus Carota Sativa Seed Oil, Carbomer, Caprylyl Glycol, Ethylhexylglycerin, Arginine, Disodium EDTA
Available at sonatutal.co.kr
This is not a complete list of toners without sodium hyaluronate and alcohol. This is just a list of products that I found so far. And the next post will be dedicated to essences and serums. So stay tuned.
I love making lists 😀
So if you are looking for products with specific ingredients, please let me know in the comments. I will try my best to create a list.
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Disclaimer: All the images in this post belong to the respective brands.Before he broke his back in a 1980s accident that ultimately triggered years of chronic pain, Jay Lawrence had to make a split-second decision. He was on a bridge with a car in front of him and the brakes on his truck had failed. "He saw a baby seat in the car and he hit the bridge," says his widow, Meredith Lawrence. She lost her husband to suicide earlier this year after his doctor abruptly decided to cut down his opioid pain medication.
"He had this great big personality," she says, describing how Jay loved to be around people and constantly insisted on helping her, even when he was in severe pain.
But in March, Jay Lawrence shot himself with a gun that he insisted she purchase for him. He was 58. They were together in a park in Tennessee, near where, just two years earlier, they had renewed their wedding vows. When he died, Meredith was holding his hand. Afterwards, she called the police and was arrested for assisting a suicide (she's now on probation).
Jay had warned his wife that there might come a day when the pain became too much for him. He'd had three back surgeries, countless steroid shots and nerve blocks, an electrical stimulator, a morphine pump, and several different types of prescription and non-prescription pain medications. He'd become resigned to the fact that he wasn't going to regain function, but on good days he could make Meredith coffee before she went to work and help tend to their menagerie of nine cats and two dogs.
Then, in February, his doctor decided he would no longer prescribe the dosage of opioids that allowed Jay this small modicum of function. Since the introduction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidelines for opioid prescribing in 2016, physicians who have chronic pain patients on doses higher than the equivalent of 90 milligrams of morphine a day are under increasing scrutiny, by both civil and criminal authorities.
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Though Jay had not misused the drugs or shown any signs of trouble, he was told that his dose would immediately be cut from 120 milligrams of morphine to 90 and would drop again within two weeks. "I will not do this," Meredith says he told her. And so, when she couldn't find another doctor for him and saw that his mind was absolutely made up, she agreed to help. "He was the most stubborn person I ever met," she says.
"It was either that or I would come home and find him," she says, adding that she didn't want that to be her last memory of him and certainly did not want him to die by himself.
"This would not have happened if they'd just left him alone," she says.
Unfortunately, Jay is far from alone in being subjected to an involuntary opioid dose reduction. Since the guidelines were rolled out, 70 percent of more than 3,000 chronic pain patients who participated in an online survey by Pain News Network reported that doctors had either reduced or simply cut off their medications.
And Jay is also far from the only person to have taken their life in response: several dozen similar cases have been documented by a growing and furious group of pain patient advocates and doctors (who are not funded by pharmaceutical companies), and who are starting to organize in the aftermath of the crackdown.
The stories are nearly unbearable to read: descriptions of various forms of intense agony, mitigated to some extent with medication, which is then stopped regardless of the patients' pleas. And then, death: often by shooting, sometimes by overdose.
"I've seen a published list that heavily emphasizes publicly reported events, which includes between 20 and 30 suicides," says Stefan Kertesz, associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Alabama, who is trying to raise alarm over the problem with the CDC and other health authorities. Kertesz says he receives numerous emails and social media posts from patients who are suffering and thinks the government needs to fund research to specifically track the outcomes of these patients. "Widespread suicidal ideation should be seen as a signal of a major risk," he says.
Although the guidelines were intended to be voluntary and to apply only to general practitioners—not pain specialists—they've been widely interpreted as a mandate. Doctors who have patients on doses that exceed the guidelines receive letters from insurers and medical boards suggesting that they cut back; state Medicaid policies have been implemented that actually do mandate a maximum legal opioid dose and pharmacies like CVS are imposing their own limits on what they will dispense. The National Committee for Quality Insurance will now rate healthcare organizations on whether they keep doses below the limit—despite a protest letter signed by multiple experts involved in developing the CDC guidelines.
All of this is occurring despite wide individual variation in opioid metabolism (meaning a high dose for one patient will be a low dose for another), tolerance (over time, higher doses can become necessary), pain condition (again, immensely variable) and a complete lack of research showing that forcibly lowering opioid dose is safe or effective.
"It remains the case that there is no evidence that mandated prescribing reduction results in better outcomes for patients," say Kertesz. While some data suggests that some patients improve with voluntary dose reductions—higher doses may sometimes paradoxically increase pain, a phenomenon known as hyperalgesia—none shows that forcible tapers do more good than harm in pain care. A recent study in the The International Journal of Drug Policy found that there was no reduction in addiction rates, either.
"A gradual taper is something every patient on high-dose opioids for chronic pain should be encouraged to do, and doctors owe it to these patients to explain why a taper makes sense," says David Juurlink, professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, who is a major proponent of decreasing the use of opioids for chronic pain. However, he says, "As much as high-dose opioid therapy is a bad idea, tapering abruptly without the patient's buy-in makes things worse. I discourage the practice at every opportunity."
Juurlink says he would never cut opioid dosage as abruptly as was done in Jay's case. "I would not take someone from 120 to 90 in two weeks, unless he a) really wanted to, and, critically, b) understood that it might be tough, and that I'd take him back up to 120 if things got bad and we'd go more slowly next time."
In the climate of fear induced by the opioid crisis, however, doctors are focused on self-preservation. Patients report coming into doctor's offices and seeing signs advising them that medication doses are being dropped, for everyone, no exceptions. "The popular discourse presents opioids as lethal and physicians as no better than heroin dealers," says Kertesz, "The result of this is that no public authority has been willing to articulate a safe harbor for physicians to protect their patients who need opioids."
These patients need exactly that: some kind of certificate or validation that their doctors are permitted to prescribe for them and they are patients in good standing. The CDC also needs to make a public statement saying that its guidelines cannot be used to prosecute doctors who prescribe higher doses in good faith.
The goal of lowering dosage is supposed to be to protect patients from the overdose death risk associated with high doses. But lowering numbers on a chart isn't saving lives—and some of these patients could even be overdosing because they've had a dose reduction, or fear one.
"Jay said that people need to
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to the researchers, the overall rate of mortality in Iraq since March 2003 is 13.3 deaths per 1,000 persons per year compared to 5.5 deaths per 1,000 persons per year prior to March 2003. This amounts to about 2.5 percent of Iraqi’s population having died as a consequence of the war. To put the 654,000 deaths in context with other conflicts, the authors note that during the Vietnam War an estimated 3 million civilians died overall; the Congo conflict was responsible for 3.8 million deaths; and recent estimates are that 200,000 have died in Darfur over the past 31 months.
“Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey” was written by Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy and Les Roberts.
Funding for the study was provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Johns Hopkins Center for Refugee and Disaster Response.
Public Affairs media contacts for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Tim Parsons or Kenna Lowe at 410-955-6878 or [email protected].
Response to the Wall Street Journal's October 18, 2006 opinion article by Steven E. Moore(AP) A 22-year-old Kearns man is behind bars after police say he left a fake bomb outside an elementary school last year.
Prosecutors say in charges that as a prank, Parris wrote the words "bomb" ''boom" and "touch sensitive" in black marker on a box and left the box outside Oquirrh Hills Elementary School in August 2015.
Students were evacuated from the school and a bomb squad was called.
The Salt Lake Tribune reports Cody Lynn Parris was charged last week with using a hoax weapon of mass destruction after police linked his fingerprints to the box.
Parris does not yet have an attorney but court documents say he confessed to police.
Granite School District spokesman Ben Horsley says a 17-year-old boy who was also involved faces a similar charge in juvenile court.You would think moonbats would be moved to maudlin tears by the story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which decries bullying and champions Rudolph, the minority of one, who turns out to be of special value due to what had been seen as his freakishness. Instead, we get tears of rage. It seems a theatrical version of the tale is not up to date regarding ideological requirements. NewsBusters quotes Laurel Graeber of the New York Times:
The show, at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, begins in Santa’s homeland, which appears to be not only frozen in atmosphere but also frozen in time. Based on the 1964 animated television special and a subsequent theatrical staging directed and conceived by Jeff Frank and First Stage, this “Rudolph” features elf boys in blue, elf girls in pink. The lyrics about Christmas toys specify “a scooter for Jimmy, a dolly for Sue.” And when an adolescent Rudolph arrives at the Reindeer Games, the coach, Comet (same dude from “A Visit From St. Nicholas”), growls, “My job is to make bucks out of you.” As for does, they apparently can’t compete.
Rudolph is played by a woman, but that isn’t enough to please a high priestess of political correctness like Ms. Graeber. Nothing could ever be enough.
She barks that “you can’t help being disappointed that this show championing equality still denies it to half the population.” If they made all the reindeer women, she would bark that they should be African. If they made the reindeer African, she would bark that they should be transsexuals.
Critical theory entails corroding the established culture by relentlessly criticizing every conceivable aspect of it on the grounds that it supposedly oppresses someone. The Frankfort School would be proud of the way the New York Times carries its mission forward, bravely marching deep into self-parody in order to undermine all things American.
Plus, Santa Claus is a patriarch.
On a tip from TCS III.You could see what the Giants were trying to do to Cam Newton on Sunday. From the very first play of the game, the plan was to blitz him as much as possible, get him on the ground, and try to knock him out of his rhythm. In some ways the plan, which has worked before, was a success—Newton was sacked three times and hit six times, and grimaced in pain after taking shots to his knee and shoulder. And yet, there’s Newton’s sparkling entry in the box score: 340 passing yards, five touchdowns, and 100 yards rushing. No one has ever seen a performance like this:
There’s been a lot of talk this season about Cam Newton’s growth as a player. He started the year off as essentially the same often electric and often shaky quarterback he’s always been, but he’s reached another level during this back half of the season—he’s tossed 24 touchdown passes and just three interceptions in his last eight games—and yesterday’s game was a particularly big step forward. The Giants were in his face all game, and Newton responded by carving them up with exactly the kind of quick-fire attack we’re used to seeing Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers roll over defenses with. He was in control all game, and even when the Giants reversed the course of the blowout and tied the game at 35 in the fourth quarter, he remained in control. Here’s how he reacted on the sideline after Odell Beckham Jr. tied the game with under two minutes to play:
The drive that followed oozed with even more confidence than the head nod. He went 3-of-4 for 37 yards through the air, and put the team in field-goal range with a heady 10-yard scramble. This was a game that had been falling apart in the Panthers’ hands just a few minutes prior, and suddenly Newton was out there winning it as if doing so was the easiest thing in the world.
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Earlier this season, I wrote about how Newton was so fun to watch because even his bad games always managed to contain pockets of undeniable brilliance. Now, that brilliance never seems to go away, and Newton is just as imperious and unflappable as any of the square-jawed leaders we’ve seen popped out of the Franchise Quarterback Mold. Newton’s ownership of the position evolved in its own particular way, but it’s just as real as anyone else’s.
Photo via GettyAmericans play football with their hands and measure height in feet and inches. Now we can add to the list of ways in which we are outliers: Americans shop for groceries differently from the rest of the world.
The above chart comes courtesy of the market research firm Nielsen. As we see, Americans' (actually North Americans') grocery buying habits stand out. While most of the world tends to make regular trips to shops and grocery stores to grab a few items, North Americans' typical grocery trip ends with a car full of groceries to feed a family for a week. The report attributes this to high gas prices and the prevalence of "hypermarkets" like Walmart and Stop & Shop, which incentivize people to make a few strategic trips, as well as the availability of storage and refrigerator space in American households.
Europeans also stock up and make fewer trips, but less so than in North America. Europe has high gas prices and one stop shops like Carrefour, but it remains common to make multiple trips - one day to the grocery store, another day to the baker, and yet again to the butcher.
People in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America are much more likely to shop daily for their immediate needs, rather than stockpiling groceries at home. (This won't surprise those used to the street food scene of many countries, in Asia in particular.) Nielsen credits the difference in grocery buying behavior to "the structure of trade, household size and refrigeration availability around the world."
Nielsen's report is available here.
To get occasional notifications when we write blog posts, sign up for our email list.THE Afghanistan government appears to be scaling back its support for women's rights to advance peace talks with the Taliban ahead of the withdrawal of foreign troops, Afghan lawmakers and human-rights activists have warned.
A government-appointed council of 150 leading Muslim clerics last week urged the strict application of a conservative and literalist interpretation of Islamic law regarding women.
The council said Afghan law should require women to wear the veil and forbid them from mixing with men in the work place or traveling without a male chaperone.
"Men are fundamental and women are secondary," the Ulama Council said in a statement on Friday, according to a translation by the Afghanistan Analysts Network.
President Hamid Karzai published the statement on his website, fueling speculation that he backed the conservative clerics' position.
The Ulama Council's recommendations also included a number of other declarations that seemed to support Karzai's political positions, including backing peace talks with the Taliban and urging the handover of US-controlled prisons to Afghan government supervision.
"This is a political statement; this is not an Islamic statement," said Shukria Barakzai, a female lawmaker from the capital, Kabul.
The council's positions are relatively standard orthodox interpretations of Islamic law, similar to those that would be issued by mainstream Muslim clerics throughout the Islamic world.
But such positions would mark a significant step backwards for women in Afghanistan were they to be enshrined in Afghan law.
They also come at a particularly jittery moment in Afghanistan.
The US and its allies are set to pull most of their troops from the country by 2014.
The US and Mr Karzai both say they are intent on pushing forward with peace talks with the Taliban - a movement that has a long history of oppressing women - although US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has pledged that the peace outreach won't mean backsliding on advances in women's rights.
Women's rights advocates fear that any compromise with the Taliban as part of a peace deal could undercut gains they have made in the past decade, including the right to vote, hold public office and get an education.
"The future of women's rights in Afghanistan is more unpredictable that at any stage over the last 10 years," the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization concluded in a report published on Tuesday.
"Most of women's important achievements over the last decade are likely to be reversed."
Mr Karzai told a news conference that he supported the Ulama Council's statements, but said such recommendations would actually strengthen the status of women's rights in Afghanistan.
"They declared the values of Islam and the principles for how to strengthen the position of women in accordance with Sharia," he said.
Originally published as Afghan women's rights may be lostAmy Poehler and Will Arnett are calling it quits.
The comedic stars, who wed in August 2003, are ending their marriage, a rep for both actors confirms to PEOPLE.
The pair have seen happier times.
In 2005, the Parks and Recreation star, 40, told PEOPLE, “He makes me feel very safe. You can have a lot of adventures if you have someone by your side.”
Arnett, 42, who currently stars on NBC’s Up All Night, said that he “immediately had a talent crush” on Poehler.
“The first time I saw her onstage, I said, ‘I’m gonna marry that girl,’ ” he told PEOPLE in 2009.
The couple are parents to two sons – Archie, 3½, and Abel, 2.
This marriage was the first for Poehler. Arnett was previously married to Penelope Ann Miller.Talk about an emotional finale! ‘Pretty Little Liars’ actress Lucy Hale reportedly broke up with her boyfriend of two years, Anthony Kalabretta, just a couple of weeks before the epic conclusion to her hit TV series. Read on for the details — A.
It’s a new chapter for Lucy Hale, 27! The Pretty Little Liars actress, who recently revealed that she gave up alcohol, also let go of something (or someone) else that no longer served her well. That’s right guys, Lucy and boyfriend Anthony Kalabretta are O-V-E-R after two years of dating, according to ET. Their breakup is reportedly social media official as well, as the stars both unfollowed each other and deleted a great deal of photos together. Now we have to wonder what exactly happened to the couple.
Without giving a concrete reason behind their shocking split, a friend close to the TV star told the publication that she “became a homebody when they were dating” and that she “really loved” him. Fans first got a taste of trouble in paradise in 2016, when rumors began swirling that the Hollywood hotties called it quits. Lucy actually stood up to those claims and slammed them as “false.” Unfortunately the couple only made it another year.
The timing behind Lucy and Anthony’s split is definitely interesting, considering the Pretty Little Liars series finale is only two weeks ago. Maybe the brunette beauty is trying to shed all elements of her past in order to start over fresh, which includes going on a health kick. Lucy revealed to Birdie magazine that she avoids big Hollywood parties these days and has “no interest” in alcohol anymore. She’s also trying to surround herself with “better people,” which could explain why she’s not with Anthony anymore.
HollywoodLifers, are you surprised to hear that Lucy and Anthony broke up? Tell us below!If Amazon really has put a ceiling on its growth in Seattle — as Thursday’s announcement of a second headquarters elsewhere suggests — that could limit growth in housing prices, rents and development.
Amazon has been blamed or praised — depending on your perspective — for Seattle’s historic real estate boom.
“Everyone has looked at Amazon as the harbinger” of the city’s record growth, said developer Jake McKinstry, a principal with Spectrum Development Solutions. “People have really banked on that.”
It’s easy to see why:
• The surge of well-paid Amazon employees rushing in from across the world has coincided with Seattle becoming the nation’s hottest homebuying market, with prices rising faster here than anywhere else in the country.
• As rent increases here outpace most every other U.S. city, Seattle is opening a record 9,000 new apartments this year — but Amazon alone has nearly 6,500 job openings in the city, far and away the most in the region.
• And at times, the company in recent years has taken more new office space than every other company in the city combined, helping Seattle become the crane capital of America and a near-constant construction site.
But now that the company plans to open a second, “equal” headquarters somewhere else, what does that mean for Seattle’s housing prices, rents and development boom?
In the short term, it probably won’t have much impact. Amazon already has committed to occupying 12 million square feet of office space in the city by 2022, and only two-thirds of that campus is complete.
To put that in perspective, the extra 4 million square feet of space Amazon still needs to move into is, by itself, at least four times bigger than the footprint for any other private employer in the city. Some of the new offices, apartments and shops coinciding with that expansion haven’t even begun construction yet.
But in the long run, real-estate analysts say, Amazon topping out here and growing elsewhere could slow bidding wars for homes as well as the influx of newcomers driving up rents.
And the developers planning office and apartment towers are likely to rethink their “build, build, build” mentality for projects they’re dreaming up now, especially around South Lake Union and the greater downtown region.
“This is probably welcome news for the housing market in Seattle, both on the for-sale side and the rental side,” said Svenja Gudell, chief economist for Seattle-based Zillow. “Not to say that Amazon is a full driver to those (housing price) increases, but they’re certainly contributing.”
At the same time, she cautioned that Amazon’s announcement doesn’t mean Seattle will suddenly return to its affordable status of yesteryear — more likely, prices will grow more slowly: “This is not writing on the wall that Seattle’s growth is over.”
Eric Shull, a Seattle managing broker with John L. Scott Real Estate, estimated about 10 to 20 percent of Seattle homebuyers are Amazon employees.
And his colleague Barry Matheny, who handles relocation services for the brokerage, said the number of Amazon renters is even larger.
“You’ll have a certain percentage of people who will relocate” to the second headquarters, Matheny said. “That opens up inventory. It’ll open up possibilities for people to buy homes.”
But neither Matheny nor Shull expect Thursday’s announcement to suddenly bring about a sea change in the housing market.
“It’s just different degrees of hotness,” Shull said. Even if demand drops off, the city still has an inventory shortage that is also driving up prices. “We just don’t have enough houses.”
The clearest impact will probably be on development, which continues to accelerate to record levels. Many of the new offices and apartments springing up across town are reliant on Amazon’s constant growth, and there is no company able to replace that demand, developers say.
Amazon now has more prime office space in Seattle than the next 40 biggest employers combined. It has more local job openings than all of the other region’s major employers combined.
“They are a unicorn in that respect,” said developer McKinstry.
“If they do slow down or stop their growth in Seattle, I do think it will cause the (development) market to look at Seattle a little more skeptically and pause,” he said.
He said he’s concerned about a potential luxury-apartment bubble; those units require a constant influx of well-paid newcomers to fill them.
Local developer Kevin Daniels added: “It probably signals the end to this cycle of office growth in our region from an international investor viewpoint.” Foreign interests have pumped billions of dollars into the development boom in recent years and in some cases, overseas developers have directly built projects here, partially on the strength of Amazon’s growth.
Then there’s the office market, which is likely to face headwinds, said Matthew Gardner, chief economist for Windermere Real Estate.
“They’ve been juicing the market there for several years. That is likely to start tapering,” he said. “But are we likely to see a contraction? I don’t see that happening at all.”TORONTO -- Daniel Bard the starter isn't acting or pitching like Daniel Bard the reliever, and the results aren't pretty.
Jose Bautista hit a three-run homer, rookie Drew Hutchison won for the fourth time in five starts and the Toronto Blue Jays beat Bard and the Boston Red Sox 5-1 Sunday to avoid a three-game sweep.
The Blue Jays took advantage of an erratic performance by Bard (5-6), who allowed five runs, walked six, struck out two and hit two batters in 1 2/3 innings, his shortest career start.
"Daniel just couldn't find it, obviously," Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine said. "He was hoping he was going to find a pitch or find a release point that would work for him."
In an ill-tempered game that featured four hit batters, home plate umpire Mike Winters warned both benches after Boston's Kevin Youkilis was drilled on the shoulder in the sixth. Youkilis stepped in front of the plate and yelled at Hutchison, but the situation did not escalate.
Youkilis did not speak to reporters following the game, but his manager denied talk of retaliation or bad blood.
"I didn't think any of them were intentional," Valentine said.
Still, even Valentine felt the need to go to his bullpen in the second inning after Bard hit two batters in three at-bats.
"The last thing I wanted to do was see anybody get hurt," Valentine said.
Toronto designated hitter Edwin Encarnacion, one of two Blue Jays to be hit on the hand in the second, stayed in the game to run but did not bat again when his turn came up in the fifth. He was replaced by Jeff Mathis.
X-rays on Encarnacion's hand were negative. He was listed as day-to-day with a bruise.
Bard, who has lost four straight decisions to Toronto, acknowledged that he's not the same pitcher as a starter as he was as a reliever the past three years, saying he's "constantly trying to tweak little things in (my) delivery to make the next pitch a little better than the last."
"The ability to repeat just isn't there like it has been in the past," Bard said. "If anything, it's that I allowed something to happen when I switched roles. Maybe we just tried to turn me into a starter rather than just take the same pitcher I was out there and move that guy to the rotation, which is probably what should have been done."
Bard walked the first two batters of the game before Bautista hit a homer off the facing of the second deck in left, his 14th of the season and second in two days.
Bautista's three-run drive snapped a streak of eight consecutive solo shots by Blue Jays batters.
Encarnacion followed with a four-pitch walk but Bard got David Cooper to ground into a double play, then got Brett Lawrie to fly out to center.
Things weren't much better for Bard in the second, which began with back-to-back walks followed by consecutive strikeouts. Yunel Escobar was hit on the hand to load the bases for Bautista, who drove in a run with a walk. That brought up Encarnacion, who drove in a run the painful way and was left yelping after being hit on the left hand.
That was all for Bard, with Franklin Morales coming on and ending the inning by getting Cooper to foul out to third.
Bautista's homer was the only hit allowed by Bard, who came in having won three of his previous four starts. Just 24 of his 55 pitches were for strikes, and his ERA rose from 4.56 to 5.24.
"The first couple of innings was tough," Valentine said, adding that he'll consider how to proceed with Bard during Monday's off day.
"I have some time," Valentine said. "Regretfully, it's going to have to take up an off day, but I'll think about it a while."
For his part, Bard suggested stripping things down and starting fresh.
"I think we've tried to change a few too many things," he said. "Maybe just get back to being simple."
Unlike Bard, Hutchison (5-2) was sharp and efficient, allowing one run and five hits in seven innings, matching his career-high. He walked one and struck out five.
"Hutch continues to mature right in front of us," Blue Jays manager John Farrell said. "He kept going, kept putting up zeros, kept the momentum on our side."
Kelly Shoppach provided the only Boston run, hitting a two-out homer to center in the fifth, his third.
Darren Oliver got two outs in the eighth and Francisco Cordero got the third before Casey Janssen finished in the ninth for Toronto.
Game notes
Bard's career-high in walks is seven, set April 16 against Tampa Bay. The only run Bard allowed in 6 2/3 innings that day was on a bases loaded walk to Evan Longoria.... Red Sox 2B Dustin Pedroia (right thumb) reported no pain from his batting practice session Saturday. Pedroia is expected to hit again Monday, an off-day for Boston.... Blue Jays RHP Brandon Morrow, who left Wednesday's start after being hit on the right shin by a batted ball, threw his scheduled bullpen session Sunday and remains on track to make his next start, Wednesday at Chicago against the White Sox.General circulation model outputs are rarely used directly for quantifying climate change impacts on hydrology, due to their coarse resolution and inherent bias. Bias correction methods are usually applied to correct the statistical deviations of climate model outputs from the observed data. However, the use of bias correction methods for impact studies is often disputable, due to the lack of physical basis and the bias nonstationarity of climate model outputs. With the improvement in model resolution and reliability, it is now possible to investigate the direct use of regional climate model (RCM) outputs for impact studies. This study proposes an approach to use RCM simulations directly for quantifying the hydrological impacts of climate change over North America. With this method, a hydrological model (HSAMI) is specifically calibrated using the RCM simulations at the recent past period. The change in hydrological regimes for a future period (2041–2065) over the reference (1971–1995), simulated using bias‐corrected and nonbias‐corrected simulations, is compared using mean flow, spring high flow, and summer–autumn low flow as indicators. Three RCMs driven by three different general circulation models are used to investigate the uncertainty of hydrological simulations associated with the choice of a bias‐corrected or nonbias‐corrected RCM simulation. The results indicate that the uncertainty envelope is generally watershed and indicator dependent. It is difficult to draw a firm conclusion about whether one method is better than the other. In other words, the bias correction method could bring further uncertainty to future hydrological simulations, in addition to uncertainty related to the choice of a bias correction method. This implies that the nonbias‐corrected results should be provided to end users along with the bias‐corrected ones, along with a detailed explanation of the bias correction procedure. This information would be especially helpful to assist end users in making the most informed decisions.
1 INTRODUCTION General circulation models (GCMs) are major tools that can provide future climate change information for impact studies. However, the direct application of GCM outputs for hydrological impact studies is restricted by their coarse resolutions and inherent bias, especially for medium and small watersheds (Feddersen & Andersen, 2005; J. W. Hansen, Challinor, Ines, Wheeler, & Moron, 2006; Sharma, Das Gupta, & Babel, 2007). Although significant progress has been made in recent years, GCMs are still unable to provide reliable information on scales below 200 km, especially for most hydrologically relevant variables (Maraun et al., 2010). Regional climate models (RCMs) are usually nested into GCMs to provide high‐resolution climate change information. Compared to GCMs, RCMs have considerable advantages in reproducing the mesoscale climate pattern, especially in representing the local precipitation, due to their improved representation of topographic effects (Buonomo, Jones, Huntingford, & Hannaford, 2007; Frei et al., 2003; Frei, Scholl, Fukutome, Schmidli, & Vidale, 2006). However, RCM outputs are still considerably biased when they are compared to their observed counterparts, even at the same temporal and spatial resolutions. Generally, most RCMs tend to overestimate the frequency of precipitation occurrence and the occurrence of light precipitation and to underestimate heavy and extreme precipitation (Chen, Brissette, Chaumont, & Braun, 2013a, 2013b; Fowler, Ekstrom, Blenkinsop, & Smith, 2007; Murphy, 1999). Bias correction methods have been developed to bridge gaps (resolution and bias) between climate model simulations and impact models (e.g., hydrological models). Due to their advantages in representing observed climate, various bias correction methods ranging from simple linear scaling to sophisticated distribution mapping have been developed and widely used for quantifying the climate change impact on hydrology (e.g., Chen et al., 2013a; Chen et al., 2013b; Chen, Brissette, & Leconte, 2011; Chen, Brissette, Poulin, & Leconte, 2011; Lafon, Dadson, Buys, & Prudhomme, 2012; Lizumi, Nishimori, Dairaku, Adachi, & Yokozawa, 2011; Mpelasoka & Chiew, 2009; Piani, Haerter, Coppola, 2010; Ryu, Palmer, Wiley, & Jeong, 2009; Salvi, Kannan, & Ghosh, 2011; Sharma et al., 2007; Teutschbein & Seibert, 2012). Previous studies have shown that bias correction methods are capable of improving RCM simulations in the representation of simulated hydrological regimes to some extent (e.g., Ahmed et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2013a; Muerth et al., 2013). Distribution‐based methods were observed to generally perform better than mean‐based methods (Chen et al., 2013a; Teutschbein & Seibert, 2012). The purpose of using bias correction methods for impact studies is to bring GCM/RCM simulations closer to real‐world observations. In other words, the performance of a bias correction method is usually judged based on how close the corrected simulations are to the corresponding observations for the test period. Bias correction methods generally reduce the variability among climate simulations for the calibration period, because each simulation is calibrated individually. However, all bias correction methods are based on the assumption that the biases of GCM/RCM outputs are constant over time. This assumption, however, is often questionable (Chen & Brissette, 2017; Chen et al., 2013a; Chen, Brissette, & Lucas‐Picher, 2015; Christensen, Boberg, Christensen, & Lucas‐Picher, 2008; Maraun, 2012; Maraun, 2016), especially when applying a bias correction to unconditional climatological distributions and disregarding the fact that the bias magnitude may depend on the weather types (Maraun, 2012). For example, Christensen et al. (2008) pointed out that model biases have the potential to grow alongside global warming conditions. Maraun (2012) also investigated the nonstationarity of RCM biases in European seasonal mean temperature and precipitation sums using a pseudoreality. The results indicate that future simulations could deteriorate for some regions and seasons, even though the use of bias correction methods generally reduces the biases of RCM simulations. More recently, Chen et al. (2015) showed how the difference in precipitation biases between two closely related historical periods is comparable to the climate change signal between future and historical periods over most parts of North America. When the biases of the future period are larger than those of the historical period, bias correction improves the results. Even when future biases are smaller than historical biases, the absolute remaining bias after bias correction may still be smaller than that without a correction, although the remaining bias changes sign. Bias correction only deteriorate the original future simulation when future biases reduce to less than half the calibration biases or when bias directions are different (different signs) between future and historical periods (Maraun, 2012). For example, Terink, Hurkman, Torfs, and Uijlenhoet (2010) corrected the reanalysis data for 134 subbasins of the Rhine River and found that precipitation prediction with a bias correction procedure was even worse than without using bias correction for the validation period. Muerth et al. (2013) assessed the impact of bias correction methods on simulated run‐off characteristics and found that bias correction was generally not needed to estimate the future change in hydrological indicators. Maraun (2013) also pointed out that the quantile mapping approach, when acting as a downscaling method, usually misrepresented the spatial and temporal structure of the corrected time series, especially for precipitation. For example, as a deterministic method, a high or low RCM‐simulated precipitation value is always transformed into a high or low local value by mapping the distribution. A correction of the drizzle effect usually leads to complete dryness across all gauges within a gridbox. Overall, for the historical or validation period, the bias correction method should not distance the climate simulations away from the corresponding observations. For the future period, the bias correction method should not increase the variability among climate simulations. In other words, the variability among corrected simulations should not be larger than that among the original simulations. If variability increases, it means that the bias correction method deteriorated the original future simulation. In such cases, the use of bias correction should be interpreted with caution. With the improvement in RCM resolution and reliability, RCM outputs have been attempted to be used as direct inputs to hydrological models for quantifying the climate change impacts on hydrology (e.g., Chen et al., 2013a; Chen, Brissette, & Leconte, 2011), especially for watersheds with areas larger than a climate model's resolution. Because deviations exist between RCM simulations and watershed observations, even at the same spatial and temporal resolutions, a hydrological model should be specifically calibrated to RCM simulations versus the observed discharge. The assumption behind this method is that RCM simulations are no more biased than the observations or that their slightly larger biases can be filtered out by a hydrological model through the calibration process. It is well known that the observed data also suffer from biases and, for various reasons, such as low gauge density, instrument problems, and station displacement. Previous studies (e.g., Chen & Brissette, 2017; Essou, Brissette, & Lucas‐Picher, 2017) have shown that global and regional reanalyses can be used as proxies of gauged precipitation for hydrological modelling in regions with a sparse network coverage. The performance of reanalysis is even better than gauged observations. If the hydrological model can be adequately calibrated using RCM simulations, it can be considered that modelled simulations are not more biased than their observed counterpart. It is very possible that hydrological model parameters calibrated using RCM simulations are different from those calibrated using observations. However, owe to the equifinality problem, the uncertainty associated with the choice of an optimal parameter set can be large for a hydrological model (Beven & Binley, 1992; Chen, Arsenault, & Brissette, 2017; Klepper, Scholten, & van de Kamer, 1991; van Straten & Keesman, 1991; Yapo, Gupta, & Sorooshian, 1996). In other words, although using gauged meteorological and hydrological data to calibrate a hydrological model, a single optimal parameter set may not be found during the calibration process. Calibration of a hydrological model accounts not only for structural errors but also for errors/biases in weather data inputs and streamflow time series outputs. Typically, model recalibration is performed periodically to account for additional years of data, and the calibrated parameters are assumed to be stationary in changing climatic and hydrological regimes. It is therefore reasonable to consider climate model simulations in the same way, thus requiring recalibration prior to usage. Chen and Brissette (2017) investigated the direct use of reanalysis‐driven RCM outputs for hydrological modelling by comparing bias‐corrected and nonbias‐corrected RCM simulations representing hydrological regimes over 246 watersheds in the Province of Quebec and found that raw simulations can be used directly for climate change impact studies. Bias correction delivered minor advantages when using reanalysis‐driven RCM for hydrological modelling over northern watersheds. However, this study only used the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis and RCMs driven by reanalysis (used as the boundary condition of RCM), rather than RCMs driven by GCMs. Reanalysis data sets are dynamically generated from atmospheric or coupled ocean–atmosphere models by assimilating observations. The sequence of weather event in the dynamical model follows the observed sequence. Thus, reanalysis data and reanalysis‐driven RCMs can be used to calibrate a hydrological model with respect to reproducing the daily hydrograph. However, this is not the case for GCM‐driven RCMs, because the exact sequence of weather events cannot be reproduced with GCMs, because they do not assimilate observations. The simulated weather events only correspond to a possible realization of the Earth's climate system, making the direct use of GCM‐driven RCMs more of a challenge. Furthermore, Chen and Brissette (2017) only investigated the direct use of RCM simulations for hydrological modelling over the recent past period. However, the ultimate goal is to quantify the hydrological climate change impacts for a future period. If bias‐corrected and nonbias‐corrected RCM simulations perform similarly in assessing the hydrological climate change impacts (changes and uncertainty), it can be argued that RCM data are able to be used directly for climate change impact studies. Accordingly, this study aims at investigating the potential of directly using GCM‐driven RCMs for quantifying the climate change impacts on hydrology. To achieve this goal, the relative change and the uncertainty of this change in hydrological regimes related to the choice of bias‐corrected and nonbias‐corrected RCM simulations are compared over four watersheds in North America. When using bias‐corrected simulations, a hydrological model is calibrated using the observed data set (referred to as standard calibration), whereas when using nonbias‐corrected simulations, the hydrological model is specifically calibrated using RCM simulations against the observed streamflow time series (referred to as specific calibration).
2 STUDY AREA AND DATA SET 2.1 Study area This study was conducted over four watersheds in North America (Figure 1). These four watersheds were selected from the 10 watersheds of Chen et al. (2013a). Chen et al. (2013a) showed that bias corrected methods performed reasonably well for hydrological modelling over five of the 10 watersheds studied. Due to the restriction of streamflow availability, the Nation watershed in Chen et al. (2013a) was excluded from this study. Bias correction methods failed for five other watersheds, due to their inability to specifically correct the temporal structure of daily precipitation occurrence. For those same five watersheds, the hydrological model was also unable to be accurately calibrated by directly using RCM simulations. This study was thus conducted over the other four watersheds (Manic 5, Umpqua, Yampa, and Yellowstone). Table 1 presents the basic information of all four watersheds. Their areas range between 6,791 and 26,410 km2, representing mesoscale and large‐scale watersheds over North America. The Manic‐5 watershed is located in central Quebec, Canada. It is characterized by heavy wintertime snowfall (accounting for about 40% of total precipitation) and pronounced snowmelt peaks in the spring. The other three watersheds are located in the United States. Both Yampa and Yellowstone are snow‐dominated watersheds. Even though the location of Yellowstone is much more south than Manic 5, they have a similar snowfall proportion, due to Yellowstone's mountainous location. The Yampa has much less snowfall than the
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, all of the Premier League telecasts are almost sold out for the season, Winter says.
While the audience is just a small fraction right now of the massive NFL audience, there are many, many more Premier League matches televised. This season, NBCSN will televise 150 matches, USA will televise 40 and NBC will air 25. NBCU’s USA is televising Premier League matches for the first time this season on Saturday mornings at 10 a.m. at the same time as another match on NBCSN.
Overall, across all of the networks, viewership is off to a record start after one month. According to Nielsen ratings, Premier League live match telecasts are averaging 540,000 viewers per match window, which is up 25% from this point last year.
The 10 a.m. Saturday window has increased viewership by 36% to 663,000 from 487,000 last season. Weekday afternoon matches on NBCSN are also off to a record viewership start, up 14% from last season.
In the 18-49 demo, the networks are averaging 287,000 viewers, up 6% from the same time last season, and up 22% from 2013, when the NBC networks began televising Premier League for the first time.
On the streaming side, NBC Sports Live Extra has so far garnered 63.8 million live minutes and 601,000 unique users, up 47% and 19%, respectively, from last season, and also on a record pace. And one month into the season, NBC Sports Live Extra has already recorded five of its seven most-streamed Premier League live matches ever.
Among the auto advertisers that have been regularly running commercials in the telecasts are Chevrolet, Mercedes, Lexus, Volkswagen, Toyota, Hyundai and Mini Cooper.
Winter says the higher-priced automakers, in particular, want to reach the Premier League telecasts’ audience. “The primary audience for the Premier League matches are men 35-45 with a median age of 38, who have incomes of between $85,000 and $100,000." The viewership is about 75% male and 25% female.
Other strong ad categories in the Premier League telecasts include financial services, insurance, beer and distilled spirits and fast food restaurants. Among the other advertisers are Geico, Liberty Mutual, Progressive, Kumho and Subway.
Winter says most of the advertisers are buying season-long packages and are also buying across networks and the streamed matches.
Local market ratings for all the matches last season on NBC and NBCSN were highest in Washington, D.C., New York, Columbus, Ohio, Denver, Philadelphia, Miami/West Palm Beach, Boston, Knoxville, Indianapolis, Dallas, Providence, Seattle, Albuquerque and Sacramento.
The new TV deal also gives NBC Spanish-language rights and multiple games are being shown throughout the season on Telemundo and NBC Universo, and also being streamed on the NBC Deportes En Vivo Extra app for mobile devices.
NBC paid $1 billion for its new six-year deal, up significantly from its current three-year deal, which ends after this season and cost $250 million. Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Sports Group, recently told the New York Times that NBC had not earned a profit through advertising during its current contract and that it will take some time to do so under the new contract.
However, Premier League will offer up 2,280 matches over the next six years, in addition to hours of related shoulder programming, and it is one of the mainstays of NBCSN, along with the NHL and NASCAR. And as Winter says, it gives advertisers a hard to reach, but desirable audience of upscale younger men on a consistent basis.
Winter believes there will be plenty of chance to grow the telecasts’ audience throughout this season and the next six. “There is so much momentum building for the sport of soccer and for the Premier League specifically,” he says. “This passionate fan base is starting to infiltrate into the U.S. culture.”ANOTHER TRUMP WIN=> Apple Supplier Foxconn in Discussions to Expand to US -WINNING, WINNING, WINNING!
WINNING – WINNING – WINNING!
Apple supplier Foxconn – from Taiwan – says it is in discussions to expand operations in the United States.
Zero Hedge reported:
There is over a month left until Trump’s inauguration, and the President-elect’s hard-hitting negotiating style may have scored yet another economic victory: according to a statement issued by Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and a major Apple Inc supplier, the company said it was in preliminary discussions to expand its operations in the United States.
“While the scope of the potential investment has not been determined, we will announce the details of any plans following the completion of direct discussions between our leadership and the relevant U.S. officials,” it said in a statement. Foxconn in its statement did not specify who its executives were in discussions with but said that any “plans would be made based on mutually-agreed terms.”
The news comes on the heels of what Masayoshi Son of Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp saying he would invest $50 billion in the United States and create 50,000 new jobs, a move U.S. President-elect Donald Trump claimed was a “direct result of his election win.”
As Reuters adds, Foxconn’s brief statement followed a report by broadcaster CNBC on Wednesday showing a snapshot of a page held by Son outlining the investment carrying the logos of SoftBank and Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. The page also showed an additional $7 billion investment and creation of a further 50,000 jobs.Nathan MacKinnon was the first overall pick in the 2013 NHL draft. As an 18-year-old last season, he racked up 24 goals and 63 points for the Colorado Avalanche and won the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s rookie of the year. He spent the summer training with Sidney Crosby, getting into shape, looking to dominate.
He’s still the same talented kid. In a shootout Sunday night, he skated into the slot, slowed down and stickhandled. He faked a shot and froze the goalie. He made another move, got the goalie going to his right and flipped the puck the opposite direction, just past the glove and into the net. Gorgeous. He’s 4-for-4 in shootouts this season.
Yet he has five goals and 20 points, putting him on pace for 12 goals and 49 points. He hasn’t scored in 15 straight games.
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And he’s not alone.
Colorado’s young forwards shined last season as the Avs finished third in the NHL standings. The team’s top four scorers were Matt Duchene, the third overall pick in 2009; Gabriel Landeskog, the second overall pick in 2011; Ryan O’Reilly, a second-round pick in 2009; and MacKinnon.
Now the young forwards are struggling as the Avs sit 24th in the NHL standings. The team’s top-scoring forwards are 35-year-old Alex Tanguay and 37-year-old Jarome Iginla. The 23-year-old Duchene, 22-year-old Landeskog, 23-year-old O’Reilly and 19-year-old MacKinnon are all off last season’s pace.
Everything seemed to work out for Colorado last season ''and this year it's kind of the opposite.'' (USA Today)
“I mean, all of us are kind of cold right now,” MacKinnon said. “Guys came in with some high expectations. It’s been frustrating for sure. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t. Obviously you want to produce more than we have.”
Story continues
The Avs had 112 points last season – and Patrick Roy won the Jack Adams Award as NHL coach of the year – even though they were one of the league’s worst possession teams. Skeptics said they did it because of unsustainably high shooting and save percentages. The Avs said they did it because they took high-percentage shots and allowed low-percentage shots.
Well, once again, the Avs are one of the NHL’s worst possession teams. Actually, they’re even worse as measured by Corsi (percentage of shot attempts) and Fenwick (percentage of unblocked shot attempts). And now they’re scoring fewer goals (2.99 last season, 2.46 this season) and allowing more goals (2.63 last season, 3.00 this season). They’re 12-13-8, on pace for only 79 points.
The magic is gone. They went 35-8-3 when outshot last season. They’re 6-10-6 when outshot this season.
“Last year nothing could go wrong,” MacKinnon said, “and this year it’s kind of the opposite.”
A few reasons:
— Personnel: The Avs parted with center Paul Stastny and winger P-A Parenteau. They added Iginla, winger Daniel Briere and defenseman Brad Stuart.
— Injuries: They have lost more than 175 man-games to injury. Though their top skaters have been healthy, their depth has been thinned, and goaltender Semyon Varlamov has missed at least 15 games over three stretches because of groin problems.
— The power play: While the penalty kill has improved, the power play has gone from fifth in the NHL at 19.8 percent to 25th in the NHL at 14.0 percent.
There's a number of reasons for the Avs' downfall, from goaltending to injuries to bad luck. (USA Today)
— Opponents: “Not taking away anything from us from last year,” Landeskog said. “We played well, and we had a good team. But we surprised a lot of teams, and teams really didn’t know what to expect from us. This year, I mean, they know what we’re all about. They know how we play. They scout us a lot more.”
— Luck: Duchene’s shooting percentage has increased from 10.6 to 11.4, but he’s taking fewer shots per game. Landeskog’s shooting percentage has dropped from 11.7 to 6.6, O’Reilly’s from 13.9 to 6.7, MacKinnon’s from 10.0 to 5.1.
— Stick-squeezing: “Another part of it is just confidence and key players just not having that confidence, myself included,” said Landeskog, who hasn’t scored in nine straight games. “A lot of us just haven’t been able to break loose offensively.”
— Goaltending: Varlamov was a finalist for the Vezina Trophy last season. He should have been a finalist for the Hart. Even when healthy enough to play this season, he hasn’t been nearly as good. His save percentage has dropped from.927 to.909.
Rookie Calvin Pickard has been excellent lately and has a.939 save percentage. He’s a huge reason why the Avs are 3-0-2 in their last five games despite being outshot every time. Still, Roy said if Varlamov is ready, Varlamov will start Tuesday night against the St. Louis Blues.
“Let’s not forget what Varly did for us last year,” Roy said. “I mean, Varly played so well for us. He was the reason why we had 112 points.”
The Avs still insist they can play well defensively while allowing a lot of shots, as long as they keep the shots to the outside. They have made adjustments, such as going from man-to-man to zone coverage in the defensive end.
They don’t talk about Corsi and Fenwick, but they do talk about improving their puck possession. They want to break out with control, not just chip it out, give it away and chase it again. They want to manage it better in the neutral zone. They want to sustain more pressure in the offensive end.
“It’s not just to keep the puck, but it’s to try to get the puck to some of the guys that fly, like Dutchie and MacKinnon,” Iginla said. “We have a good skating group, and we want to get them the puck in positions to put other teams on their heels.”
That’s their strength. At least it should be.
“I think that we’ve got a lot more goals in here, a lot more firepower that’s just waiting to click,” Iginla said. “I think there’s another level when guys start getting hot.”
MORE NHL COVERAGE ON YAHOO SPORTS:supernovamaniac Profile Blog Joined December 2009 United States 3002 Posts Last Edited: 2011-11-17 12:51:40 #1 This upcoming season is BROOD WAR Proleague. No mention of STARCRAFT 2 in ANY of the articles. DO NOT be stupid when posting here. If you're looking for flame war, PM me instead about how much BW sucks. We don't need flame wars in TL threads.
(Will be doing a full translation if I think its necessary in the future)
To sum it up:
-New Proleague season will be divided up into 2, half a year per. Each season has 3 rounds, and there will be total of 84 games, which means each team will play 21 matches. We will have TWO winners this season, instead of having a Grand Final.
-8 teams will participate. In this post season, 4 top teams will go into playoffs with challenge style (previously used format I guess). Semi-PO and PO will be Best out of 3, while Finals will be only one match.
-BO5 will return this season. In order to keep the new players playing in Proleague, they got rid of ACE MATCH system, so player who played in any of previous 4 sets cannot play again.
-Matches will be held at OGN on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. For Weekend, OGN will cast 2 games back to back starting 12:00 KST. On Tuesday/Wednesday, Proleague starts on 16:00 KST but only 1 match. There will be total of 6 matches per week.
-New Maps: Down to 6 from 8 because its BO5 now. Every map is new this season. Seems like we have a map similar to Holy World (Chain Reaction), successor to Outsider (Outlier), 4 player version of Medusa (Electric Circuit), and the 3rd series in the 'Ridge' series (Sniper Ridge) will be included. Seems like we also have reverse ramp style map 'Jade' along with 'Ground Zero' which might serve as successor to 'Python' and 'Fighting Spirit'
-First match is SKT T1 vs KeSPA 8th Team. It will be followed by KT Rolster vs Airforce ACE
More translations coming soon.
Source:
ONE INTERESTING NOTE: I haven't seen 'SHINHAN' Proleague ANYWHERE yet. Disclaimer:(Will be doing a full translation if I think its necessary in the future)To sum it up:-New Proleague season will be divided up into 2, half a year per. Each season has 3 rounds, and there will be total of 84 games, which means each team will play 21 matches. We will have TWO winners this season, instead of having a Grand Final.-8 teams will participate. In this post season, 4 top teams will go into playoffs with challenge style (previously used format I guess). Semi-PO and PO will be Best out of 3, while Finals will be only one match.-BO5 will return this season. In order to keep the new players playing in Proleague, they got rid of ACE MATCH system, so player who played in any of previous 4 sets cannot play again.-Matches will be held at OGN on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. For Weekend, OGN will cast 2 games back to back starting 12:00 KST. On Tuesday/Wednesday, Proleague starts on 16:00 KST but only 1 match. There will be total of 6 matches per week.-New Maps: Down to 6 from 8 because its BO5 now. Every map is new this season. Seems like we have a map similar to Holy World (Chain Reaction), successor to Outsider (Outlier), 4 player version of Medusa (Electric Circuit), and the 3rd series in the 'Ridge' series (Sniper Ridge) will be included. Seems like we also have reverse ramp style map 'Jade' along with 'Ground Zero' which might serve as successor to 'Python' and 'Fighting Spirit'-First match is SKT T1 vs KeSPA 8th Team. It will be followed by KT Rolster vs Airforce ACEMore translations coming soon.Source: http://esports.dailygame.co.kr/news/read.php?id=52205 ONE INTERESTING NOTE: I haven't seen 'SHINHAN' Proleague ANYWHERE yet. ppp
infinitestory Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United States 3708 Posts #2 What no grand final?
-_- i dont like the sound of this... Translator :3
Hyde Profile Blog Joined November 2007 Australia 14566 Posts #3 WTF no GF and two winners? What?
No Ace match too huh? woah Because when you left, Brood War was all spotlights and titans. Now, with the death of the big leagues, Brood War has moved to the basements and carparks. Now, Brood War is unlicensed brawls, lost teeth, and bloody fights for fistfulls of money - SirJolt
iLoveKT Profile Blog Joined October 2008 Philippines 3495 Posts Last Edited: 2011-11-17 05:25:58 #4 but all those tense moments where everyone is waiting on who the ace would be is now gone. good for january I guess.
edit: is there a Winners League? boo... I hate the NO ACE MATCH part. Not only because Im a KT fanbut all those tense moments where everyone is waiting on who the ace would be is now gone. good for january I guess.edit: is there a Winners League? Woo Jung Ho
sour_eraser Profile Joined March 2011 Canada 928 Posts #5 On November 17 2011 14:16 supernovamaniac wrote:
(Will be doing a full translation if I think its necessary in the future)
To sum it up:
-New Proleague season will be divided up into 2, half a year per. Each season has 3 rounds, and there will be total of 84 games, which means each team will play 21 matches. We will have TWO winners this season, instead of having a Grand Final.
-8 teams will participate. In this post season, 4 top teams will go into playoffs with challenge style (previously used format I guess). Semi-PO and PO will be Best out of 3, while Finals will be only one match.
-BO5 will return this season. In order to keep the new players playing in Proleague, they got rid of ACE MATCH system, so player who played in any of previous 4 sets cannot play again.
-Matches will be held at OGN on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. For Weekend, OGN will cast 2 games back to back starting 12:00 KST. On Tuesday/Wednesday, Proleague starts on 16:00 KST but only 1 match. There will be total of 6 matches per week.
-New Maps: Down to 6 from 8 because its BO5 now. Every map is new this season. Seems like we have a map similar to Holy World (Chain Reaction), successor to Outsider (Outlier), 4 player version of Medusa (Electric Circuit), and the 3rd series in the 'Ridge' series (Sniper Ridge) will be included. Seems like we also have reverse ramp style map 'Zaid' along with 'Ground Zero' which might serve as successor to 'Python' and 'Fighting Spirit'
-First match is SKT T1 vs KeSPA 8th Team. It will be followed by KT Rolster vs Airforce ACE
More translations coming soon.
Source: (Will be doing a full translation if I think its necessary in the future)To sum it up:-New Proleague season will be divided up into 2, half a year per. Each season has 3 rounds, and there will be total of 84 games, which means each team will play 21 matches. We will have TWO winners this season, instead of having a Grand Final.-8 teams will participate. In this post season, 4 top teams will go into playoffs with challenge style (previously used format I guess). Semi-PO and PO will be Best out of 3, while Finals will be only one match.-BO5 will return this season.-Matches will be held at OGN on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. For Weekend, OGN will cast 2 games back to back starting 12:00 KST. On Tuesday/Wednesday, Proleague starts on 16:00 KST but only 1 match. There will be total of 6 matches per week.-New Maps: Down to 6 from 8 because its BO5 now. Every map is new this season. Seems like we have a map similar to Holy World (Chain Reaction), successor to Outsider (Outlier), 4 player version of Medusa (Electric Circuit), and the 3rd series in the 'Ridge' series (Sniper Ridge) will be included. Seems like we also have reverse ramp style map 'Zaid' along with 'Ground Zero' which might serve as successor to 'Python' and 'Fighting Spirit'-First match is SKT T1 vs KeSPA 8th Team. It will be followed by KT Rolster vs Airforce ACEMore translations coming soon.Source: http://esports.dailygame.co.kr/news/read.php?id=52205
I feel happy and sad by that part. I want to see new players play, but that means I get to see Flash play less I feel happy and sad by that part. I want to see new players play, but that means I get to see Flash play less "What's the f*cking point of censoring a letter if everyone and their mother knows what it stands for.... F*cking morons"
Antoine Profile Blog Joined May 2010 United States 7344 Posts #6 -New Proleague season will be divided up into 2, half a year per. Each season has 3 rounds, and there will be total of 84 games, which means each team will play 21 matches. We will have TWO winners this season, instead of having a Grand Final.
I think it's pretty clear what this means.
I don't like the no ace match system, but if it was no ace match bo5 vs ace mach bo5 i'd probably take it. rather have ace match bo7 though.
wtb pictures of the maps! I think it's pretty clear what this means.I don't like the no ace match system, but if it was no ace match bo5 vs ace mach bo5 i'd probably take it. rather have ace match bo7 though.wtb pictures of the maps! Moderator Flash Sea Action Snow Midas | TheStC Ret Tyler MC | RIP 우정호
Kiett Profile Blog Joined March 2011 United States 5789 Posts #7 T___T why Bo5, no Ace? I feel like that's actually going to make people less likely to stay until the end, if their favorite player (Flash, Jaedong, Bisu, etc.) has already played. Writer :o
VManOfMana Profile Blog Joined December 2008 United States 764 Posts #8 It also looks like WimmersLeague is gone.
Wasn't the "two half seasons" format used in 2007 or so? Woo Jung Ho, FIGHTING! | "With the death of BW comes the death of an idea. And that idea, held by many BW fans, was that a computer game could actually outlive the Next New Game cycle. And to some extent it did." -Falling
NationInArms Profile Blog Joined December 2010 United States 1538 Posts #9 Why no Grand Finals? BW for life | Fantasy, MMA, SlayerS_Boxer | Taengoo! n_n | "Lelouch vi Britannia commands you! Obey me, subjects! OBEY ME, WORLD!" | <3 Emi
supernovamaniac Profile Blog Joined December 2009 United States 3002 Posts #10 On November 17 2011 14:25 VManOfMana wrote:
It also looks like WimmersLeague is gone.
Wasn't the "two half seasons" format used in 2007 or so?
Yes. But we don't have 'Grand Final' anymore. Yes. But we don't have 'Grand Final' anymore. ppp
amazingxkcd Profile Blog Joined September 2010 GRAND OLD AMERICA 15736 Posts #11 This hurts the rookies because teams not can't afford to save their ace players for the last match if they can lose before game 5. I want the bo7 format back and Grand Finals on the beach, yo! The world is burning and you rather be on this terrible website discussing video games and your shallow feelings
Dakkas Profile Joined October 2010 2548 Posts #12 No Grand Final? Is Kespa really against Bisu holding the Proleague trophy that badly?
Megaliskuu Profile Blog Joined October 2010 United States 5112 Posts #13
Effort can't go out and win 2 games anymore WHAT THE FUCKEffort can't go out and win 2 games anymore |BW>Everything|Add me on star2 KR server TheMuTaL.675 for practice games :)|NEX clan| https://www.dotabuff.com/players/183104694
Black[CAT] Profile Blog Joined July 2010 Malaysia 2569 Posts #14 WTF? No ACE match and not playing Bo7 is the worst!!!!!!! You mean ESPORTS isnt a synonym for SC2? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -Proud owner of a Filco Majestouch 2 with Cherry Blue Switches- BW or SC2? Why not both?
e_i_pi_1_0 Profile Joined September 2009 933 Posts Last Edited: 2011-11-17 05:32:39 #15 NO WL? NUUUUUUUUUU
I wanted to see Jaedong AKs.
Wait, Bo5 with the ACE having to be a different player? This doesn't make sense.....why not Bo7? Jaedong and Hwaseung Oz fan.
Zona Profile Blog Joined May 2007 40425 Posts #16 No ace match? No grand final?
WTF?
I'm glad that it's a bo5, though. "If you try responding to those absurd posts every day, you become more damaged. So I pay no attention to them at all." Jung Myung Hoon (aka Fantasy), as translated by Kimoleon
Lucumo Profile Joined January 2010 6220 Posts #17 Bo5 and no ace match? That makes me sad =/
Two halfs + no Grand Final isn't exactly awesome either...
Kiante Profile Blog Joined December 2009 Australia 6612 Posts #18
This really sucks no ace match, no grand final. two seasons (ie: sc2 next season).This really sucks Writer
krndandaman Profile Joined August 2009 Mozambique 8311 Posts #19 --- Nuked ---
Doraemon Profile Blog Joined January 2010 Australia 11210 Posts #20 no ace and bo5 makes me sad =[ Do yourself a favour and just STFU
1 2 3 4 5 23 24 25 Next AllIt's not hard to keep track of the news on your smartphone, as seemingly every major news organization (in the US at least) has released their own app. People who don't like the idea of bouncing back and forth between apps can use a dedicated RSS reader or any number of curated news offerings ranging from Flipboard to Google's own Currents. But there's one issue that none of these apps address - they deliver full-length articles to people who may not want or have time to read such lengthy content on their phones. Enter Circa News, an app that takes the day's headlines and serves readers with just the gist.
Circa's editorial staff does its best to provide comprehensive but concise coverage of the major headlines in hopes of making it easier for us to get our news. That means no more intimidatingly long articles, no re-reading articles on the same subject just to get the latest details, and no more walking away from an article because there just isn't enough time. The app provides a simplistic interface that's both attractive and easy to skim, and there are large buttons that make it easy to share each story or "follow" it for updates. It's the news presented in a way that suits a mobile lifestyle, and while it may have taken a year to make its way over from iOS, you can now get your hands on it for free below.
The app was not found in the store. :-( Go to store Google websearch
Via: AllThingsDBriton Reece Elliott given 28-month term for online comments that led to students being kept away from schools in Tennessee
A British internet user who posted threats on Facebook to kill 200 US schoolchildren in the wake of a mass shooting at a primary school has been jailed for two years and four months.
Reece Elliott, 24, was sentenced at Newcastle crown court after admitting communications offences. He had posted messages on tribute pages set up for two US teenagers who had died in road accidents.
More than 3,000 children were kept away from school in Warren County, Tennessee, the day after he left the remarks. A 15-year-old girl who challenged his comments was told: "You have been chosen tomorrow at school to receive one of my bullets."
The threats were made in the weeks following the events at Sandy Hook primary school in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were killed last December. The comments caused panic, with Warren County authorities asking residents to keep children at home.
Elliott, from Fossway, South Shields, was branded an "internet troll" after his campaign of online harassment was made public.
Judge James Goss QC, the recorder of Newcastle, told him the offences were driven by "no more than self-indulgent nastiness". The judge said the sentence of 28 months in prison took into account Elliott's early guilty plea and genuine remorse.
At a previous hearing the father-of-one admitted one count of making threats to kill and eight Communications Act offences.
Elliott posted on a tribute site to Caitlin Talley, a 17-year-old girl at the Tennessee school killed by a drink driver in October.
Using a false name, he wrote: "I'm glad the fat bitch is dead. Let's drink to drink driving. No one gives a shit that she's dead, get over it. If I was there now I would rape you."
And on another for a teenager who died in a car crash, he said: "Hip, hip, horray [sic], he is dead motherfucker. Huge brain injuries. Stupid motherfucking bitch. I hope you rot in hell."
After a local deputy sheriff threatened to shut down Elliott's page, he responded by writing on Caitlin's tribute page: "My father has three guns. I'm planning on killing him first and putting him in a dumpster.
"Then I'm taking the motor and I'm going in fast. I'm gonna kill hopefully at least 200 before I kill myself. So you want to tell the deputy, I'm on my way."
Using the same pseudonym, Elliott also posted the threat: "I'm killing 200 people minimum at school. I will be on CNN."
The FBI contacted police in England after discovering that the threats were coming from the north-east. Outside court, Detective Chief Inspector Ged Noble, who led the investigation, said officers were about to arrest Elliott when he walked into the police station.
"Police officers were about to go to the identified address when we were notified by a local solicitor that Reece Elliott wanted to hand himself in," said Noble.
"New guidelines on dealing with people who post offensive messages using social media have been released by the director of public prosecutions and we will continue to work closely with the Crown Prosecution Service to take action against those who cross the line from their right to free speech to committing criminal offences."
During Elliott's first appearance at South Tyneside magistrates' court in February, Gary Buckley, prosecuting, told the court: "[He] was well aware that he was wanted. He handed himself into South Shields police station.
"He said he was a part-time troll. He said he decided to post offensive comments to see what kind of reaction he could provoke.
"He was asked if he knew what had been going on recently and said he was well aware of the recent incidents following the shootings in schools.
"He confirmed he did post the postings on Facebook and therefore did make these threats but he didn't expect the threats to be taken seriously and didn't expect them to cause the reaction they did."
The CPS guidelines on the misuse of social media emphasise the importance of making an assessment about whether there was an "intention to cause distress or anxiety to the recipient".
The "Twitter joke trial" involving Paul Chambers – who eventually overturned a conviction for sending a menacing tweet on the grounds that it was never meant to be taken seriously – showed that, by contrast, what was little more than an expression of exasperation should not have been considered a criminal offence.ICO Review — TribeToken
Priyab Dash Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 7, 2017
Summary
Introduction
TribeToken (TRIBE) is a decentralized charity platform that uses Tokens to donate or create charity projects and can be traded on exchanges. It it is fully dedicated to charity projects and uses Ethereums as the underlying platform. Their goal is to create a global currency for charity projects and to help people in need and to create a decentralized Token so anyone could acquire without limitations, to create a decentralized network of projects which are stored on the Ethereum‘s Blockchain and can be controlled by a decentralized voting system.
Symbol: TRIBE
Crowdsale opening date: 7/24/2017
Crowdsale closing date: 8/14/2017
Platform for Fundraiser: Ethereum (What is blockchain?)
Analysis
Value Proposition for Investors
At the outset I should say their project has lot of red flags, like they do not have a star list of advisers, they have a 16 year old as a team member who is also their Blockchain & Cryptocurrency developer. They do not have a registered company or a foundation, they plan to raise it via the seed capital they raise. They are basically freelancers who though have extensive experience in developing websites but their charitable experience is limited though noteworthy. And finally their platform may be centralized as they initially want to develop it in PHP & Maria DB, though the smart contract part is on Ethereum.
But as an investor I can assure that I have not seen a much committed team than they are. They have been called scam and what not but they have been patient and polite in answering to people. Hence if you are really looking for a team that is long committed to their project and yourself are charitable then you should talk to them support their project they need it badly.
My View
I met their team while going through an ANN in bitcointalk. And hearing the lack of transaction to their project. And then I started interacting with the team on their Telegram channel. On talking to them further and some unsuccessful attempt to raise awareness about their project, finally sat down to write this review. While as a whole when I saw, their concept was much more practical and value proposition much more lucid and simple, still based on my interaction with the team I felt very positive about their commitment and also happy that they were planning to change their project to a community project if they did not raise enough funds.
Key Aspects
Problem
Currently funding charity projects and for charities to reach larger masses is difficult, despite the proliferation of internet, still the threat of government interference, crackdown and even lack of traction or attention of public causes is a major issue. And even if charitable projects are funded its not transparent and there is unified social platform for charities. TribeToken wants to change this situation.
Solution
TribeToken is a decentralized digital charity token based on Ethereum’s Blockchain for funding charity projects that help the society, nature, wildlife. TribeToken allows anyone with any modern device and Internet connection to contribute in charity or to create a charity project with minimal fees and fully decentralized, without any authority controlling the Tokens.
Platform
The platform works in two parts
The main platform that can be accessed via a web interface or an application on your Android or iOS phone
The smart contract part where users will be able to transfer the tokens to specific project or charity”
Features
For the charity organizations, Platform’s Smart Contract (PSC for short) will directly transfer the funds charity wallet.
The PSC Charity Project part will hold the tokens users send to the project for the donation period, then the users/admin gets notified and the funds are disbursed to the charity wallet.
Donate the tokens to a project or an organization can be done anonymously, but actions like commenting, reviewing, as well as creating projects will need registration.
Creating a project on the platform with an initial deposit of TribeTokens will earn you a certain percentage, based on that deposit up to a certain point.
TibeToken will have a special section for approved charity organizations in which users can donate tokens where it directly gets transferred to the charity of your choice.
Tokensale
ICO Starting date: July 24th, 12:00 UTC ICO Ending date: August 14th, 12:00 UTC
Total TribeToken Supply: 200 000 000 TRIBE
20 000 000 — Team
10 000 000 — Tribe Economy
10 000 000 — Bounties and partnerships
160 000 000 — ICO remaining will be burned
Minimum goal 500 ETH
Maximum goal 50 000 ETH
Token exchange rate: 3000 TRIBE = 1 ETH
Minimum transaction amount: 300 TRIBE = 0.1 ETH”
Roadmap
Tribe One
For their first release, they will launch decentralized charity platform where users can donate to charity projects and create them using TribeToken.
Tribe Two
In their second release, they want to focus on mobile app usage off the platform. By creating a decentralized web application.
Tribe Three
In the third release, they want to activate the Tribe Economy.
Team
Roy Brand Founder — Concept Designer
Alexander Kozhukhov Founder — Senior Developer
L
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the municipal authorities, but this is only 2% of the total German tax revenue, whereas wage tax and sales tax make up for 25% each. We need a complete tax shift, don’t we?
Germany is indeed suffering from rising housing prices. I think there are a number of reasons for this. One is that Germans have not had a real estate bubble like what occurred in the US or England. They did lose money in the stock market, and many decided simply to put their money in their own property. There is also a lot of foreign money coming into Germany to buy property, especially in Berlin.
The only way to keep housing prices down is to tax awat the rise in the land value. If this is done, speculators are not going to buy. Only homeowners or commercial users will buy for themselves. You don’t want speculators or bank credit to push up prices. If Germany lets its housing prices rise, it is going to price its labor out of the market. It would lose its competitive advantage, because the largest expense in every wage-earner’s budget is the cost of housing. In Ricardo’s era it was food; today it is housing. So Germany should focus on how to keep its housing prices low.
I’d like to come back to the issue of interest once more. The English title of “Der Sektor” is “Killing the host – How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy”. It’s much more coming to the point. It struck me that you mention John Brown. He wrote a book called “Parasitic wealth or Money Reform” in 1898. I came across his book some years ago and thought that he was somehow America’s Helmut Creutz of the 19th century. He was a supporter of Henry George, but in addition John Brown analyzed and criticized the interest money system and its redistribution of wealth. He said that labour is robbed of 33% of its earnings by the parasitic wealth with subtle and insideous methods, so that it’s not even suspected. Why does almost nobody know this John Brown?
John Brown’s book is interesting. It is somewhat like that of his contemporary Michael Flürscheim. Brown’s book was published by Charles Kerr, a Chicago cooperative that also published Marx’s Capital. So Brown was a part of the group of American reformers who became increasingly became Marxist in the 19th and early 20th century. Most of the books published by Kerr discussed finance and the exponential growth of debt.
The economist who wrote most clearly about how debt grew by its own mathematics was Marx in Vol. III of Capital and his Theories of Surplus Value. Most of these monetary writers were associated with Marxists and focused on the tendency of debt and finance to grow exponentially by purely mathematical laws, independently of the economy, not simply as a by-product of the economy as mainstream economics pretends.
So you recommend reading his book?
Sure, it is a good book, although only on one topic. Also good is Michael Flürscheim’s Clue to the Economic Labyrinth (1902). So is Vol. III of Capital.
Brown’s plan of reforms included the nationalization of banks and the establishment of a bank service charge in lieu of interest. The latter sounds remarkably up-to-date. In Germany the banks are raising charges because of the decrease in their interest margins. How is your view on the matter of declining interest rates?
Well, today declining interest rates are the aim of central bank Quantitative Easing. It hasn’t helped. The most important questio nto ask is: what are you going to make your loans for? Most lending at these declining interest rates has been parasitic and predatory. There’s a lot of corporate take-over lending to companies that borrow to buy other companies. There is an enormous amount of stock market credit that has helped bid up stock prices with low-interest credit and arbitrage. This has inflated asset prices for stocks, bonds and real estate. If the result of low interest rates is simply to inflate asset prices, the only way this can work is to have a heavy tax on capital gains, that is asset price gains. But in the US, England, and other countries there are very low taxes on capital gains, and so low interest rates simply make housing more expensive, and make stocks and buying a flow retirement income (in the form of stocks or bonds that yield dividends and interest) much more expensive.
I guess Brown is getting to the positive aspects of low interest also.
What Brown was talking about were the problems of finance. In the final analysis there is only one ultimate solution: to write down the debts. Nobody really wants to talk about debt cancellation, because they try to find a way to save the system. But it can’t be fixed so that debts can keep growing at compound rates ad infinitum. Any financial system tends to end in a crash. So the key question is how a society is NOT going not to pay debts that go bad. Will it let creditors foreclose, as has occurred in the US? Or are you going to write down the debts and wipe out this overgrowth of creditor claims? That’s the ultimate policy that every society has to face.
Very topical, the German Bundesbank sees the combination of low interest rates and a booming housing market as a dangerous cocktail for the banking sector. “The traffic lights have jumped to yellow or even to dark yellow”, Andreas Dombret said, after the Bundesbank had denied the problem in the last years by dismissing it as Germany’s legitimate catch-up effects. The residential property prices have gone up by 30% since 2010, in the major cities even by more than 60%. The share of real estate loans in the total credit portfolio is significantly rising. The mortgage loans of the households have increased in absolute terms as well as relative to their income. It’s only due to the low interest rates that the debt service has not increased yet. But the banks and savings companies are taking on the risk: the mortgages with terms of more than ten years have risen to more than 40% of the residential real estate loans. The interest-change risks lie with the banks. Don’t we have to face up to the truth that interest rates shouldn’t go up again?
What should be raised are taxes on the land, natural resource rent and monopoly rent. The aim should be to keep housing prices low instead of speculation. Land rent should serve as the tax base, as the classical economists said it should. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill… all urged that the basis of the tax system should be real-estate and natural resource rent, not income taxes (which add to the cost of labor), the cost of labor and not value-added taxes (which increase consumer prices). So tax policy and debt write-downs today are basically the key to economic survival.
Banking should be a public utility. If you leave banking in the present hands, you’re leaving it in the hands of the kind of crooks that brought about the financial crisis of 2008.
Couldn’t the subprime-crisis have been prevented if the Fed had introduced negative interest rates in the 1990s?
No. The reason there was the crash was fraud and speculation. It was junk mortgages and the financialization of the economy. Pension funds and people’s savings were turned over to the financial sector, whose policy is short-term. It seeks gains mainly by speculation and asset price inflation. So the problem is the financial system. I think the Boeckler foundation has annual meetings in Berlin that focus on financialization and explain what the problem is.
Yes, that’s a big topic. The financial sector is interested, as you said, in short-term gains, but people who want to save for their retirement are interested in long-term stability – that is contradictory. Do you know the “Natural Economic Order by Free Land and Free Money” by Silvio Gesell?
It is not practical for today’s world, it is very abstract. The solution to the financial problem really has to be ultimately a debt write-down, and a shift to the tax system, as the classical economists talked about.
Gesell was also advocating the taxing of land. I think he had something in mind with bidding for the land, letting the market fix the prices.
He did not go beneath the surface to ask what kind of market do you want. Today, the market for real estate is a financialized market. As I said, the basic principle is that most rent is paid out as interest. The value of real estate is whatever a bank will lend against it. Unless you have a theory of finance and the overall economy, you really don’t have a theory of the market.
You are advocating a revival of classical economics. What did the classical economists understand by a free economy?
They all defined a free economy as one that is free from land rent, free from unearned income. Many also said that a free economy had to be free from private banking. They advocated full taxation of economic rent. Today’s idea of free market economics is the diametric opposite. In an Orwellian doublethink language, a free market now means an economy free for rent extractors, free for predators to make money, and essentially free for financial and corporate crime. The Obama Administration de-criminalized fraud. This has attracted the biggest criminals – and the wealthiest families – to the banking sector, because that’s where the money is. Crooks want to rob banks, and the best way to rob a bank is to own one. So criminals become bankers. You can look at Iceland, at HSBC, or at Citibank and Wells-Fargo in the news today. Their repeated lawbreaking and criminal activities have been shown tob e endemic in the US. But nobody goes to jail. You can steal as much money as you want, and you’ll never go to jail if you’re a banker and pay off the political parties with campaign contribution. It’s much like drug dealers paying off crooked police forces. So crime is pouring into the financial system.
I think this is what’s going to cause a return to classical economics – the realization that you need government banks. Of course, government banks also can be corrupted, so you need some kind of checks and balances. What you need is an honest legal system. If you don’t have a legal system that throws crooks in jail, your economy is going to be transformed into something unpleasant. That’s what is happening today. I think that most Europeans don’t want to acknowledge that that’s what happened in America (USA). There is such an admiration of America that there is a hesitancy to see that it has been taken over by financial predators (a.k.a. “the market”).
We always hear that oligarchies are in the east, in Russia, but hardly anyone is calling America an oligarchy… although alternative media says that it’s just a few families that rule the country.
Yes.In the past 20 years there has been an explosion of discoveries in the field of exoplanets, i.e. planets located outside our solar system. Today we know more than 3,600 exoplanets around 2,700 different stars and the number grows day after day as new data comes in.
The number of stars in our Milky Way alone is estimated to be around 400 billions and based on the observations of the aforementioned planetary systems, astronomers believe that something like at least 100 billion planets might lurk out there.
Exoplanets are usually discovered around main sequence stars, which are stars that are converting hydrogen into helium in their cores, a process that generates energy. The Sun is a main sequence star and the light we see comes from this type of nuclear reactions.
However, there is a very small number of planets that are known to orbit an extraordinary object: a neutron star. In retrospect, the very first exoplanets ever discovered were actually observed more than 20 years ago to rotate around a neutron star, specifically a pulsar (named PSR B1257+12).
This planetary system contains a millisecond pulsar, that spins on its axis every 6 milliseconds, plus three planets. The closest planet has the size of the Moon, whereas the other two are so-called Super-Earths, 4 times more massive than the Earth. They orbit the pulsar at a distance which is a bit less than half the distance of the Earth from the Sun. Since then, only very few more planets have been discovered around pulsars.
The environment around neutron stars is very harsh, since these are very extreme and energetic objects. Large flows of X-rays are constantly emitted with an intensity thousands to million times stronger than the Sun, which would be of course a deadly experience for any form of life developing on such planets.
Furthermore pulsars emit charged particles with speeds close to the speed of light which are called “pulsar wind”. This wind is capable of hitting the atoms in the outer layers of a planet and quickly evaporate its atmosphere. Furthermore, the collision generates heat that in turn produces gamma rays, the most deadly type of radiation.
In a recent work, however, we have considered in detail the atmospheric processed that both X-rays and pulsar winds induce on planets around pulsars and we have found something very surprising. It is true that the gamma and X-rays, together with the pulsar wind, evaporate the atmosphere of a planet. However, if such a planet is a Super-Earth, it can take several hundred millions to several billion years to remove completely its atmosphere. This is due to the fact that Super-Earths have a huge atmospheric mass, hundred thousands to million times thicker than the Earth, even if they are slightly more massive than our planet.
The main reason for this is that their gravity is stronger and thus they can retain a much larger gaseous mass. The atmosphere of the primordial Earth was indeed much ticker than it is today and we live in the thin and precious layer that is left over since those times.
But what is even more surprising is the fact that the two Super-Earths around the pulsar PSR B1257+12 might very well still possess an atmosphere despite the hundred million years spent bathing in the deadly radiation coming from the pulsar. Therefore these planetary atmospheres might still be able to shield the surface of the planets from the dangerous incoming high energy radiation.
Another surprising fact is that as the planet absorbs part of the X-ray radiation and pulsar wind, its atmospheric temperature can rise to levels which are compatible with life. We cannot say for sure whether the two Super-Earths have still an atmosphere and whether the amount of energy absorbed is sufficient (or whether it is even too much) to set the temperature to acceptable levels, but it seems that neutron stars can have an habitable zone (or a “Goldilocks zone“) and with a bit of luck the two Super-Earths might lie within this soft temperature spot.
Imagine what would be life on such planets: a huge pressure on the surface (due to the large atmospheric mass) able to crush anything we are familiar with. And completely dark. A very thick, black, warm fog. Indeed since gamma and X-rays cannot penetrate the whole atmosphere and reach the surface, neither will ultraviolet, optical or infrared light. It must vaguely look (and feel) like the deepest regions of the sea here on Earth with the difference that you have a whole planet at your disposal.
If we want to go way beyond with our imagination we can envision a pulsar planet where life has developed and evolved for billion years and become complex like on Earth. But I believe we cannot stretch it much beyond an ecosystem similar (but more extreme) than we have here in the Mariana trench. On Earth we have barophiles (a form of extremophiles), organisms able to live and thrive in such extreme conditions. We have huge amoebas like the xenophyophores, single celled organisms 10 cm in size. Sea cucumbers flourish on the floor of the Challenger Deep and a couple kilometers above them you can find “supergiants”, a species of gigantic shrimps and even snailfish.
Other extreme creatures here on Earth comprise the tardigrades, amazing creatures that seem immortal. They are able to survive both in space and at pressures of several thousands times the surface pressure of Earth. Could life on pulsar planets resemble such organisms? This is of course impossible to say at the moment, although one can imagine sci-fi scenarios where life evolves in such extreme conditions.
Of course someone will say what about intelligent life? Would it be possible? Would it even be conceivable? I don’t believe this is possible but imagine what would it be. What would it be for an intelligent organism to communicate in this immensely thick fog. And if they would manage to make it outside their enormous atmosphere what would they see? A neutron star spinning hundreds of times per second and emitting beacons of radiation. They would learn with little effort things which are incredibly complex for us. They would witness the effects of general relativity in front of their eyes. Neutron stars do indeed bend space and time in a way that is second only to black holes. They could learn about ultra-dense matter and the behavior of the strong force if they could measure the mass and radius of their neutron star. They would witness the effects of strong magnetic fields and complex electromagnetism by looking at the pulsar. And perhaps they would then look at the other stars, the “normal” stars, like the Sun, and wonder whether life would be possible around those large distant objects, whether such poor emitters of X-ray radiation could sustain life. Whether it would be even conceivable to have life around such pale, cold, weak stars.
AdvertisementsUpdate: Toronto police had initially released the name and photo of a 17-year-old suspect sought in this case. Judicial authorization to identify the boy has now expired and he can no longer be identified under the provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
One man has been arrested in connection with an investigation into what Toronto police are calling a "gang war kidnapping." However, two high-profile suspects remain on the loose.
Canada-wide warrants have been issued for Lincoln Anthony Richards, 23, and a 17-year-old boy, for their alleged role in a kidnapping that police say began with two rival gangs — the Young Buck Killas and Queen's Drive Crips — exchanging gunfire inside a condo tower in the Front Street and Blue Jays Way area on April 18.
Police released dramatic surveillance video of an armed standoff inside the elevator of a Front Street condo tower on Thursday and released photos of the suspects.
The suspects are accused of playing a role in abducting two 17-year-olds, who were held for several days. Police said the victims reported being tied to chairs, forced to perform sex acts, and beaten. Police also said the teens were forced to play Russian roulette with a handgun.
The kidnapped teenagers were released on April 21 after a family member paid a ransom, police said.
On Friday, police said a 51-year-old Toronto man was arrested and charged with:
Kidnapping
Assault with a weapon
Obstructing police
The suspect is set to appear in court at Old City Hall on Saturday.
Police declined to detail how the 51-year-old was involved in the case because the investigation is ongoing.
Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact police directly or Crime Stoppers anonymously.This week we are joined by the lead producer of NHL 16 for EA Sports, Sean Ramjagsingh to give us some great tidbits on what to expect in the upcoming NHL game.
‘Rammer’ has been working at EA Sports since 2000 and has been working specifically on the NHL series since 2009. He has become the well known face and voice for the very successful NHL series.
Rammer breaks down what improvements fans of the game can look forward to from a gameplay perspective. Also, Sean explains what game modes are back for this year and what tweaks have been added for the existing modes.
Lastly, we discuss some of the aesthetic enhancements, like more detailed arenas and mascots, that we can look forward to.
If you are a fan of the yearly NHL game for EA Sports, this is an episode you don’t want to miss.
Enjoy!
You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.0 Ohio's lieutenant governor reveals sons' opioid addictions
- Ohio's lieutenant governor revealed Thursday that her two sons have struggled with opioid addiction, adding her family to the thousands affected by the nation's prescription painkiller and heroin epidemic.
"Like many Ohioans, my family is struggling with addiction, and the opiate crisis has, you know, it's come in my front door," Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor said in making the revelation to the Dayton Daily News.
She said Ohio's second family has been at times in crisis over the past five years, describing failed drug rehab programs, two overdoses at the family's home and urgent calls for ambulances.
Taylor, a Republican who is planning to run for governor, said her sons - Joe, 26, and Michael, 23 - are now doing well, though one son remains in drug treatment.
"It's take it one day at a time, one day at a time," she said.
Taylor, 51, declined to discuss further details about the family situation, but she appeared to link the start of her sons' addictions to prescription pain pills. Her state office also declined further interviews on the topic, calling it a "very personal situation."
"She is a mom first and a public official second and the health of her sons is and always will be her primary concern," said spokesman Michael Duchesne. "While she was willing to share some of her family's struggles in the hopes that her story can help others, she is concerned that shining a further spotlight on her sons' lives will not be beneficial to their long term recovery at this time."
Taylor has served alongside GOP Gov. John Kasich since 2011, and he has said he would endorse her bid for governor.
"Mary and I have discussed this situation for an extended period of time," Kasich said in a statement. "As a dear friend I have encouraged her and her family during this extremely difficult journey, and I will continue to lift her family up in my prayers."
Taylor's office said the Kasich administration continues "to use every resource at our disposal to fight this epidemic and Lt. Governor Taylor will continue to be a leader in that battle."
Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.EXCLUSIVE: The Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, a temple of the art house movie scene in New York for 30 years, is at the end of its lease and is scheduled to close in January, Deadline has learned.
While we have been told that others are exploring ways to step in to preserve the site as a movie theatre, if the influential six-screen multiplex does go dark, it would be a crushing blow to the specialty film business. A long list of films, including Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, began their high-grossing, award-winning runs with exclusive engagements there.
Long operated under a joint venture involving Dan Talbot, France’s Gaumont banner and building owner Milstein Properties, Lincoln Plaza has gotten a little scruffy and run-down over the years. One can only imagine what an exhibitor with more resources, anyone from AMC to Alamo Drafthouse, could do with the place.
Located in the basement of a residential building on the corner of Broadway and 62nd Street, Lincoln Plaza still draws solid crowds due to its location and also the taste of its longtime gate-keepers, Talbot and his wife of 68 years, Toby. The Lincoln Plaza is the latest art house hit by a historic confluence of forces, including the streaming boom and New York gentrification. Landmark’s once high-flying Sunshine earlier this year said it would close to make way for a high-rise development.
In an interview with Deadline, Toby Talbot seemed resigned to the likely fate of the theatre. She said she and her husband “did everything we could to ask for the lease to be extended.” Milstein, she added, “is looking to get everything he can. He’s looking to make money.”
A phone message left with Milstein Properties was not immediately returned.
If the end does come, it will close a major chapter in the legendary film careers of the Talbots, who opened the New Yorker Theater in 1960, and followed it with Manhattan’s Cinema Studio and Metro Theater in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. They also maintained a distribution label, New Yorker Films, which was founded in 1965 and distributed some 400 titles, including Shoah, The Decalogue and Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
As the specialty film business evolved into a potent arm of the movie business, films would debut at the Lincoln Plaza and go on to rack up sizable grosses and awards, with the Talbots determining who made the cut. “We acted as kind of first readers,” Toby Talbot said. “If a film opened at Lincoln Plaza, it had to be worthwhile.”
While the Upper West Side exhibition scene saw changes over the past 30 years, notably the renovation of Lincoln Center and the start of commercial bookings there, Lincoln Plaza remained a coveted destination.
Newer players in New York like Alamo in Brooklyn or the Metrograph on Manhattan’s Lower East Side have brought new ways to address today’s distracted, luxury-craving moviegoer. For Alamo, that means in-theatre dining and alcohol and a ban on texting, while Metrograph offers a highly curated lineup designed for ultra-cinephiles. Landmark also just opened a cushy new eight-screen complex in the up-and-coming Far West Side, on 57th Street near the Hudson River. Even the Film Forum down on Houston Street, an art house as dyed in the wool as Lincoln Plaza, finally acknowledged modern reality and plans to close next May and June for a multi-million-dollar expansion and revamp.
New York City, not the movie trade, gets much of the blame for the end of the Lincoln Plaza, Talbot said. While the city is thriving by some measures, its commercial real estate market remains a conundrum, with many mom and pop stores being driven out by skyrocketing rents. A surprising number of empty storefronts fill otherwise flush neighborhoods across town as landlords hold out for big paydays. “If you go along the Upper West Side, there are vast spaces without anything, and then you’ll see another bank, another Bed, Bath & Beyond,” she said.
Toby Talbot, whose 2009 memoir featured an introduction by Martin Scorsese, said word of the January end date has started to circulate among industry execs and filmmakers, but no notices have been posted alerting customers. She said plans are being made for a formal sendoff on January 21.
While the Talbots were regulars on the festival circuit and courted by filmmakers and distributors with commercial ambitions, they maintained an old-fashioned zeal for cinema, which governed many of their choices. “We had the luxury of choosing films that we knew were not going to be successful commercially, and we could put them on our screens,” she said. “We were able to do what we wanted to do.”I mostly got this version because I love Nvidia's Reference Design for their cards and it was out of the box OC, and can still be pushed even more. It is a $500 dollar GPU. When it comes to PCs money literally buys performance. Especially in terms of CPU and GPU. So it performs amazingly in everything I have played.
My PC Hardware:
CPU: i7-4790k.
GPU: This one?.
RAM: Kingston HyperX 2x4GB.
SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 120GB for Operating System (Win 10 64bit) and Apps.
HDD: 1TB Western Digital Green for games (and videos I record).
Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare; This game runs amazingly at max settings excluding super sampling. There does not seem to be a noticeable difference with super sampling on. I see about 90FPS all the time during gameplay no matter what is going on in Campaign. In multiplayer the framerate is well over 100FPS with now stutter or slowdown.
Skyrim; The game destroys skyrim. Okay that is expected. BUT it also runs rock solid 60FPS with ENB mod and Many many other graphical and physics mods active. The only Mods that hurt the framerate are those ridiculous grass mods. That drops the FPS around 40 sometimes which is a bit disorienting when in combat. Other than that it will handle any mod you throw at it with ease as far as I have seen.
Tomb Raider (2013); Runs 60 FPS MAX with 2xSSAA (4xSSAA is just weirdly demanding. There is still plenty of VRAM left, system RAM, and I have a i7-4790k so i seriously do not understand what the problem is with 4xSSAA). The only time the game drops frames is during cutscenes when the camera gets close to Lara's Hair when TressFX is on. Other than that I have played through the entire game and noticed no other performance problems. You can check out a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP5C6aYIkik You will notice the only time it drops frames is when the camera gets close to her hair.
Firestrike Demo: Scored 14,214 for Graphics Score. 11,895 for Overall Score. (Better than 87% of results it says)
Now I do not know the power draw and all of those super specific kind of things but it only has 2 6pin power connectors which should tell you it is very power efficient for how powerful it is.
The default fan profile is really quite and keeps the card from killing itself (along with throttling back).
My card boost up to 1380MHz after GPU Boost 2.0 does its thing. I have tried lightly overclocking the card's GPU which worked fine but caused coil whine. I fixed the coil whine by setting the card back to default values then simply stressing it out with games and benchmarks for a little while. That method has worked for me but I would caution against OC the card further. I have since left my card at stock. (I will probably overclock it again anyway, I am weird like that lol).
I tried bumping the RAM speed up a little. All i can see for this is do not do it lol. I do not know why but my card threw a fit and the graphics driver crashed. A LOT of reviewers of the base model 980 and all the 3rd party derivatives bumped the RAM speed up to a woping 7010MHz (10 from the base 7000MHz) and left it there. This card as you probably saw in the specs list Some said it was because of the way that power is allocated on this series (900) cards that OC the ram would take power away from the core so they just put all the OC effort into the Core. I think it is for a different reason but again I cannot be for sure.
The moral of the story is this card can handle pretty much anything @1080p you can throw at it. And it looks nice....really nice. It is pretty. It is quite at base fan profile like all the other cards with this cooler. If you have the money for this and not the 980ti/Fury X i would recommend it.[widget="https://gleam.io/t7EAz/toms-hardware-beat-the-heat-giveaway", 800][/widget]We've increased the number of methods of entry! You can now enter by posting a hyper link to a comment in this thread. Copy the link from the time-stamp of your post, and post the link directly in the giveaway widget.The second of our two back-to-back summer giveaways is now open! If you didn’t get lucky during our Best PC Builds giveaway, now’s your chance to win big. UK members, keep reading! In what might be a first in Tom’s Hardware history, we’re proud to announce that our big summer giveaways are now available to our friends across the pond. That’s right, all UK members are now able to enter!For our second summer sweepstakes, we’ve assembled a premium hardware bundle that would make anyone pine for the great indoors. Our two week long Beat the Heat Summer giveaway features an ultra-premium AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU starter bundle, including an MSI GeForce GTX 1080 TI DUKE 11G OC, MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING Titanium Motherboard, and a SeaSonic FOCUS Plus 850 Gold PSU.Our second-place winner will be keeping it cool thanks to a supersized Steam gift card worth a whopping $500, enough dough to cover any gamer’s wish list and perfect for escaping the sweltering sun. Just like in our last big summer giveaway, we’re also offering 100 Runner-Up Prizes for ARCTIC MX-4 Thermal Compound and an exclusive Tom’s Hardware case badge.For your chance to win type in your public profile ID into the sweepstakes widget above. You can find your public profile id in the URL address of your Public Profile Page. To get there simply to head to your profile, and select “See my profile”:The Tom’s Hardware Beat the Heat Summer Giveaway starts Tuesday, August 29th, and will close at 12 pm EDT on Tuesday, September 12th.The Tom’s Hardware Beat the Heat Summer GiveawayGrand Prize: MSI GeForce GTX 1080 TI DUKE 11G OC, MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING Titanium Motherboard, a SeaSonic FOCUS Plus 850 Gold PSU, and an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU.$500 Steam Gift Card.1 tube of ARCTIC MX-4 Thermal CompoundThis Thread in the Components ForumFollow the Instructions on the giveaway widget and log into your Tom’s Hardware accountThe Tom’s Hardware Beat the Heat Summer Giveaway will start this Tuesday, August 29th and close at 12 pm EDT on Tuesday, September 12th.Conroy hits back at Turnbull filter critique
Updated
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has rejected criticism of the Government's proposed internet filter levelled by his opposite number, Malcolm Turnbull.
The Government wants to block websites containing child pornography and other material that is refused classification.
Mr Turnbull, the Opposition's new communications spokesman, says the filter will slow internet speeds and give parents a false sense of security.
But Senator Conroy told ABC Radio's PM program that the United Kingdom, Sweden and Finland all have successful filters in place.
"Ninety-five per cent of every single internet user in the UK goes through a filter of the kind we are talking about and it blocks 100 per cent accurately the child pornography websites," he said.
"In Finland, in Sweden, in a range of Western countries, a filter is in place today, and 80, 90, 95 per cent of citizens in those countries, when they use the internet, go through that filter.
"It has no impact on speed and anybody who makes a claim that it has an impact on speed is misleading people.
"If you want to be a strict engineer, it's 170th of the blink of an eye, but no noticeable effect for an end user. So there is no impact and the accuracy is 100 per cent."
He said the Government always said the internet filter would not pick up peer-to-peer traffic, which is how the bulk of child pornography is distributed online.
But he said that did not mean the filter was pointless.
"The peer-to-peer material does nothing about the 440 child pornography sites that are there right now," he said.
"What Malcolm Turnbull has to explain to Australian families is that he is prepared to do nothing, nothing about blocking access to those 440 child pornography websites."
NBN threat
Senator Conroy says the biggest threat to internet speeds in Australia was the Coalition's policy to block the National Broadband Network (NBN).
"There is one thing though that will slow down and make the NBN more expensive and that is if Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull continue to block the legislation that is before the Parliament and has been there for eight months," he said.
"If we cannot get the vote and pass this through the Parliament, then Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott will be making the NBN more expensive to build and they will be causing more cable to be laid overhead than would otherwise be with the deal."
Within hours of taking on his new role on Tuesday, Mr Turnbull, with instructions to "demolish" the NBN, hit the airwaves and said the Government had not been honest about the cost of the NBN rollout.
"It is quite extraordinary that they're proposing to spend $43 billion of taxpayers' money on a project they say will result in an asset worth $43 billion, and yet they have provided no evidence, no financial analysis, no business case, no financial models to justify that expenditure or to convince any of us that this isn't going to be nothing other than a massive destruction of taxpayers' money," Mr Turnbull said on Tuesday.
"Every billion dollars that is wasted on this project - and I believe tens of billions of dollars will be wasted on this project if it goes ahead - is money that cannot be spent on fast rail, on public transport, on schools, on hospitals, on roads."
But Senator Conroy said Mr Turnbull needed to spend more time reading the $25 million McKinsey report outlining the financial viability of the NBN.
He says that in the future, there will be a big improvement in economic activity as a result of better broadband.
"There's a whole range of studies around the world that have showed in individual jurisdictions and macro studies... when you've got broadband connected across different regions and different towns and different cities, there is significant improvements," he said.
"There are studies which my own department has released from Access Economics which talk about the advantages and the productivity of e-health, of teleworking, working from home.
"There are a range of sources... that have looked at this case and argued that there are overwhelming macro-benefits to productivity from introducing high-speed broadband."
Senator Conroy says the copper era is coming to a close and regional Australia needs the NBN.
He says the debate is not just about download speeds but also about capacity, and Mr Turnbull is "misleading Australians" by saying they can get the same capacity on wireless networks as on a fibre network.
"If you look at the bandwidth demand worldwide, there is a massive increase in mobile; it comes off a low base but a massive increase and that's a great thing," he said.
"But the demand for fibre and fixed-line broadband capacity is equally moving at as fast if not a faster rate.
"There's plenty of information. If Malcolm takes the time to read it, he will see that fixed-line broadband is being cried out for because of the demand for the capacity of a fixed line."
Take-up debate 'irrelevant'
Reports earlier this week noted that only 50 per cent of homes in the Tasmanian towns of Midway Point, Scottsdale and Smithton had opted to have broadband fibre optic cable installed.
But Senator Conroy says the debate about take-up has become irrelevant, as eventually anyone who wants a fixed line will have to use the fibre network.
"The deal that we have with Telstra is that they are decommissioning, closing down the copper network," he said.
"To have a fixed line in what we call the 93 per cent footprint, the only way at the end of this process you'll have a fixed line is on the NBN's fibre network.
"The Tasmanian rollout is absolutely on time, exactly as we predicted, and if you go back and check
|
APPERGEIST:
A gluttonous ghostly ambush predator.
SHIVERGEIST:
An eerie, venomous ectosaur.
TRAPPERGEIST:
An Ectosaur with retractable, roaming jaws.
VAPORGEIST:
A toxic, gas-spewing Ectosaur.
Homo sapiens metamorphose into the mindless, generally harmless bioforms known as "zombies" following brain-death, but many stranger, more dangerous creatures can arise in the rare case that these shambling corpses successfully reproduce. All knownmetamorphose into the mindless, generally harmless bioforms known as "zombies" following brain-death, but many stranger, more dangerous creatures can arise in the rare case that these shambling corpses successfully reproduce.
AFTERSPAWN:
A strange little mutant formed from a placenta.
ENCEPHALOBE:
A rogue brain that has evolved into a mental predator.
ESCARGHOUL:
A freak merging of zombie and gastropod.
FESTERLING:
A zombie's inhuman offspring.
FESTERLING B:
A bloated, ravenous festerling variant.
FESTERLING C:
An acid-spitting festerling variant.
FESTERLING D:
A fanged, aggressive festerling variant.
FESTERLING E:
A crawling, pathetic festerling variant.
GASTRIKING:
A stomach that has evolved into a gluttonous monster.
LESION:
An oozing, floating pus creature.
MORTIGORE:
A one-eyed heap of miscellaneous meat and bone.
WORMROOT:
A tree grown on an extra-special fertilizer.
SWARMLINGS
BEEBLEZUG:
An undead maggot colony.
DEBILITWITCH:
A carrier of mind-controlling worms (see the "wormbrain" class).
PESTEQUIRM:
An overgrown head filled with worms.
PUTREPHILE:
A floating mutant protected by flies.
ZEELZEBUZ:
An undead honeybee hive.
SQUIRMINATOR:
A hulking mutation of the debilitwitch.
BEZULGA:
- the ultimate zombie/insect conglomerate.
GREATER SPAWN
BLASTODON:
A bulky, crawling zombie spawn with toxic gas.
ECTOZYME:
An amoebic, chaotic zombie offspring.
FOETUSAUR:
A powerful, highly evolved mutant embryo.
GRIMGUG:
A titanic, sloth-like mutant embryo.
PROGENOID:
A ferocious, taloned mutant embryo.
ZOMBRYO:
A speedy long-limbed zombie spawn.
ZYGHAST:
A powerful, highly evolved mutant embryo.
ULTIMATE SPAWN
ABNORTIS:
A twisted, malformed abomination.
OOVULE:
- the perfect being, or still incomplete?
Emerging from slimy, colorful subterranean hives, the origins of Jokers are entirely unknown, but they seemingly live to perpetuate chaos and disorder, their very consciousness housed not merely in a brain, but in the colorful, intoxicating gases swirling through their rubbery bodies, their minds as incomprehensible as their behavior.
BUFFUME:
A toxic balloon-like joker.
CATERPUCKER:
A weak, lowly wormlike joker.
CACCHINNOX:
A sadistic porpoise-like joker.
CRUELHARDY:
An exceptionally powerful, rogue Joker.
DEMENTIPEDE:
A multi-bodied joker.
EYECHOSIS:
A joker dwarfed by its own rolling eye.
FLATULOON:
A gas-spurting cushion-like joker.
FESTOOGE:
An exceptionally stretchy, squishy, electrical joker.
GRINATA:
A sweet, toxic Joker with a candy-like lure.
GRINDROME:
A joker made primarily of teeth and gums.
HARLEQUEEN:
A mad manifestation of the joker hive.
INSANITITTER:
A powerful serpent-like joker.
LOCOMELEON:
A powerful beastly joker.
MALCONTENT:
A gigantic, tentlike joker.
PACHYDERF:
A towering, elephantine joker.
SCREAMPIE:
An amoebic, edible joker.
SEPTICLOWN:
A common endoparasitic joker.
SLIPSTICK:
A mollusk-like, slime generating joker.
SWILLJOY:
A saclike joker packed with venom.
MADCAP:
A powerful, many limbed joker with sinister powers.
NOZO:
A ghastly limbless joker with a sharp, venomous snout.
OPTICAPER:
A bizarre "puppeteer."
WHIMSIKILL:
A tiny joker with a deadly acid.
Many monsters defy any easy categorization, and may originate from other worlds entirely. "Unknown" both is and is not a proper class, but a miscellaneous designation for creatures believed to be of extradimensional or extraterrestrial nature.
CORPUSITE:
A body-snatching invader.
DRAINWAVE:
A balloon-like energy-sucker.
GENETIMORPH:
A parasitoid alien warrior.
GENETISAUR:
A massive and formidable genetimorph queen.
UNDERFIEND:
A tentacled parasitoid.
SHUMOTH:
A shambling, polypous horror.
SKUZBUG:
A scurrying brain-sucker.
SUCCUPUS:
A lecherous lady with toxic tendrils.
TENTABOG:
An advanced, tentacled brain-sucker.
VACCUTHAX:
A vampire of vampires.
PARADIMENSIONALS
ABATHRAEL:
A beautiful celestial being of unknown purpose and unpredictable behavior.
ANGLESNIPE:
- believed to be the luring mechanism of an unseen entity.
ARKHEX:
An invisible, intangible parasite.
BANDERWOCK:
A lurking boogieman-like being.
HOBKIN:
A metallic, clawed goblinoid.
LOBOTOMASK:
A devourer of minds.
LONGFELLOW:
- A mysterious stranger.
OBLIVIOTE:
A tiny but terrifying mental parasite.
PSYCHODROME:
An abstract force that hides in electronic broadcasts.
RADIOVADE:
A weird floating entity with unusual molecular properties.
SNILE:
A happy, smiling agent of fear.
VAULT:
A floating radioactive phantom.
VISIDRON:
A metallic statue-like being with peculiar gravitational qualities.
VORLUNE:
A thing of many small holes.
WIRVINIA:
An energy draining monster with light-warping wings.
XENOGOG:
An eerie needle-armed invader.
METEORIDS
AVAZOTH:
A collection of spore-like mineral structures that feed on intelligence.
GRENZO:
A flesh-hungry rock from above.
ZIAFEL:
A strange energy-drainer with telescoping arms.
These horrific psychic weapons were engineered by an ancient civilization to punish behaviors they deemed morally destructive. It is widely believed that the "birds" themselves contributed to their creator's extinction, and did not function entirely as intended.
ENVY:
A feeble little creature that can exchange bodies with its victims.
GLUTTONY:
A bird that remotely parasitizes others.
GREED:
A heavily burdened creature that generates mysterious pearls.
LUST:
A tiny flying predator that preys on a common weakness.
PRIDE:
A psychic manipulator unaware of its loathsome form.
SLOTH:
An ultimate embodiment of slothfulness.
WRATH:
A creature that perpetuates violence.
ADVANCED DEVILBIRDS
BARBALETCH:
- the devil bird of delusion.
BONNAGANDER:
- the devil bird of cruelty.
DODOOFUS:
- the devil bird of ignorance.
EFFIGY:
- the devil bird of hate.
GLOOMSDAY:
- the devil bird of despair.
JABBERGRACKLE:
- the devil bird of paranoia.
PSYCHESHRIKE:
- the devil bird of cowardice.
PHASMORIA:
An accidental creation with oddly pleasant attacks.
ULTIMATE DEVILBIRDS
ASTARATH:
- the devil bird of lies.
DIABLYMOUS:
- the devil bird of death.
MEPHILAS:
- the devil bird of knowledge.
Integrating organic and electronic systems, Biomecha are self-replicating machines regarded by some as far superior to fully biological monsters.
ANALYZER:
An intelligence node and information gatherer.
HACKER:
An eerie, mind-warping mechanoid.
HARVESTER:
A spindly creature designed to collect raw materials.
MANGLER:
A beastly, violent mechanoid.
PROTECTOR:
An all-purpose combat unit.
RECONSTRUCTOR:
An asymmetrical medical and repair unit.
TOILER:
A simple worker mechanoid.
brain flukes as specialized host bodies, each Wormbrain essentially a vehicle for a hive mind of parasitic worms. These monsters were engineered by a collective of sentientas specialized host bodies, each Wormbrain essentially a vehicle for a hive mind of parasitic worms.
CESTOID:
A sluggish but durable wormbrain.
MANTICOIL:
A powerful and savage worm carrier.
MEGRIMORA:
A sneaking, camouflaged wormbrain.
NEMATEUTHIS:
An enormous, kraken-like wormbrain.
PROGLAPSE:
A simplified, floating wormbrain.
SLOGLOBITE:
A simple, basal parasite host, the ancestor of all modern wormbrains.
TROGLOTTID:
A repeating chain of small, suicidal wormbrains.
UNFESTID:
An unusual "reverse" wormbrain.
BROOD-EYES
PARASEETHE:
A simple, common hominoid wormbrain.
PARASIDIOUS:
A giant, snail-like wormbrain.
PARASLOB:
A massive, slug-like paraseethe variant.
PESTARE:
A small wormbrain with detachable, mobile eyes.
EYEZOME:
A snail-like humanoid wormbrain.
SCREAMATODE:
A howling, stretchy-limbed wormbrain.
GASPERS
COMMON GASPER:
A head-chomping worm.
BLEEDING GASPER:
A many-mouthed bloodsucker.
BELCHING GASPER:
A Gasper with poisonous breath.
GULPING GASPER:
An engulfing worm.
ULTIMATE WORMBRAINS
VERMEDULLA:
A single worm with many hosts.
These advanced biological weapons can dissolve their bodies into billions of infectious nanomonsters and reconstitute from host bodies, effectively transforming between a macroscopic monster and a microbial disease at will.
BOTULARIA:
causes brain degeneration and epidermal mold.
CANKERSOUR:
causes nausea, disgust and dysentery.
FLUVIUM:
causes fever and delusion.
FOULMONELLA:
causes stinking slime secretion and indifference.
GERMALADY:
A microbial puppet-master and fectoid "queen."
GOUTBREAK:
causes bleeding and bloodlust.
LEPROSORE:
- causes sorrow and explosive boils.
POXULE:
An exponential and explosive parasite.
PATHOGERM:
- causes sneezing, congestion and a drive to infect others
PNEUMANIA:
- causes fearfulness and rigor.
SCRABIES:
Attacks through insect bites.
STAPHOBIA:
Animates the dead.
TERRORTOMA:
- causes an outgrowth of unstable bio-organic weaponry.
Garbage-class monsters are those creatures which have arisen spontaneously from the biochemical run-off of Mortasheen city, created accidentally with every new genetic experiment and sometimes multiplying out of control. While usually harmless, their unpredictable genetics can imbue rare individuals with surprisingly deadly powers, and some strains are capable of metamorphosis into far more formidable "garbage beasts."
AGBLAP:
A blind, wandering thing.
BALANOID:
An upside-down creature which feeds through its posterior.
BARTLESLART:
An oozing bucket of scum.
BLEMMYSH:
A cowardly, pus-filled, dog-faced creature.
BLEB:
A sticky bag of organs.
BLEEVUS:
- its large and active brain is unfortunately useless.
BLEEZOL:
A strange monster blinded by its own thick mantle.
BLINDLING:
A crawling, useless eye.
BLISTER:
A blubbery, gibbering abomination.
BLOART:
- eats and eats, until it pops.
DROSS:
A twisted, molten humanoid.
DYNCH:
A wailing puddle-like creature.
EEPS:
An eye with a discriminating attention span.
EKEBLANGE:
A peculiar walking spinal cord.
ELDOON:
A flatworm-like parasite.
FARP:
A smelly cloudlike creature.
FECULUS:
A dung-spewing blob.
FLARMPH:
A set of flapping, filthy ears.
GARBLOB:
A creeping, bug-eyed piscoid.
GNARBLEWOMP:
A dim-witted and clumsy little monster.
GOOBUS:
A snail-like mud dweller.
GOBLOBOBBLE:
- has a stupid, tiny head.
GROBBIDILE:
A creature perpetually eating itself.
GROTCH:
- walking trouser-like monster.
GUZU:
- looks good, smells good. not good.
HASPAGLAR:
A crawling, groping fish-faced monster.
HOOGZ:
- ugh, get it off!
HOST:
A scurrying, faceless thing.
HUME:
A meaty, peeling creature.
HUHHK:
An air-filtering, thoughtless brain.
IDJIP:
A slimy, hairy clot.
IGLEK:
A disturbing box.
JEEPER:
A shy, perfectly flat monster.
KORPUM:
A creature encased in a ball of limbs.
KRODE:
A rotten tooth-shaped being.
OOV:
A melon-shaped thingamabob.
OGLESLOP:
A snail-like creature.
PUKKERUP:
An inverted, overly affection subhumanoid.
PUTTERPATTER:
A fast-moving, spidery creature made of fingers.
PLAZOON:
A colonial, creeping being.
QUERM:
like a living fishbowl!
SCHNOOZE:
A snotty mucus monster.
SCUZZLE:
A mite-like monster that scuttles on its mouthparts.
SHRABLER:
A bony, crescent creature.
SKIZIX:
- paranoid and delicate.
SKWUNK:
A gnarled, twisted and fatally self-conscious little creature.
SLARP:
A sluggish, ground-sucking creature.
SLOBOIL:
A greasy, slippery heap.
SNERG:
A gassy, floundering reptilian beast.
SPEWCUMBER:
A vomiting slug with oversized eye stalks.
SPORNOK:
A top-heavy spore sack.
SQUIRCHIN:
A prickly but fragile creature.
THORK:
hides in its own ribs.
TWURD:
tweets and twitters pointlessly.
UNDULARD:
A chrysalis-like animal.
URGH:
An upside-down suction cup baby.
USKUS:
eats its own waste, over and over.
VARBLE:
doesn't understand this "defense" thing.
VARROA:
A peculiar creature that must drag its own mouth.
VEERIE:
An organic sonar dish with nothing important to broadcast.
VERMOLD:
A crawling, fungoid "rat."
VLOGGLE:
A somewhat obscene, backwards monster.
VULG:
A giggling, rootlike mutant.
VUNTCH:
A fishy being that tends to drown itself.
WAUGH:
A headless, chickenlike thing that never stops screaming.
WERNSOM:
rolls about inside its own huge blister.
WEZZLE:
A timid, blood-spewing monster.
YABBER:
A chattering toothy thing.
GARBAGE BEASTS
CARNIBUNCLE:
A monstrosity with toxic blood.
CROCOBOIL:
A slithering, grease-secreting beast.
DECOMPOGLOB:
A beast with infectious heads.
GARBELCH:
A rancid trash creature with a shell of metal scrap.
GARBILE:
A floating, vomitous fish-like monster.
GARBOID:
A rancid, fish-like trash creature.
GROBBYDRUS:
A multi-headed autocannibal.
SNARGLE:
A twisted, reptilian monstrosity with poison-spewing entrails.
VERMOEBA:
A shape-shifting mass of saw-toothed bodies.
Currently in development as the setting for an independent pen & paper role-playing game, "Mortasheen" is a world I've been populating with my own original monsters since almost as far back as 2003; an impossibly vast, biomechanical city at the apex of a toxic, irradiated world, Mortasheen is populated by mad geniuses and otherworldly mutants whose daily lives revolve around the bio-engineered monsters they modify and train. It's lawless, polluted and impossibly dangerous, but it's a world that also exists in surprising harmony. Its average citizen may be an aggressively bloodthirsty, venomous parasite, but that doesn't mean they'reBelow is a link to every monster in Mortasheen's current canon, illustrated by myself. Dating back over a decade, the art and writing quality as well as the level of taste may vary wildly; new monsters are currently added almost every month, while older monsters are selectively rewritten and sometimes redesigned. It's a never-ending project!New York Congressman and potential 2016 presidential candidate Peter King put points on the soundbite scoreboard yesterday with a fiery appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Host Joe Scarborough was happy to escalate the intra-party war between the hawkish Republican establishment and Sen. Rand Paul.
“Let’s start with Rand Paul,” Scarborough said. “I take it that you would not be comfortable with Rand Paul being the commander-in-chief.” “His views would be disastrous, Joe. I think he appeals to the lowest common denominator,” King said of the man who has assumed a contentious front-runner status for the Republican presidential nomination.
For advocates of a limitless global American military presence, Paul’s rising popularity is an existential threat to the GOP as we have known it for generations. The suddenness of Paul’s rise has unleashed a flood of conservative-on-conservative invective. Paul’s views have been described as “nakedly unacceptable … unhinged … lunacy” (Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal), “fringe … extremism … hooey” (Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post) and “dewy-eyed foolishness” that is “more appropriate to a dorm-room bull session than the Situation Room” (Rich Lowry at National Review).
And that was just last week.
Last month, former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer told Time that Paul has “a naiveté that’s going to be a problem.” In the midst of Paul’s 13-hour filibuster protesting President Obama’s drone powers last spring, Sen. John McCain uttered what remains Paul’s most enduring label, when he called his younger senate colleague a “wacko bird.”
Paul’s policy deviations are significant, but the “wacko bird” wasn’t taken seriously until the polls showed that his message was catching on with voters. Now that he represents an unquestionable insurgency within the GOP rank and file, the establishment has finally roused itself into an organized counter-attack. Rubin is leading the media charge (she wrote four Paul hit pieces in the last four days), while anonymous donors huddled around a Time reporter to deliver a mafioso message in Las Vegas—they will bury Rand Paul’s candidacy in its infancy.
Paul is marching on, wrangling over the Reagan legacy even as his foes tar him as a strident leftist for remarks he made in a 2009 video where he seemed to implicate former Vice President Dick Cheney in wanton war profiteering. On ABC’s “This Week,” this week, Paul said that Cheney “loves his country.” And while he said that he does not question Cheney’s motives, he reiterated that the former veep’s role at Halliburton, a major defense contractor for Operation Iraqi Freedom, created “a chance for a conflict of interest.”
Paul is being careful with this messaging, but only to a point. He is not holding back his belief in what constitutes “realism” in foreign policy, a worldview that he maintains is the more authentic conservative and Reaganesque model. In the weekend interview, he pointed to what he sees as the hypocrisy and recklessness of diplomatic bellicosity. To hawks who claim that the United States will not accept a nuclear Iran under any circumstances, Paul offered a historical comparison.
“We woke up one day and Pakistan had nuclear weapons,” he said. “If that would have been our policy towards Pakistan, we would be at war with Pakistan.”
In an op-ed in Wednesday’s Washington Post, he distilled the point:
“If, after World War II, we had preemptively announced that containment of nuclear powers would never be considered, the United States would have trapped itself into nuclear confrontations with Russia, China, Pakistan, India and North Korea.” To Peter King, these are the views of “an isolationist wing from the 1930s.” In his bulldog appearance Wednesday morning, King said that Paul’s views on foreign policy, drones, and domestic surveillance are at “a hysterical level” that is “feeding into paranoia.”
This is the same Congressman King who, in a 2004 radio interview with Sean Hannity, said that “80 to 85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.” American Muslims, King said at the time, are “an enemy living amongst us.”
It seems apparent that, of the two men, King has engaged in the greater fear-mongering. While Paul may have entertained some far-fetched hypotheticals about drones wiping out a Starbucks, the Pentagon would survive a Paul presidency. He is far more moderate on defense spending than his father ever was, and skepticism of government overreach is arguably a core American value. One of these men may be prone to paranoid hysteria, but it isn’t Rand Paul.
Michael Ames reports on politics, culture, and land issues. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @mirkelTalented K-pop idol groups have been around for decades; each new year brings exciting new releases and new groups for us to discover and fall in love with. From the amazing vocals, captivating dance moves, and cute new idols on the scene, there’s a lot to choose from whether you’re starting out or you’re a K-pop veteran. Ever wondered what some of the best debut songs of all time are? Here’s a quick rundown!
2NE1 – Fire
2NE1’s debut single “Fire” was released in May 2009 and became an instant success in South Korea. This fiery debut song is a combination of hip-hop and reggae with a fun music video; you can really see why this is one of the best debut songs of all time. 2NE1’s debut song really got the attention of K-pop fans around the world!
EXO – MAMA
When EXO’s “MAMA” was released in 2012, their unique and powerful performance was instantly big talk in the K-pop community. Combining R&B, rock guitars, and an orchestra created a unique concept which proved to be a smash hit, as the music video alone has over 49 million YouTube views!
BLACKPINK – Boombayah
BLACKPINK might have only just debuted this year, but “Boombayah” has proved it will be a legendary song for the K-pop industry. The lyrics and music video ooze confidence and sex appeal, placing the rookies high up on the charts! Now, if only I could get my hair flips to look as good as theirs…
SHINee – Replay
It is almost impossible to think about the best debut songs of all time without including a classic, an oldie but a goodie, SHINee’s “Replay.” This debut track has a sophisticated R&B rhythm, iconic dance moves, and lyrics that you can’t help but get stuck in your head. This song gained huge success, even creating a SHINee trend of skinny jeans and colorful sweaters.
Girls’ Generation – Into the New World
Girls’ Generation first came onto the scene in 2007 with their debut song “Into the New World.” Selling over 10,000 copies in its first month of release, the song became number one again 10 years later, showcasing its popularity. This sweet song has since paved the way for all debuting girl groups, becoming a legendary debut song.
TWICE – Like Ohh-Ahh
TWICE’s debut song “Like Ooh Ahh” is a recent release with a big impact! Within just one year of release, it hit over 100 million views and became the first debut music video to do so. This will surely be a debut song to remember for many years to come.
MAMAMOO – Mr. Ambiguous
MAMAMOO officially debuted in 2014 with the song “Mr. Ambiguous,” considered one of the best debuts of the year. Their powerful vocals and captivating performances have led them to win many awards and nominations.
SISTAR – Push Push
“Push Push” was released in 2010 by girl group SISTAR and is a song that really makes you want to get up and dance! The members showcase their cute and sexy personalities in the music video and have continually impressed fans with their vocals and ability to break typical beauty standards.
BIGBANG – We Belong Together
BIGBANG’s “Big Bang,” also known as “We Belong Together,” was released in 2006 and is such an iconic debut! The members both composed and performed the song, creating one of the biggest K-pop groups of all time. The song was so successful, it remained in the charts for eight months.
miss A – Bad Girl, Good Girl
miss A only debuted in 2010, but were an instant success with their debut song “Bad Girl, Good Girl.” It topped various charts in South Korea, even beating established artists! The music video has since surpassed 40 million views as the members showcased their impressive dancing abilities and vocals.
Hey Soompiers, what do you think are some of the best debut songs? Let us know in the comments!
daisyamy is a psychology student from the UK who loves SHINee, flowers, k-beauty, travelling, and anything pink! You can follow daisyamy on Instagram or Twitter to see what she’s up to!You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with
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Using the tool simply involves placing it on top of the pull-up cord, wrapping it over, positioning your hand properly, and pulling. The tool dislodges once tension is removed from the pull-up cord and you can then quickly start passing it through the next grommet. For the final pull before putting in the pin, wrapping the pull-up cord around the tool completely is recommended just to prevent any chance of the cord slipping out.
PUCA Tool can also do a variety of other different things. You can carry grocery bags with it, hold a leash, start your lawnmower (if the handle breaks), pull small strings, etc. It provides you with a comfortable grip for just about any thin, soft, flexible material.
Fits one or multiple plastic bags at once.
Pulling 550 paracord, for example.
The Notch:
This is the feature that makes the tool work. Inspired by sailing cleats, the notch utilizes cord tension and friction to immobilize your pull-up cord by compressing it into its progressively smaller gap. Once tension is removed and the tool is nudged slightly, the cord releases without a hitch. Testing showed that the notch could handle a pull up cord without wrapping it around, but it’s still recommended to wrap the cord around the tool once to eliminate any chance of slippage.
It’s also been optimized to lock pull-up standard pull-up cords just the right amount: not too loose and not too tight, therefore you can choose pull-up cords depending on you preferred level of security.
Here’s the fun part: the notch feature of the PUCA Tool allows you to use materials other than pull-up cords as well. Anything as wide as a shoelace works, anything thinner may need to be wrapped around a couple times.
Don’t worry about damage to your pull up cord either. The compression force doesn’t wear your cord any more than the closing loop does already. It may warp the cord over time but it’ll always remain functional. Finally, although unconfirmed, the PUCA Tool, in theory, may lead to fewer closing loop replacements. Unlike other tools that tend to sway and grind against closing loops, the PUCA tool forces the pull up cord into a linear orientation and prevents any friction.
A Very Thought-Out Bottle Opener:
Given that beer is an end-of-the day ritual for so many people, skydivers especially, it only made sense to incorporate a bottle opener on the end of the tool as well. The best part is, it opens beers at an ideal angle, 127 degrees to be exact. At this angle, the wrist stays relaxed and can use its full range of motion to pry off the cap standing between you and liquid gold. Works like a charm.
From the beginning of this project, it was apparent that balancing size and comfort was going to be the most influential part of the Tool’s design. In other words, there were two different approaches: either make something really comfortable but expensive and bulky, or design the tool to be ultra-compact (like current packing tools) but uncomfortable and perhaps inadequate.
The PUCA Tool falls perfectly in the middle: Comfortable and Compact.
Countless iterations, 3D-Printed prototypes, and tests have led to a design that is only as big as it needs to be. Big hands just barely fit all four fingers across the tools 3 inch grip surface. Smaller hands have a bit more room to work with.
Yet, it remains comfortable thanks to its airfoil like profile which follows the contours of your fingers rather than simply being a blunt object to pull on.
Think of using the PUCA Tool as tug of war with a solid rope rather than dental floss. A larger and more rounded surface distributes force across a greater surface area in multiple directions. Thin materials exert a high degree of force on a concentrated area which causes discomfort.
Additionally, to account for varying finger lengths and diameters, and to ensure that all fingers experience a similar amount of force, the leading edge of the PUCA tool has a very particular swept contour. The notch has also been rotated 9.2Degrees
All of these considerations and details work together to make it feel like your pulling less weight.
Suit Pocket - For the most security, keep it in your jumpsuit pocket. Unless you have a really tight suit, the tool's smooth profile and small size prevents it from digging into your ribs while you fly.
Leg Strap - Tie it around your harness D-Ring and store it in your leg strap for super-quick access on the packing mat.
Arm
The bungee cord also doubles as a wrist strap so that you can keep it close at all times or just to swing it around your arm for endless fun. Don’t let it fly off and hit anybody though… just a warning from experience (Sorry Pat).
Keys
The key ring allows you to put it among the other things on your keys.
Or, buy a couple for everyone to share on the DZ!
You can also store your pull-up cord on the PUCA Tool by either wrapping it into the notch or slipping it through the key ring.
Given the low number of parts being made, it's hard to keep the cost of them low. I am a firm believer in the idea of a'skydiving community' and that we should help each other out wherever possible. So, I took an altruistic approach. I've priced the PUCA Tool to make barely any money. The only profit coming out of this project is to cover what I've put in already and to cover some surplus parts/stock for keeping the project going after the campaign.
Depending on demand, the PUCA Tool will utilize one of two potential designs, each suited to a particular manufacturing process. In either case, the 316 Grade stainless steel midplate and screws will remain unchanged. However, the plastic shell will adapt to the optimal manufacturing technique.
100 – 1000 PUCA Tools (Funded $3,300 - around $20,000)
Once the lowest minimum order quantity has been met, this range of PUCA Tool shells will be spun cast using a strong UV-resistant thermoset resin with an addition of tiny glass particles for reinforcement. Spin casting is an amazing alternative to injection molding. Relatively, it is really cheap and produces exact replicas of any intended part. It is important to note that some minor imperfections are possible as a result of this process but I plan to work with John Kerst at Newnaks, a highly experienced spin caster, and will examine all parts prior to installation so there should be no unacceptable surprises.
1000+ PUCA Tools. (Funded around $20,000+)
If this campaign calls for more than a thousand PUCA Tools, injection molding is the only logical method to get them produced in time, and possible only in producing such a large amount due to its high upfront costs. These shells will be injection molded with a 33% glass-reinforced nylon (PA66) which is one of the strongest resin and reinforcement combinations available. These tools will not only look and feel exceptional but will also resist bending, impact, and wear. They’ll literally last forever.
As a student, a skydiver, and a tunnel instructor, (one of the worst combinations for a solid bank account), I am nowhere near being able to fund this project on my own. Your funds are the backbone of making this project possible. The manufacturers have set minimum order quantities that need to be met in order for this product to become a reality. In essence, without a large manufacturing run, no PUCA Tools can exist. With your support, we can get the PUCA Tool into the hands of as many jumper and non-jumpers as possible. Also, as somebody who loves skydiving and wishes to continue to use their design skills and manufacturing knowledge to advance the sport, you’re also helping me build my confidence and experience as a designer and, consequently, supporting the progression of our sport as well.
I truly appreciate your support, your time, and considerations. Thank you!
I've timed timed everything so that all backers get their PUCA Tools by the time it's nice and jumpable outside.
“I pull my cord three times when closing the container… Does that mean I have to take the tool on and off each time?”
Answer: You definitely can. Image closing like you would with a normal pull up cord, except you now have a handle to pull the cord with. Since the tool slips on and off of the pull-up cords easily, you can use it to pull your cord each time you pass it through a new grommet/flap. Or, if you close like I do, you can just pass the cord through all of the grommets first, wrap the cord around the tool and just pull once.
"$300 for 10 minutes!?"
Answer: Beer and/or a meal included after flying (place of your choice at the MB Financial park). Plus, that little extra boosts the campaign immensely.
The PUCA Tools portrayed on the page and in the video is are both 3D printed and aluminum prototypes (One finished, one not). The production version may look different, but most likely better.
The PUCA Tool is merely a parachute container closing assistance device that works in combination with pull-up cords. It does not replace any of the steps necessary for safe parachute operation, nor does it guarantee it. When using the PUCA Tool, the user is still required to insert a closing pin and check for a properly activated pilot chute. Always be sure to securely stow the PUCA Tool to prevent dislodgement during freefall and never bring it with you inside of a wind tunnel. Do not use the PUCA Tool outside of its intended functions and be sure to adhere to the recommended process for best results and/or to reduce the risk of injury.How did global warming discussions end up hinging on what's happening with polar bears, unverifiable predictions of what will happen in a hundred years, and whether people are "climate deniers" or "global warming cultists?" If this is a scientific topic, why aren't we spending more time discussing the science involved? Why aren't we talking about the evidence and the actual data involved? Why aren't we looking at the predictions that were made and seeing if they match up to the results? If this is such an open and shut case, why are so many people who care about science skeptical? Many Americans have long since thought that the best scientific evidence available suggested that man wasn't causing any sort of global warming. However, now, we can go even further and suggest that the planet isn't warming at all.
1) There hasn't been any global warming since 1997: If nothing changes in the next year, we're going to have kids who graduate from high school who will have never seen any "global warming" during their lifetimes. That's right; the temperature of the planet has essentially been flat for 17 years. This isn't a controversial assertion either. Even the former Director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, Phil Jones, admits that it's true. Since the planet was cooling from 1940-1975 and the upswing in temperature afterward only lasted 22 years, a 17 year pause is a big deal. It also begs an obvious question: How can we be experiencing global warming if there's no actual "global warming?"
2) There is no scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and caused by man: Questions are not decided by "consensus." In fact, many scientific theories that were once widely believed to be true were made irrelevant by new evidence. Just to name one of many, many examples, in the early seventies, scientists believed global cooling was occurring. However, once the planet started to warm up, they changed their minds. Yet, the primary "scientific" argument for global warming is that there is a "scientific consensus" that it's occurring. Setting aside the fact that's not a scientific argument, even if that ever was true (and it really wasn't), it's certainly not true anymore. Over 31,000 scientists have signed on to a petition saying humans aren't causing global warming. More than 1000 scientists signed on to another report saying there is no global warming at all. There are tens of thousands of well-educated, mainstream scientists who do not agree that global warming is occurring at all and people who share their opinion are taking a position grounded in science.
3) Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012: The loss of Arctic ice has been a big talking point for people who believe global warming is occurring. Some people have even predicted that all of the Arctic ice would melt by now because of global warming. Yet, Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012. How much Arctic ice really matters is an open question since the very limited evidence we have suggests that a few decades ago, there was less ice than there is today
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relatives in North Korea are still alive. North Korea and the United States must address this urgent humanitarian issue before time runs out. They must establish a government-led reunion mechanism to allow families from both sides of the Pacific to connect.”
Representative Charles B. Rangel (D-NY), who introduced H.Con.Res.40, said that as a Korean War veteran who fought in the Kunuri battle almost 70 years ago, he couldn’t be more proud that his last bill to pass in Congress would give some hope to those families who have been separated by their loved ones.
“I may be retiring from Congress, but I will never stop being a friend to Koreans and an advocate for peace on the Peninsula,” Rangel said. “It is my sincere hope that the family reunions could start soon and that I will see a reunified Korea in my lifetime.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA), an original cosponsor of H.Con.Res.40, said the U.S. Congress has spoken with one, unified voice.
“The North Korean regime should allow millions of families torn apart during the Korean War to be reunited,” Royce said. “A large number of these families’ members are elderly, so time is of the essence. These families deserve one last opportunity to be with loved ones they’ve not seen in 60 years.”
In 2016, the Council of Korean Americans (CKA) began lobbying the Congress on H.Con.Res.40 and engaging policymakers about this tragic issue. CKA has urged the White House, Department of State, and presidential candidates to address this longstanding issue on behalf of the Korean American community.
In June, CKA hosted a public briefing at the Brookings Institution in Washington that was widely attended.
CKA is proud to collaborate with fellow Korean American groups to advance this issue. In particular, we wish to thank Divided Families USA for their partnership and look forward to advancing this important humanitarian issue together in 2017 and beyond.
*A concurrent resolution does not require the approval of the president and is typically adopted to regulate internal affairs of the legislature. It does not have the force of law, but it is a powerful tool to educate lawmakers and the American public about an issue that affects this country.
For more information about divided families, please email [email protected]
CKA is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization of successful Korean American leaders. Our mission is to assert a strong, clear voice on issues vital to Korean Americans while helping them engage in American society to achieve meaningful success.TRENTON — State Sen. Barbara Buono today announced she’s running for governor, becoming the first high-profile Democrat to launch a campaign aimed at toppling popular Republican incumbent Chris Christie next year.
"It’s time for a leader in Trenton who will put the middle class first — lifting our schools instead of scapegoating our teachers; protecting property taxpayers rather than pushing income tax cuts for millionaires," Buono (D-Middlesex) said in a email message to supporters.
Buono’s announcement comes as New Jersey’s political world awaits word from the Democratic Party’s biggest name: Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who said he will decide whether he’s running for governor within the next two weeks.
While Buono is in the race, other high profile candidates will likely be scared off by a Booker candicacy. If Booker doesn’t run, Buono could face a crowded field of challengers, including her bitter rival, Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester).
Once entrenched in party leadership, the 59-year-old lawyer has repeatedly butted heads with top Democrats as they embraced elements of Christie’s agenda, including shifting greater health and pension costs onto public workers. That means that while she may get the support of public worker unions, Buono faces an uphill climb in a state where primaries are often won or lost based on support from county parties and power brokers.
"I’m not going to run a conventional campaign," Buono said in a three-minute video message that accompanied her announcement. "And I won’t be anointed by the political bosses. Instead, I’ll stake my chances on the folks at grocery stores and train stations"
Buono, a native of Nutley who has lived in Metuchen for decades, has the inside track in her home county of Middlesex, one of the seven counties considered critical for success in the primary.
"I would think she would get overwhelming support (in the county)," said state Sen. Bob Smith, an influential Democrat from Middlesex.
Buono’s announcement was of little surprise. In recent weeks, she placed ads for a campaign manager, hired speech coaches and attended the Democratic Governors Association winter meeting in California.
She told supporters today that "grassroots donations and neighbor-to-neighbor organizing is going to be the foundation of our campaign for change."
Booker’s top political strategist, Mark Matzen, did not return phone calls today seeking comment.
Sweeney today said he plans to decide soon on whether to run for governor or U.S. Senate in 2014. "I have a lot of options," he said.
The Star-Ledger recently reported Sweeney has told at least three Democrats that he plans to run for governor if Booker refuses.
State Sen. Richard Codey (D-Essex) is also weighing a run, promising a decision before the end of the year. Asked about Buono’s announcement, he said: "Good luck. She’s a good Democrat."
Christie’s top political strategist Michael DuHaime was ready for the Buono announcement.
"I think Barbara represents all the failed tax and spend policies of the McGreevey and Corzine era," DuHaime said. "She has voted for $5.5 billion in tax and fee increases over the years."
Speaking to business leaders in Woodbridge today, Christie, who announced his re-election bid two weeks ago, didn’t mention any Democrat by name, but sounded very much like a candidate.
"Do we want to go back to the failed partisanship of today or do we want to work together to provide people with a hopeful and successful tomorrow?" he asked.
Buono has carved out space on the liberal side of the Democratic Party in Trenton, pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy, increases in the minimum wage and for the legalization of gay marriage. Before she was booted from the Senate Budget Committee for bucking party leadership, Buono also built a reputation as supporter of small businesses and boosting property tax relief.
Buono has worked hard at cultivating a relationship with Emily’s List, a national organization that helps progressive-minded women get elected which spent $51 million on candidates this year.
"It’s great to see so many women throw their hats in the ring for critical governor’s races," said Jess McIntosh, a spokeswoman for the group. "We look forward to continuing to talk to her."
Recent polls show Buono trailing Christie by as many as 40 points.
Star-Ledger staff writer Jenna Portnoy contributed to this report.
Related coverage:
• State Sen. Barbara Buono posts ad seeking campaign manager for gubernatorial run
• Cory Booker says Gov. Christie's bid for re-election has no bearing on decision to run
• Gov. Christie has strong support of N.J. voters, new poll shows
• Gov. Christie enjoys significant lead against potential Democratic opponents, poll saysCar-sharing companies like Zipcar, Maven, Getaround and Gig have peppered Bay Area communities with on-demand vehicles for short-term rentals, but many of those companies — and their vehicles — are in still in short supply in low-income neighborhoods.
That’s what makes a recent grant from the California Energy Commission unique. The state agency awarded Los Angeles-based Envoy Technologies $1.5 million to install charging stations and shared electric vehicles in Bay Area and Sacramento communities most burdened by air pollution, which also tend to be neighborhoods with high concentrations of low-income residents.
It’s been a challenge so far for these shared vehicle companies to operate in disadvantaged communities, said Clarrissa Cabansagan, a transportation planner with the nonprofit advocacy group, TransForm. Cost, language barriers and the need to use credit cards, which aren’t always accessible to low-income residents, are major barriers, she said, as is access to a smartphone, which is necessary for these services.
But, that doesn’t mean there isn’t demand.
{snip}
“The California Energy Commission grant allows us to not only deploy the vehicles at minimal cost, but to also subsidize the cost for users,” he said. “We thought this was the perfect opportunity to test our business model.”
The locations are still being determined, but Ohana said by March, the company plans to have 30 vehicles spread across 15 sites in San Mateo, San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa counties. The company is working with consultants to help their app work for people who don’t have bank accounts. And, they’re experimenting with different pricing and time-limit schemes to find an approach that’s profitable in under-served communities.
{snip}
Original Article
Share ThisWilliam Hesmer officially retired today according to a story by Clemente Lisi on the US Soccer Players website. Hesmer played 140 games in MLS over the course of his nine year career with Kansas City and the Columbus Crew.
Hesmer played college soccer at Wake Forest before being picked up by Kansas City in 2004. He failed to make an appearance until his third year when he started three games.
Hesmer was then picked up by Toronto FC in the 2006 Expansion Draft, but was immediately traded with Danny O'Rourke to the Crew. After recovering from a leg injury he started 20 games and cemented himself as the team's starting 'keeper.
He backstopped the 2008 MLS Cup winning side, playing 29 games, racking up 17 wins and 10 shutouts. He played all four games in the playoffs, including the Cup 3-1 win against New York on his 27th birthday.
Hesmer would remain the team's starter through the 2011 season. He'd continue to play well; including notching a game tiying goal against Toronto in 2010. He became only the second goalkeeper to score in league play. His hold on the starting position ended when a hip injury forced him into season ending surgery last March. He played his last game against Colorado in the playoffs on October 27th, 2011.
Hesmer would go on to play regular season 130 games for the team locking up several records in the process. He is the team's career leader in wins with 59, shutouts with 41, saves with 412, and is tied with the best winning percentage with %58.
Hesmer was never the most imposing physical specimen. He didn't have the sharp, instinctive reflexes that Andy Gruenebaum has. He worked tirelessly on the mental side of goalkeeping, always being in the right place and playing the angles perfectly. He was also the soft spoken leader in the locker room.
After being let go from the Crew in December and failing to come to terms with Los Angeles after being picked up in the reentry draft, Hesmer quickly has moved on. He got married in December and has already moved to North Carolina and is pursuing his second career with Raymond James.http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Website/Reddit
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load more tropesThe Denver Broncos’ injury report against the Tennessee Titans is about a mile long, which isn’t all that surprising considering the three game stretch they just went through (vs. KC, @NE, @KC), but aside from three players, everyone was a full participant in practice on Thursday.
Only Trindon Holliday and Derek Wolfe didn’t participate for the Broncos, and wide receiver Demaryius Thomas (shoulder) was limited.
That means that star tight end Julius Thomas–who has missed the Broncos’ last two games and some of the first KC game–was a full participant in practice on Thursday, and if all goes according to plan leading up to the game, he’s expected to suit up and play on Sunday against the Titans.
This will be a big boost for the Broncos’ offense, of course, which has used a combination of Jacob Tamme, Virgil Green, and Joel Dreessen in Thomas’ absence. Thomas is such a great athlete and a mismatch on nickel corners, and it will be key having him back against the Titans, which have a very athletic defense.
The Broncos also got some great news in regards to cornerback Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, who was also a full participant in practice. DRC was injured in the first half blowout against New England, when he foolishly dove for a hail mary pass by Tom Brady that would have landed safely on the ground as time expired.
It was rumored during that game that DRC would be probable to return, but he hasn’t played since. Hopefully he’s fully recovered and can get back to shutting down opposing receivers.Left-wing supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have called on the Labour leader to to "condemn clearly and specifically" the bombing of civilians by Russia and the Assad regime in Syria.
In an open letter published by the Syria Solidarity UK campaign group, they accuse Mr Corbyn and the wider anti-war campaign of "silence and inaction in the face of such momentous atrocities".
More than 70 people have put their names to the letter, including many members of the Labour party, Momentum and union activists.
Russia has been accused of war crimes for its involvement in the bombing of rebel-held areas of Aleppo in northern Syria. Thousands have been killed by the aerial attacks, most of them civilians.
Mr Corbyn was an opponent of the Government's decision to begin military action against Isil targets in Syria, and voted against it in the Commons last December.
He was also criticised for failing to refer to Russia or its involvement in the Aleppo atrocities in his speech to the Labour conference two weeks ago.
In their open letter to the Labour leader, published last night, the activists say: "We agree wholeheartedly with your opposition to militarism and nuclear weapons, and your call for an end to British arms exports to countries such as Saudi Arabia. Yet we are concerned by your silence – thus far – on the ongoing slaughter of civilians by Russian and Assad-regime forces in Syria.
"We share your scepticism about knee-jerk military responses to the situation in Syria, such as the bombing campaign against ISIS proposed by David Cameron last autumn. We are not asking you to back western interventions of this kind, but simply to say clearly and unequivocally that the actions of Assad and Russia in Syria are barbaric war crimes, and that you will seek to end them, and to hold their perpetrators to account."
They add: "The fact that Assad is supported not by the USA or Britain, but by Russia and Iran, does not make his crimes any less horrific, or the political future he represents for the people of Syria any less dismal. Nor does it mean that western political leaders are powerless in acting to oppose these crimes.
"We appreciate your concern not to lend support to right-wing calls for fruitless bombing campaigns. But in the face of the horrors being perpetrated across Syria, with impunity, and above all by Russian and Assad regime forces, we believe socialists and anti-war activists cannot simply look on in silence.
"We ask that you condemn, clearly and specifically, the actions of Assad and Russia in Syria, which have caused the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths and which present the biggest obstacle to any workable solution to the Syrian crisis."
The letter goes on: "'Food not bombs' should be the rallying cry, not 'Hands off Syria', which only gives the Assad regime and Russia carte blanche to continue with their slaughter.
"Failure to act on this issue now threatens to undermine practically and politically much of the work done over many years by the anti-war movement. The legacy of yourself and the anti-war movement over Syria must not be one of silence and inaction in the face of such momentous atrocities."
A spokesman for Mr Corbyn said: "Jeremy has always been clear on Syria and how we achieve peace. More bombing in Syria will not solve the problem. There has to be a negotiated political solution led by Syrians and backed by the main regional and international forces."The number of experienced barbers in Wellington is receding like a dodgy hairline, the industry says.
While Wellingtonians may have noticed new barbershops sprouting up, many are advertising for months, if not years, to become fully staffed.
A surge in demand for men's grooming, coupled with the boom in new shops, is making for slim pickings in those capable of holding the clippers because there is no easy path to training.
Barber Tuigamala Andy Tauasiafi co-owns Killa Kutz – where Julian Savea gets his locks shaved or 'faded' – and has been advertising a role for two years.
He said it was difficult finding a person with the right experience and attitude. Recently they hired a young man who had been cutting his friends' hair at school.
It was a reasoned punt to take as Tauasiafi learnt his trade at college, doing cuts in the lunchbreak for $1, enough for a Georgie Pie pie, and saving with his mates to go 10-ways on a pair of clippers.
"If you were in a rugby team you were cutting at school all the time," he said.
"You can teach as much as you want [in training] but the experience of doing it is where you get it from."
Custom Cutz barber Simon Kelland said he also struggled to find staff and the shortage was evident in the "quality of haircuts walking around Wellington".
"I don't know what you could put it down to, but there's a good barber shortage in Wellington."
The shop has cut the famous locks of the Governor-General Sir Jerry Mateparae and Phoenix player Roy Krishna.
Part of the problem could be there wasn't a set training path for those who wanted to get into the industry.
"And people don't seem to take apprentices on anymore, that old style of apprenticeship learning has gone out the window," he said.
Up the road in Woodward Street Barbers, there is a steady stream of well-suited men lining up for a cut.
Barber Deby Stonyer said they had been looking for a new staff member for two months, but had not had any luck.
HTO hair and beauty industry training organisation boss Erica Cumming said barbers needed to get back into the tradition of taking on keen newbies and training them up in-house.
"Sometimes you need to grow your own."
That was exactly what Boar & Blade owner Brendan Blake was doing. Each of the barbers in his chain of traditional barbershops were trained by him.
"I was trained by fourth and fifth generation barbers, the techniques, the secrets of the trade, were handed down," he said.
While there was a barber course in Auckland, it was costly and very short.
"I'll handpick someone on their personality and passion, and I'll train them up - whether they have trained before or not."
THE ART OF MEN'S HAIR
Gone are the days of barbershops offering a traditional short back and sides or the infamous bowl cut, now it is all about the "zero fade".
Fading is using a razor and clippers to shave the hair on the back and sides from bald around the ears to longer at the top. It has been made popular with all ages by the likes of Julian Savea and Sonny Bill Williams.
Many kids (and adults) get patterns worked into the fade, such as zig-zags, stars, lines, even silver ferns.
Barbershops also offer a wide range of grooming options from eye-brow shaping to beard trimming and oiling, hot-towel shaves and cut-throat shaves.
Beard trims will set a Wellington man back from $5 to $30, depending on the shop and the size of the beard.
Cut-throat shaves are about $50 across the city.
And for that zero-fade like SBW? That will cost stylish Wellington men about $35.The city of San Diego is launching a new effort to clean up nine specific areas of the city struggling with excessive litter and illegal dumping.
"We've identified nine hot spots for illegal littering and dumping," said Angela Colton, waste reduction deputy director in the city's Environmental Services Department.
A one-year pilot project will target Ocean Beach, Point Loma, Logan Heights, San Ysidro, City Heights, Paradise Valley. The project will also focus on three combination zones: Mission Beach/Pacific Beach, Webster/Mount Hope in southeastern San Diego and the South Bay area near the international border.
Mayor Kevin Faulconer included $800,000 for the program in revisions he made to his proposed budget for the fiscal year that began July 1.
Because the new program is a one-year experiment, the city plans to rely on workers supplied by the Urban Corps of San Diego instead of hiring new employees.
Many of those staffers work for the Urban Corps to fulfill community service requirements of plea bargains.
"They will be going to each of these nine areas throughout the week and picking up any illegal littering or dumping and identifying any graffiti and reporting that over to the Streets Division," Colton said.
Under the new program, which will supplement work already conducted by city crews and people on probation, each of the areas will be visited by crews cleaning up litter and dump sites at least four days a week.
While the workers won't be eradicating graffiti, they will help speed up the city's response by reporting it more quickly than private citizens generally do.
If you have any tips or complaints about excessive litter, illegal dumping or graffiti, click here to check out the “Get it Done,” app launched by the city last year.Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis defied court orders by refusing to issue marriage licenses, and now steps have been taken to hold her in contempt of court.
A motion was filed Tuesday, asking U.S. District Judge David Bunning to hold Davis in contempt. Davis has until the end of the day Wednesday to respond to that motion. Bunning scheduled a contempt hearing for 11 a.m. Thursday in Ashland. At that time, the gay couples will have to present evidence, which could include testimony from Davis herself. Bunning would then decide on punishment. That could include fines, jail time or both, but the motion asks the judge to impose only financial penalties.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to intervene in the case, leaving Davis no legal grounds to refuse to grant licenses to gay couples.
Tuesday's court maneuver comes after Davis refused to process marriage licenses.
Davis showed up for work just after 7 a.m. Tuesday and, about an hour later, she denied a couple that sought a marriage license.
A deputy clerk told April Miller and Karen Roberts, who walked into the office trailed by dozens of television cameras, that no licenses would be issued and refused to make Davis available.
A second couple, David Moore and David Ermold, rejected a fourth time, demanded to speak with Davis.
Ermold shouted: "Tell her to come out and face the people she's discriminating against."
Davis was initially in her office, with the door and the blinds closed. However, eventually came out.
Ermold: "I would never do what you are doing to us to someone."
"You believe passionately about something as do I," Davis responded.
Ermold: "We aren't leaving without a license...then you're going to have a long day."
When confronted with the fact her temporary stay was up, she responded by saying while the stay is up she however is not done with her appeals
"We aren't giving licenses today pending appeals process," Davis said. She added that her office is doing so "under God's authority."
Ermold: "Did God tell you to do this?"
Davis: "I have told you all to leave...you are interrupting my business."
Ermold: "You can call the police if you want us to leave...I pay your salary, I pay you to discriminate against me right now."
"I just want her out. Whatever that means. If that means they have to fine her, if that means they have to jail her. Whatever that they do, that's not what's important to me. Get her out of office and get someone that's going to do the job. Not just do it, but to do it happily," Ermold told WKYT Tuesday evening.
Later Tuesday, Davis issued a statement through Liberty Counsel, saying she won't resign or violate her religious beliefs about same-sex couples.
The statement says that despite calls for her resignation, Davis has done her job well. But she says that issuing marriage licenses to gay couples would "violate my conscience."
Davis calls it "a Heaven or Hell decision."
Davis also it's is not "a gay or lesbian issue," but rather a "matter of religious liberty, which is protected under the First Amendment."
Rowan County Judge Executive Doc Blevins said Tuesday evening he expects something serious to happen at Thursday's hearing.
"It's all in the judge's hands. She's not been following what the judge told her to do. She's exhausted all her opportunities to get a stay or to prolong this. I think the judge will probably come down pretty hard on her," Blevins said.
The Liberty Counsel on Tuesday issued the following statement by Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis:
I have worked in the Rowan County Clerk's office for 27 years as a Deputy Clerk and was honored to be elected as the Clerk in November 2014, and took office in January 2015.
I love my job and the people of Rowan County. I have never lived any place other than Rowan County. Some people have said I should resign, but I have done my job well.
This year we are on track to generate a surplus for the county of $1.5 million.
In addition to my desire to serve the people of Rowan County, I owe my life to Jesus Christ who loves me and gave His life for me. Following the death of my godly mother-in-law over four years ago, I went to church to fulfill her dying wish.
There I heard a message of grace and forgiveness and surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. I am not perfect. No one is. But I am forgiven and I love my Lord and must be obedient to Him and to the Word of God.
I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage.
To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God's definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience. It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision. For me it is a decision of obedience.
I have no animosity toward anyone and harbor no ill will. To me this has never been a gay or lesbian issue. It is about marriage and God's Word.
It is a matter of religious liberty, which is protected under the First Amendment, the Kentucky Constitution, and in the Kentucky Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Our history is filled with accommodations for people's religious freedom and conscience.
I want to continue to perform my duties, but I also am requesting what our Founders envisioned - that conscience and religious freedom would be protected.
That is all I am asking. I never sought to be in this position, and I would much rather not have been placed in this position. I have received death threats from people who do not know me. I harbor nothing against them.
I was elected by the people to serve as the County Clerk. I intend to continue to serve the people of Rowan County, but I cannot violate my conscience.
Source: http://www.lc.org/index.cfm?PID=14102&AlertID=1965
WKYT's Hillary Thornton is at the Rowan County Courthouse covering the fallout.
Tweets by @HillaryWKYT
Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis quickly became a trending topic on Twitter
Tweets about "Kim Davis"MEDINAH, Ill. -- Phil Mickelson and Keegan Bradley helped stake the Americans to their biggest lead in the Ryder Cup in more than 30 years. Ian Poulter, eyes bulging and fists shaking with every clutch putt, at least gave Europe some big momentum over the final frantic hour Saturday at Medinah.
Right when it looked as if the Americans were a lock to win back the cup, Poulter birdied his last five holes to win a crucial point and keep everyone guessing. Steady chants of "USA! USA!" gave way to snappy serenades of "Ole, Ole" as both sides trudged to the team rooms in darkness to prepare for 12 singles matches on Sunday.
The Americans still had a big lead, 10-6. Europe at least had hope.
"The last two putts were massive," European captain Jose Maria Olazabal said after watching Poulter stay undefeated in this Ryder Cup by rolling in one last birdie putt from 12 feet. "That gives us a chance. It's been done before in the past. Tomorrow is a big day."
Only one team has ever rallied from four points behind on the final day -- the United States in that famous comeback at Brookline in 1999. Olazabal remembers it well. He was in the decisive match when Justin Leonard rolled in a 45-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole.
Is the Spaniard a big believer in fate?
"I believe momentum will come our way," Olazabal said. "Why not tomorrow?"
Olazabal borrowed a page from that American team at Brookline by loading the top of his singles lineup with his best players. Luke Donald leads off against Bubba Watson, followed by Poulter against Webb Simpson, Rory McIlroy against Bradley and Justin Rose against Mickelson.
U.S. captain Davis Love III put Tiger Woods -- winless in the Ryder Cup for the first time going into Sunday -- in the anchor position against Francesco Molinari, whom Woods beat in Wales last time.
The final two matches Saturday were a showcase of what the Ryder Cup is all about -- one brilliant shot after another, birdies on every hole, suspense at every turn.
Donald and Sergio Garcia were on the verge of blowing a 4-up lead to hard-charging Woods and Steve Stricker, hanging on when Donald matched two birdies with Woods, including a tee shot into the 17th that plopped down 2 feet from the cup.
Woods and Stricker lost all three of their matches, even though Woods made five birdies on the back nine for the second straight day.
Woods was thinking more of the big picture.
"Being up four is nice," he said. "We are in a great spot right now to win the cup."
Poulter and McIlroy were 2 down with six holes to play against Jason Dufner and Zach Johnson when McIlroy made a 15-foot birdie putt on the 13th, and Poulter took it from there.PITTSBURGH — A Pennsylvania company plans to invest $380 million to expand natural gas pipelines in the state, and ultimately link to markets in New Jersey and New York.
Penn Virginia Resource Partners, L.P., of Radnor, said Monday that some of the expansions to its Lycoming County pipeline in central Pennsylvania will begin in the next two weeks and be finished later this year. Other parts of the project will continue through 2018.
CEO William H. Shea, Jr. said in a statement that the expansions are part of a long-term plan to help bring the bountiful gas production from Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale to markets in the northeast and New England, where heating oil is used extensively.
Shea said the company has signed a 20-year distribution agreement with a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell PLC, as well as agreements with Southwestern Energy Co. and Range Resources Co. to extend an existing pipeline an additional 19 miles into Tioga County.
The new project will also eventually connect PVR's existing pipeline to Shell's system in Bradford County.
The company said it ultimately plans to connect its pipelines to the Tennessee Gas Pipeline, an El Paso Co. project that stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.Iggy Azalea is one of hip hop's most exciting new artists, as well as one of the genre's most unexpected success stories. Her rise to prominence is notable not only for what seems like its immediacy, but for how infrequently someone like her makes it to the top. If you're not keeping up to date on your rap culture or much into top 40 radio, you should know that she is not your typical hip hop star.
Just a few weeks ago, her album "The New Classic" became the highest charting debut album by a female rapper since Nicki Minaj back in 2010, starting at number three. The position is impressive considering she is a brand new name in this country, and she had only achieved her first top 40 hit a few weeks prior.
Making a name for yourself as a woman and hip hop is laudable enough, forget the fact that she is a white, blonde, Australian woman. In a genre dominated almost exclusively by African American men she sticks out like a statuesque thumb.
In fact, women are so few and far between in the field that the Grammys had to discard their separate category, which many genres had up for years. For a few years there was a Best Female Rap Solo Performance and one for men, but it was discontinued after only two trophies were given out (both to Missy Elliott). After that, both rap and rock only gave out one trophy, and almost always to a man.
In addition to her album’s success, just this past charting week she also became the first woman in hip hop to have two simultaneous hits in the top five of the Billboard Hot 100. Her single "Fancy (ft. Charli XCX)" has quickly risen the ranks to number three, and she is featured on the new Ariana Grande cut "Problem", which debuted at the same ranking last week and is presently sitting at number four. It is rare for any artist to achieve such a feat, let alone a female rapper.
Iggy isn’t the first woman to find success in the genre, but she is the latest and currently the only one representing the gender on the charts. For the past several years, Nicki Minaj has been the prominent woman in hip hop, but it seems there has been a change. Not only has Minaj been oddly quiet for months, she has said she will no longer be releasing radio-ready pop/hip hop blends, instead going back to her pure rap roots, leaving a void to be filled by none other than Iggy.
While this is all happening very quickly for her in America, she has actually been honing her craft for a decade now, first rapping at the age of 14. In the ten years since, she has seen and been through all the trials and tribulations of the industry. While “Fancy” is her first real hit in the United States, she has been commercially successful in other parts of the world for years now. She has actually had four top 20 hits in the UK, and is just beginning the promotion of “The New Classic”.
With so much buzz--and not to mention measurable success--Iggy Azalea is poised to be this year’s breakout music star.
UPDATE: The title of this article has been changed from its original version -- "Hip Hop Is Run By A White, Blonde, Australian Woman" -- because it did not accurately reflect the content of the piece. The author offers sincere apologies to anyone who was offended by it.The seven experts who advised President Obama on how to deal with offshore drilling safety after the Deepwater Horizon explosion are accusing his administration of misrepresenting their views to make it appear that they supported a six-month drilling moratorium -- something they actually oppose.
The experts, recommended by the National Academy of Engineering, say Interior Secretary Ken Salazar modified their report last month, after they signed it, to include two paragraphs calling for the moratorium on existing drilling and new permits.
Salazar's report to Obama said a panel of seven experts "peer reviewed" his recommendations, which included a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs and an immediate halt to drilling operations.
"None of us actually reviewed the memorandum as it is in the report," oil expert Ken Arnold told Fox News. "What was in the report at the time it was reviewed was quite a bit different in its impact to what there is now. So we wanted to distance ourselves from that recommendation."
Salazar apologized to those experts Thursday.
"The experts who are involved in crafting the report gave us their recommendation and their input and I very much appreciate those recommendations," he said. "It was not their decision on the moratorium. It was my decision and the president's decision to move forward."
In a letter the experts sent to Salazar, they said his primary recommendation "misrepresents" their position and that halting the drilling is actually a bad idea.
The oil rig explosion occurred while the well was being shut down – a move that is much more dangerous than continuing ongoing drilling, they said.
They also said that because the floating rigs are scarce and in high demand worldwide, they will not simply sit in the Gulf idle for six months. The rigs will go to the North Sea and West Africa, possibly preventing the U.S. from being able to resume drilling for years.
They also said the best and most advanced rigs will be the first to go, leaving the U.S. with the older and potentially less safe rights operating in the nation's coastal waters.
Fox News' William LaJeunesse contributed to this report.“This is where I came out of the closet… and never went back in.”
Austin, Texas, on a wall filled with other street art next to Homeslice Pizza.
I was on vacation in Austin visiting my family. This trip most definitely had purpose. I was going to come out once and for all.
The year or so leading up to this trip was a very turbulent time of self discovery. I had grown up in a conservative family and really not had any positive exposure to anyone in the LGBT community. I had been denying that I was queer for so long and felt so much guilt and shame about what I was that I had spiraled into depression and anxiety. I always knew I was a lesbian, but also ‘knew’ this was
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know what he earns at Ajax? This isn’t a serious offer. Come Rody, we aren’t going to waste our time.” He got up to leave, so Turpijn dutifully rose too. The chairman pleaded with them to stay. In the next 20 minutes Raiola negotiated a contract (including every imaginable extra) that, writes Turpijn, “largely secured my future. Not only for the four years that I would play for De Graafschap, but just about for the rest of my life.”
The story illustrates one of Raiola’s maxims: even the smallest transfer can change somebody’s life.
© TT/PA Images
Raiola regularly urged Turpijn to be more like Nedved. It didn’t happen: after a disappointing stint at De Graafschap, Turpijn retired from football aged 25, and happily went off to university. However, Raiola’s approach worked on a more ambitious young Ajax footballer he encountered in about 2001 — a Swedish striker of Yugoslav origin named Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Raiola is a central character in I Am Zlatan, Ibrahimovic’s autobiography. No wonder, because perhaps the key influence on the modern footballer’s career is his agent. The relationship is often closer than the much-discussed but typically transient one between coach and player. This is especially true of Raiola, who keeps his stable of players small so as to offer each one a personal service.
The two immigrant boys met in Amsterdam’s chic Japanese restaurant Yamazato. Ibrahimovic had dressed in a suit. “But who the hell turned up? A bloke in jeans and a Nike T-shirt — and that belly, well, like one of the guys in The Sopranos,” he writes in his book. (Raiola believes that not wearing a suit is an advantage, as it leads people to underestimate him.)
Raiola can do good cop or bad cop, and he knew which one Ibrahimovic would respect. As Ibrahimovic tells it, Raiola disdained the Japanese dishes and, while scarfing down enough pasta for six people, berated the striker for underachievement. He asked Ibrahimovic his standard question for footballers: “Do you want to be the best in the world? Or the player who earns most and can show off the most stuff?” Of course Ibrahimovic replied that he wanted to be the best.
The Swede was impressed. He recounts phoning Raiola afterwards to ask him to be his agent:
Raiola: [Long pause] All right. But if you’re going to work with me, you must do what I say. Ibrahimovic: Sure, absolutely. Raiola: Sell your cars, your watches, and start training three times as hard. Because your stats are rubbish.
Soon Ibrahimovic was working like Nedved.
By this time, Raiola’s old enemy Moggi had moved to Italian club Juventus. One day he phoned Raiola to inquire about signing Nedved from Lazio. Raiola recounts the conversation:
Raiola: Do you have a watch? Moggi: Look, don’t be unpleasant. Yes I do. Raiola: What time are we meeting? Moggi: 12pm, in Florence. Raiola: I’ll be there at 11.50am. But I’m leaving at 12.10pm, and then the price doubles.
By 12.10pm Moggi hadn’t shown up, so Raiola left. Nedved did end up joining Juventus, and in 2003 won the Golden Ball award for Europe’s best footballer. Now retired, he remains in touch with Raiola. That’s Raiola: close to his players, hostile to clubs and authorities. (Football’s governing body Fifa once fined him for calling its president Sepp Blatter “a senile dictator”, after which Raiola briefly tried to run for Fifa’s presidency.)
Many of Raiola’s players treat him as an all-purpose helpmeet. Mario Balotelli once phoned him to say his house was on fire; Raiola advised him to try the fire brigade. Nowadays Raiola’s younger players FaceTime him. He moves around imitating them as they hold up their phones to show him things they want to buy: “‘I’m walking through the house. What do you think of it?’” He chuckles fondly.
Does he regard his players as friends? “Ninety-nine per cent of them, yes,” he replies.
So he doesn’t see Pogba as a client? “I don’t see him as a client at all. In fact I dare to say, family.”
I suggest that Raiola has turned the model of a family pizzeria serving a clientele of regulars into a football agency. His eyes brighten: “Unconsciously, yes. When you say that I get a little gooseflesh. And it’s true — we didn’t see ourselves as a pizzeria.”
What were you then? “A home. You came to eat at our home.”
His business model informs the layout of his Haarlem workspace: footballers tend to feel uncomfortable in offices, so the place is essentially structured as a kitchen, with a screen in the corner to show matches. On a kitchen rack is a plate inscribed, “Ristorante Napoli, Haarlem”.
It’s commonly thought that clubs and coaches decide which players to sign. Often, though, the driving force is the agent. Raiola explains, “I always try to formulate a goal with a player: ‘That is what we want. We’re not going to sit and wait and see where the wind blows.’” In 2004 he decided Ibrahimovic should join Italy’s most “extreme” club: Juventus. Dressed in beach shorts and soggy with sweat after an unscheduled sprint through Turin, he did the deal with Moggi for a transfer fee of €16m.
Do you want to be the best in the world? Or the player who earns most and can show off the most stuff?
At Juve, Ibrahimovic saw for himself how hard Nedved trained. “I thought you were exaggerating, but it’s true,” he told Raiola. Nedved told the young striker, “You don’t know what you’ve got.” Ibrahimovic merged the Czech’s work ethic with his own superior talent.
The striker’s 15-year European odyssey reveals one of Raiola’s gifts: anticipating changes in the transfer market. Raiola says, “It sounds arrogant. I saw every change in the football world coming before it happened.” In 2006 it emerged that Moggi habitually phoned referees assigned to Juve matches before the game. Raiola realised that Juve would suffer for this. Months before the club was punished by relegation to Italy’s second division, he arranged Ibrahimovic’s transfer to Inter Milan. In 2009 he moved him to Barcelona — a transfer that went wrong when coach Pep Guardiola dropped the player. Any mention of Guardiola’s name still jolts Raiola into almost instinctive tirades (“a coward”, “no balls” etc) but he quickly dispatched Ibrahimovic to AC Milan.
Then, in 2012, Raiola pushed the player out of Italy. “He didn’t want to go at all. But I’d been telling Milan for years, ‘You can’t afford these salaries any more.’” Italy’s football economy was declining, while rich Qataris had bought Paris Saint-Germain. Ibrahimovic reluctantly moved to Paris — where he earned €14m a year in a top-class team while Milan sank.
Ibrahimovic, after 15 years as a Raiola client, is now cumulatively the second-most expensive footballer in history, after Angel Di María. In that time, clubs have paid an estimated total of €131m in transfer fees for the Swede, whose career alone would have been enough to make Raiola rich. When I ask if he takes 10 per cent of a player’s salary, he replies: “Or more, or less. But that is agreed and is very transparent.” However, he insists that he considers money merely a byproduct of good work.
© Jacopo Raule
Guiding players’ careers sometimes goes wrong. Raiola’s greatest failure may be the Italian striker Mario Balotelli, who is now with modest Nice, his huge talent unfulfilled. Raiola says that Balotelli has often been distracted from achievement by falling in love: “Balotelli has chosen, unconsciously or consciously, not to put football in the middle of his life. So there were always marginal phenomena that influenced his performances. Zlatan doesn’t have that, Pogba doesn’t, Nedved doesn’t. But Ouasim Bouy [an unfulfilled Dutch talent on Raiola’s rota] doesn’t have that either.”
Does Raiola share some blame for Balotelli’s failure?
“Yes. A big mistake I made in his career was to let him go from Manchester City to Milan, against my advice. I should have said, ‘You succeed with City, that’s it, period. If I’d done that, hard, he would have.”
He has chosen, unconsciously or consciously, not to put football in the middle of his life
I suggest that many footballers, possibly including Balotelli, don’t particularly want to reach the top. Why should they? They can make millions without knocking themselves out.
“Well, that’s right,” replies Raiola. “That’s why in my recent conversations I have an important question for players: ‘Why do you play football? What is your drive?’”
What do they answer?
“Well, most haven’t thought about it yet. I send them home saying, ‘Go think about it.’”
A few years ago, Raiola unearthed a French talent with unquestionable drive. Paul Pogba was then a teenage hopeful at Manchester United. He hadn’t broken into the first team and Raiola told him he was underpaid, but added that perhaps he ought to stay anyway, especially as United had a “fantastic manager”, Alex Ferguson. However, in 2012 Raiola asked United for a better contract. He breaks into English to recount the negotiations:
Ferguson to Raiola: I don’t talk to you if the player is not here. Raiola: Get the player out of the locker room and sit him here. Pogba enters. Ferguson to Pogba: You don’t want to sign this contract? Pogba: We’re not going to sign this contract under these conditions. Ferguson to Raiola: You’re a twat.
Raiola was unfazed, partly because he didn’t know the word.
Raiola: This is an offer that my chihuahuas — I have two chihuahuas — don’t sign. Ferguson: What do you think he needs to earn? Raiola: Not that. Ferguson: You’re a twat.
Ferguson’s published verdict on Raiola: “I distrusted him from the moment I met him.”
Download a high-resolution image of the agents and agencies who run world football
Raiola canvassed Europe’s leading clubs to decide which one Pogba should join. “Juventus said, ‘We want him at any cost. This is the best player we’ve seen in the world.’ However, Juve historically had little patience with youngsters. Raiola told Pogba: “This maybe isn’t a good step for you.” Yet Pogba was set on joining the Italian club.
Raiola says he negotiated a salary that marked Pogba out as a valued first-team player. Afterwards he asked him: “Why did you want to go there?” Pogba replied, “Because in my life I have always chosen the hardest path. This was the hardest path.” He performed brilliantly at Juve, winning four straight Italian titles.
This summer, Raiola brought Ibrahimovic and Pogba to United. Why join a club that hadn’t qualified for the Champions League and has underperformed for three years? Raiola explains, “Because I think: you have go to the club that needs you. This club needed them.”
What you see is the final result of years of sculpting. I spent two years working on Manchester United’s deal with Paul
He had foreseen United’s need as early as summer 2015, when the club signed the young forwards Anthony Martial and Memphis Depay. Raiola claims to have known they wouldn’t succeed. “Not if you have to perform now,” he says, slapping a fat fist into a fat hand. “Martial and Depay come in and say, ‘We have to carry Manchester United, a giant institute?’ So already last year I told the people at United, ‘You’ll have to put in a guy like Zlatan to restore the balance.’ Then the attention goes to Zlatan. He has the experience, and dares take the responsibility.”
And, says Raiola, United needed Pogba too. “Look, Pogba could have gone to all the top clubs. But Real Madrid had just won the Champions League. He’d have been a trophy player there. Barcelona — their three trophies are Messi, Neymar and Suarez. What you see is the final result of years of sculpting. I spent two years working on Manchester United’s deal with Paul.”
United’s decision makers evidently trust Raiola. The coach, José Mourinho, has historically preferred to sign players from his own agent, Jorge Mendes, but now seems happy to work with the Dutchman. Raiola says: “I knew Mourinho from Inter, and there we’d had a bad relationship. I’d said things in the newspaper. But I think Mourinho is intelligent enough to understand what I do. At clubs that understand me, I have three or four players. Now at United, and before at Juventus, Milan, Paris Saint-Germain.” In these cases, says Raiola, he becomes a club’s “in-house consultant”. Logically, then, he must share some blame for United’s current dismal performances.
© Instagram/Paul Pogba
United paid a world record transfer fee of €105m for Pogba in August. Raiola has said he takes only a cut of his players’ salary — but what about media reports that the clubs paid him €20m, as a percentage of the transfer fee? “I can’t talk about the contract but, in a deal like Pogba’s, it’s not just the clubs who earn from it,” he says.
Were you paid a fee by Juventus?
“No — not in the way that you’re saying it.”
So you did get money from Juventus?
“I have to see how I can phrase this in a way that Juventus cannot tackle me through the law, let’s say. Hmm. How can I say it? [Long pause.] Yes: in this deal Juventus was not the only owner of the player’s rights.”
But third-party ownership of players (TPO) has been banned?
“Not then. Only afterwards [by Fifa in 2015].”
So until TPO was banned, you often owned stakes in players?
“Not often. But sometimes.”
And Pogba was one of them?
“It’s not TPO. Be careful with the legal definition of TPO. But let’s say that in that case there was an upside for our side. And by our side, I mean the player’s side.”
Which isn’t allowed any more?
“It’s not allowed any more.”
Juventus says, “No third party had any ownership of the player’s rights.”
© Raimond Wouda
Raiola boasts of having had great players in every era, and is busily planning ahead. “There are eight, nine players in the Brazilian [youth] team, each one better than the next. I have [Gianluigi] Donnarumma at AC Milan, who’s 17 and is already their goalkeeper. I have a top striker at Juventus, Moise Kean, 16 years old, who might make his debut this year.” Raiola doesn’t sound like a man planning to take up golf.
Many footballers lose all their money after they retire. England’s Professional Footballers Association has estimated that 10 to 20 per cent of ex-players go bankrupt. This is something Raiola thinks about a lot. “Look, you now have players who can earn €50m to €200m [over their careers]. How do you invest that — or not? Players are always getting offers from people.” He puts on an overexcited young voice: “‘Mino, a friend of mine has a real estate company, and they’re going to do this, and I’ll get 14 per cent, guaranteed!’
“But you also have to watch out for banks. Banks want to sell you products too. I now have an [investment] portfolio for various players, which if you add it all up is worth about €900m. And we’re more conservative than conservative. I always say to players, ‘We do not invest.’ We just want the player to finish his career with the money he earned, and more — but not less. What I suggest is, ‘Buy your own house fast, buy bricks, and otherwise keep your money in the bank, even if it’s at low interest. You don’t have to live off the interest. Don’t put it into businesses you know nothing about.
“All my players, in the beginning, want a restaurant, a hotel or a café. I come from the restaurant business and I say, ‘Don’t come to me with that, zero. Because I know what that is.’”
Simon Kuper is an FT columnist
Photographs: Matthew Peters; Raimond Wouda, TT/PA Images; Jacopo Raule; Instagram/Paul PogbaUPDATE: NEW CYBERPUNK COMIC SERIES.
New reward tiers are available to receive issues of Nerve Gum, a cyberpunk comic series. Each issue will feature an original story by a new artist. The material will be unrelated to Blade Runner, but will take place in a similar hi-tech dystopian universe. The issues will be 5.5 x 7.5", 16 pages, and risographed in two colors on French Paper.
We're beginning with just a two-issue subscription, but the series will hopefully continue indefinitely. The first two issues will be drawn by James O and A.P. Westcott, shipping in March and April, respectively.
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UPDATE: 2ND EDITION. The support so far has been incredible. Due to the wonderful and unanticipated explosion of backers, the original risograph edition of the zine ($13 reward level) is permanently sold out. However, we're producing an unlimited 2ND EDITION with a few differences. These will be printed digitally, so the images will be sharper, but lack the cool print quality of risography. The paper will be of equal thickness, but it won't be from French Paper Co. The content and everything else stays the same! Thanks so much for your continued support.
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Replicants unite! We're bringing you a fan-made tribute to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Known for its futuristic, dystopian aesthetic, the Blade Runner universe provides the perfect fodder for a collaborative art project. In an off-world mining colony, twenty-five of us illustrators have taken up the challenge, and plan to collect our work in a super high-quality booklet. But we need your help to ensure it reaches Earth.
Monica McClain
Noah MacMillan
James O
A.P. Westcott
Max Temescu
The Zine
The zine will be staple-bound, A5 size (5.8 x 8.3"), made of the highest quality paper (sustainably-milled at the incomparable French Paper Co.), and printed in two colors on a risograph printer-duplicator. Risographs are manufactured in Japan and can be thought of (conceptually) as automatic screen printers. They look like photocopiers, but instead of using toner, they force real ink through a stencil - as such, they are beloved among illustrators and comic artists for their vibrant and tactile print quality. Basically, we're shooting for the same quality as an art print you might hang on your wall - except it's an entire book.
Illustrations include new interpretations of favorite scenes, futuristic cityscapes, fake ads, character collages, parodies, and more. The sample images above are digital approximations of how the printed pages will look. Once on paper, the artwork will appear less precise, and assume a more lively, handmade print aesthetic. Slight misregistration and imperfections in the ink ensure no two copies will be the same. The final product will be a piece of beautifully gritty ephemera that would not be out of place on a rain-soaked newsstand in 2019 Los Angeles.
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UPDATE: RISOGRAPH EDITION SOLD OUT. See top^ for info on the 2ND EDITION.
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Other Rewards
The digital PDF version of the zine will be scanned from an unbound copy of the printed zine. In lieu of giving you the digital versions of the artwork, you'll get to see the richness of ink on paper.
In-process photos will be posted as the zines are printed and hand-assembled.
Smallprint
This is, of course, a fan-made labor of love that is not affiliated with anything that would make it "official."
For Non-US backers: shipping costs are already included in your pledge, but we cannot be responsible for any additional VAT or import duties levied by your country. Check with your local customs agency for details on estimated costs (shouldn't be much, if anything).
Contributors!
Jenna Stempel, Sam Washburn, James O, Lisa Ito, Max Temescu, Vincent Nappi III, A.P. Westcott, Elizabeth Beier, Susannah Lohr, Quentin Habermas, BRNK, Monica McClain, Chris Hohl, David Brennan, Tony Huynh, Alex Vitti, Noah MacMillan, Esther Hong, Helen Chau, Diana H. Chu 朱凱蒂, Matthew Hunter Ström, Kelsey Eng, C. A. Stavridis, Grace Hong
Follow me on Twitter for more updates on this project!
Thanks so much for your support!23 years ago, Batman: Mask Of The Phantasm (henceforth known as Phantasm) was released to critical acclaim and much fanfare. Building on the immense success of Batman: The Animated Series, Phantasm brought the animated version of Batman to a whole new level, and plays a tremendous part in DC’s continued success in the animation business.
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Having recently re-watched Phantasm with my four-year old son Bruce (nope, not a coincidence), it dawned on me that the film would not only stand the test of one generation, but several. The details and elements in the film, such as a lack of supertech but an overabundance of creativity to the plot, make the story timeless and relevant now, and long into the future.
Phantasm is an emotional love story that keeps you engaged via a plethora of flashbacks, and is built on the back of a pseudo-origin Batman story in which Bruce Wayne is struggling to balance his personal love life, as well as determining how he wants to fight crime. Of course, those two aspects intertwine, and Bruce’s choice is taking from him when his fiancé Andrea Beaumont flees the United States for Europe due to events that will play a role in the present day storytelling.
The brilliance of Phantasm is not the two stories split into past and present, but instead how well they’re timed and feed off each other to reach a higher level of suspense. Hans Zimmer described his Joker score from The Dark Knight as being sounds that hints at insanity, as in the tones escalates in pace and eventually sounds like it’ll come to an end, but doesn’t, and keeps a high-pace, high-intensity sound running to the point where you’re at the edge of your seat. In terms of visual storytelling, Phantasm does the same. As each story progresses, it unveils a new image that shows exactly how deep the submerged iceberg of the whole story is. And when it all comes to a head, you’re left satisfied with how the two concurrent stories conclude: With lots of mystery and an open ending that only cements one thing: Bruce once again missing out on happiness, leaving him with the task of donning the cape and continuing his quest to save Gotham City.
The final shot of the Bat-signal lighting up the night, and for Bruce to respond by accepting whatever new problem has risen, is an acceptance of his fate and duty as the watchful protector.
My son has seen the movie twice, and a large chunk of time has passed between viewings. Yet, he remembered some of those small elements that made the film so satisfactory to watch. Bruce drawing the red lips on pre-Joker, that Beaumont revealed herself as the actual Phantasm, and even Bruce’s early struggles in the flashback when he tries to beat a gang of thugs wearing something resembling black guerilla gear. “That’s before Bruce knew he’d become Batman right, Dad?”
The film, lasting only 76 minutes, completely masters the balance of plot progression and character development, while simultaneously displaying nothing short of breathtaking animations and intriguing dialogue that always serves a purpose. Phantasm is about as efficient a film as any, animated or live action, and should serve as an example for filmmakers who doesn’t understand the value of killing their darlings.
Phantasm also adds to the experience by expanding on the animated series, by including murders and blood, albeit the latter is severely limited. More dramatic effects are taken into use, accepting up front that this differs slightly from the series, but remains in the same universe and carrying much the same tone and identity. Introducing vengeance via the means of murder automatically raises the bar for Batman’s involvement. There’s always a small safety net in the animated series due to lack of deaths, but here the stakes are higher which is introduced immediately as the Phantasm kills Chuckie Sol, and setting Batman up as the culprit at the same time.
Adding in an indirect pre-Joker origin would in many cases seem forced, and likely clunky. But it’s done so organically in Phantasm, that when you watch it for the first time, there’s a genuine moment of surprise when Bruce draws the lips on his picture.
Having seen the film roughly 50 times since then, there are obviously no surprises left. But doesn’t that in its own way make a point about the brilliance of the film and its presentation? It never forces a narrative, it allows itself to grow much like a seed, and the end result is a perfect flower which beauty lies not only in its appearance, but its blooming journey.
So how does it stay relevant? Notice again which elements are there, and which are lacking. There are no cosmic Justice League journeys, there are no lasers and advanced weapons, and the tech that is being used is limited to remote controls, basic database searches off a computer, and a Joker-driven drone carrying a bomb. These items exist in our world, and combined with the deeply personal storytelling and plot development, the film is grounded in a reality much like the one we know today, and will know for quite some time. It allows for older viewers as myself to enjoy the realism of it all, while having an iPad and PlayStation consuming four-year old sitting alongside me, carrying the same level of anticipation and appreciation.
Batman: Mask Of The Phantasm is at the end of the day a cinematic masterpiece that can rightfully challenge every film in history and hold its own ground.A US court ruling meaning broadband internet service providers will no longer have to follow principles of network neutrality has sparked predictions the internet will end as we know it.
Some predict it will be controlled by a few rich corporations who will charge content providers on a pay-to-play model.
Others have predicted increased government control or suggested that people in developing nations will be forced into servitude to Facebook.
But Australia hasn’t ever had net neutrality, with domestic internet service providers shaping and restricting traffic, and often allowing “unmetered” access to certain websites for their own reasons. And it hasn’t been a disaster.
Are some more equal than others?
Net neutrality means an internet connection is free from filtering, prioritisation, censorship, or favour based on the provider of the content which is being accessed.
That is, all content must be treated equally so that some parts of the internet are not priviledged over others.
Internet service providers can – and often do – manage their networks to ensure that bandwidth sensitive applications like Skype and video streaming operate smoothly.
Internet service providers who manage their networks in this way do so to maximise the capacity of expensive infrastructure, while ensuring that data intensive peer to peer applications like Bittorrent used by some don’t affect others.
One of the creators of the modern internet, Vint Cerf, has already said that traffic management is not a net neutrality issue, so long as providers are consistent in their treatment of like services.
So what’s the problem?
The problem arises when a provider is no longer even-handed in its network management, and one supplier of content is prioritised over another.
Doing so adds a distinct anti-competitive flavour to internet access.
For example, if the provider was partnered with Google, it could then provide users with free access to one gigabyte of Google content each month.
Such a partnership gives Google an advantage over its competitors by making competing services comparatively expensive. Under such a deal, internet users will likely favour Google over Bing, and Google+ over Facebook.
And while users could choose between competing content giants, minnow sized startups are unlikely to ever make similar deals. Innovation is stifled, and new competitors are effectively locked out.
The Open Internet Rules, which were set aside by the court, applied mainly to fixed-line broadband services, but exempted mobile broadband services like smartphones.
The Commission’s reasoning was sound – fixed-line broadband providers are monopolies in many parts of the USA, but a customer can usually choose between a number of mobile providers and therefore switch if one provider is restricting content.
The court’s reasoning for setting aside the Commission’s Open Internet Rules centred on a previous decision to classify internet service providers as “information services” rather than “common carriers”.
The court ruled that enforcement of the Open Internet Rules was imposing carrier obligations and so was tantamount to treating the internet service providers as “common carriers”. As there is no legal basis for “information services” to be regulated in this way, the court set aside the rules.
The saving grace of the ruling is the retention of the disclosure rules. These rules oblige internet service providers to publicly disclose network management practices, so consumers know what they’re buying.
What about Australia?
The possibility of true net neutrality in Australia has been lost a long time ago.
Historical wholesale pricing practices means that many providers provide their customers with “Freezone” areas which provide unmetered access to popular content. These arrangements reflect the lower cost for the provider in delivering locally hosted content to their users.
Bigpond
Most internet-using Australians are familiar with ABC iView being unmetered when accessed via selected providers. While the ABC hasn’t paid providers for this feature, it has invested heavily in content distribution networks to deliver their data cheaply to them.
This is one reason why ABC iView attracts significantly more viewers than similar online offerings from SBS and the commercial networks.
Despite Australian net neutrality being a long lost ideal, two things remain in Australia’s favour:
Solid competition across most of Australia: Thanks to Telstra’s ADSL network being open to use by competitors, most Australians have a choice of which broadband provider they use, and so can switch providers if their provider restricts part of their internet service. This follows through to the National Broadband Network. Once a house is connected to the NBN householders can choose from a number of competing providers. Strong consumer protection laws: Australian consumer law – usually enforced by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission – is a world leader in protecting consumers. Any attempt by a large carrier to engage in anti-competitive conduct such as blocking or limiting access to a competitor’s service will invite long and costly action by the ACCC.
Net neutrality is an honourable aspiration, but the Australian internet service provider market has thrived and innovated without it. Discriminatory pricing in the form of unmetered content is more a consumer bonus than an imposition of someone else’s choice.
Now that the United States has ditched the rules of net neutrality, we can only hope they follow Australia’s example.View Full Version : Microwave plate turn direction change. Why?
clayton_e I don't really know a better way to phrase it than that..
I've noticed microwaves often have their rotating plate change direction after you stop it for a second to see if something is done then start it again.
Why?
I understand that having the plate turn puts the food item through as many microwaves as possible and from many angles, getting rid of small spots that would be cold by missing the microwaves... But changing direction while turning would have no effect on that.. would it?
MC$E I don't have a cite, other than the quote below, but I know that I have read that the direction the motor turns is random.
A motor with a completely symmetrical stator will start and run in seemingly random directions, as the armature will turn towards whichever pole of the stator is nearest when it last stopped. In an application where the direction of rotation matters (and that's most motor-drive applications), stators are built such that the rotor will always be attracted the same way, and thus start and run in the same direction.
Q.E.D. The type of motor used is called a synchronous induction motor and unless there is a mechanical means to prevent it, the motor will randomly start in either direction. Due in large part to the energy-storage properties of the the geartrain, the motor more often than not starts in the opposite direction it was running before. Since oven turntables are one of the few applications where motor direction is unimportant, microwave oven manufacturers can save money by using this less expensive type of motor.
clayton_e Well thank you both much. This Q has been Aed, so I guess this can be closed.
Frylock I don't have a cite, other than the quote below, but I know that I have read that the direction the motor turns is random.
What's that a quote from?
-FrL-
MC$E What's that a quote from?
-FrL-
I am pretty sure it was from ask.metafilter.com. I don't have the exact page in my history on this machine though.
Napier Just tried my microwave, and it seems to pick a direction randomly, not alternately.
clayton_e I'm sure I didn't notice it when it would go the same direction it just did.. So perhaps it isn't alternating. I just know a good chunk of the time when I check on something to see if its done then put it back in for a few more seconds it will go the opposite direction.
Nanoda Hmm. The microwave here at my house (a small, cheap brand probably, came with the place) appears quite random, and exhibits gear lash and other motions I would classify as indicative components such as Q.E.D. describes.
However, from prior testing at the office (don't ask), I determined a few months back that the microwave table there would always turn twice counter-clockwise, then once clockwise. I don't have an explanation for this, other than someone was asked to make it either 'random', or 'alternating', and screwed it up.
clayton_e However, from prior testing at the office (don't ask), I determined a few months back that the microwave table there would always turn twice counter-clockwise, then once clockwise.
And I thought I was bored..
MC$E Hmm. The microwave here at my house (a small, cheap brand probably, came with the place) appears quite random, and exhibits gear lash and other motions I would classify as indicative components such as Q.E.D. describes.
However, from prior testing at the office (don't ask), I determined a few months back that the microwave table there would always turn twice counter-clockwise, then once clockwise. I don't have an explanation for this, other than someone was asked to make it either 'random', or 'alternating', and screwed it up.
Did you always use the same cook time when performing the test? To get a truly accurate result, you would need to randomize the cook time.
si_blakely I thought it was to stop the food from getting dizzy...
SiSTOCKHOLM, Sweden – Kurdish women in Sweden play a leading role in public life in that country and many have received awards in 2016 in recognition of their work.
“Kurdish women have a potential which turns them into innovators and leaders when they join European communities,” said Agnita Swanson, a Swedish activist, referring to Nadia Murad and other Kurdish women who were recognized with numerous awards in Sweden this year. “I am amazed by the ability of Kurdish women,” Swanson added.Annually, a plethora of awards are given out to persons of the year and other outstanding citizens who have had a profound impact on European society, especially in Sweden.In 2016, over four Kurdish women were picked as ‘persons of the year’ in Sweden alone. “This is one of the advantages of the Kurdish diaspora to the Swedish communities. As a Swede, I am indebted to this nation and I am proud of them,” Swanson detailed.The Kurdish Swedish MP, Amineh Kakabaveh, was picked by Fokus Magazine as the ‘Swede of the year’ this year. She is credited for her role in the country’s endeavors to counter racial discrimination.Kurdish activist and volunteer Tina Murad was chosen from over 120 contenders by Sweden’s leading human rights organization, Raoul Wallenberg Institute, for its annual award. She was given credit for her outstanding voluntary service to refugees.
Two other Kurdish women, Sakine Madon, a journalist and activist, and Sarah Mohammed, an activist, have been selected along with 48 other Swedes by the Swedish National Radio as persons of the year. The radio names 50 Swedes from across the social spectrum every year for the award.
A number of Kurds were also included among 100 people nominated for ‘influential people of the year’. Two Kurdish women are among the nominees – writer and artist Nisti Sterk and Gulan Avci, a member of the leadership of the Liberal Party of Sweden. The result will be announced in the last week of 2016.The influence of Kurdish women living in Sweden has gone beyond the country’s borders. Journalist and Swedish citizen Angel Alcu, a Kurd from Diyarbakir, was given the Martin Adler award on December 8, 2016 in London. The award seeks to honour freelance journalists who often work under difficult circumstances and receive little recognition.In addition, the Kurdish Yazidi women Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar who survived the savage rule of the Islamic State (ISIS) were given Sakharov award this year for their human rights work.“There are very few nations and ethnicities that could produce so many influential personalities in one year,” Swanson explained.“
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hit that number.
Humbling as this is, that highest viewership total for the NHL would equal the lowest rated NBA Final game in 23 years, Game 2 between the Nets and Spurs in 2003.
Sigh …
Look, I can’t figure it out. The NHL can’t figure it out. Media analysts can’t figure it out. There are millions of sports fans with an affinity for hockey that simply don’t watch the Stanley Cup Final.
Is it apathy for the matchup, without a rooting interest? Is it a lack of star power? Is it a lack of clear, compelling storylines? Is it because the ESPN drones aren’t watching anything their network doesn't tell them to watch?
Is it because watching ice hockey in summertime June temps is something our brains can't compute.
If you’re a hockey fan that checks out for the Stanley Cup Final, we’d like to hear from you in the comments or at [email protected].
Meanwhile, consider this your official call to arms:
If you’re in a market that you believe isn’t giving the Stanley Cup Final its due, contact your local TV station news director or newspaper sports section editor.
Correspond often. Be respectful. Get your friends to do the same.
You will be amazed how a few notes from disgruntled consumers can feel like a groundswell. And you will be amazed how your local sports media creates more space or time for hockey because of that groundswell.
In the words of Reg Dunlop, Let’em Know You’re There.
Oh, and then watch the games. That too.
MORE FROM YAHOO HOCKEYWings 8-11-2 when trailing after 2 periods
Detroit Red Wings Drew Miller, left, and goalie Jimmy Howard celebrate a 3-2 win over the San Jose Sharks on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015, in San Jose, Calif. (Photo: Ben Margot Associated Press)
UP IN THE AIR -- The Detroit Red Wings are a confident group when it comes to crossing the finish line first.
They wrap up five road games in eight days with a Saturday matinee against the Nashville Predators, who sit atop the NHL with 89 points. The Wings have gone 2-1-1 through stops at Dallas, Anaheim, Los Angeles and San Jose, most recently rallying for a 3-2 victory over the Sharks on Thursday.
That improved the Wings to 8-11-2 when trailing after two periods, a league-best winning percentage of.381. Newcomer Teemu Pulkkinen already has picked up on what happens when it's late in a game and the score isn't in Detroit's favor. "Even when we are losing," he said after the Sharks game, "we keep playing like we are going to get a goal."
The Wings are taking today off because recuperation trumps practice when so many games are crammed into a short span. Coach Mike Babcock already has decided that goalie Jonas Gustavsson will get the start against the Predators.
Defenseman Brendan Smith left the Sharks game with a sore hand, but general manager Ken Holland told the Free Press that Smith should be OK to play. If he isn't, Kyle Quincey is available.
Henrik Zetterberg remains sidelined at least one more game because of the effects of getting hit in the head.
The Wings' ability to bounce back starts with the team's leadership. Datsyuk has had an especially impressive trip, scoring five goals. As goalie Jimmy Howard put it, "We're thankful that he's on our side every night.
Luke Glendening, who had the game-winning goal in San Jose, likewise pointed to the leadership of Datsyuk, Zetterberg and Niklas Kronwall when asked about the Wings' rallying ability.
Kronwall repeatedly described the Sharks victory as "we found a way." That way was to outshoot San Jose, 31-8, after a bad first period. Babcock pointed to the Wings' ability to skate and their competitiveness as keys. "If you compete at a high level, you have a chance," he said. "That's what the game is all about. The game is fair every night -- if you compete hard, you get rewarded, and if you don't, you're not rewarded. I liked that the guys found a way."
When the Wings start well enough to build a lead after two periods, they're 21-0-3. When they don't, their resiliency has an upside that one veteran sees paying off in the long term. "It's great to see, especially from a young team," Howard said. "I think a lot of guys are maturing throughout the year here, and it's going to be great down the stretch and in the playoffs."
Contact Helene St. James: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @helenestjames.It remains one of motor racing’s toughest challenges; 1,100 miles of racing across two very different disciplines on the same day, but since it was first attempted in 1994 Double Duty has become entwined in Indycar racing lore, and made heroes out of those five drivers who have taken on it’s challenge.
The origins of Double Duty can be traced back to 1961, when Nascar pioneer Bill France Sr. introduced the World 600 as the showpiece event for the newly constructed Charlotte Motor Speedway. Originally the World 600 was scheduled on the Sunday prior to Memorial Day, whilst Indy remained in it’s traditional memorial day slot regardless of the day of the week that the day fell upon, this allowed a number of drivers from both disciplines to take part in both events, and led to a number of Nascar’s best and finest to make one of appearances in the prestigious 500 mile event (something we will look at in more detail on a later date). With the introduction of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act however the 500 was moved permanently to the Sunday prior to Memorial Day, and in the process directly into conflict with the World 600. With both races sharing roughly the same starting time, and the emergence of the 600 as one of the standout events of the Grand National series, it meant that it became almost impossible for one driver to compete in both prestigious events.
In 1992 however Charlotte Motor Speedway introduced floodlights around the circuit for the first time, allowing Nascar officials to move back the start time for the 600 (now known as the Coca-Cola 600) to incorporate a prime-time finish. The move also moved the race out of conflict with the 500’s start time, meaning that it became technically feasible for one driver to compete at Indianapolis, and then quickly travel to Charlotte to take the field for the Coke 600.
In 1994 John Andretti became the first man to ever attempt the feat of competing in both events on the same day. Andretti had enjoyed a solid career in Indycar racing up until that point, picking up his only win at Surfer’s Paradise in 1991, and had started to dip his feet into Nascar racing with a number of sporadic events during the 1993 season. Despite heavy media pressure, as well as the physically demanding itinerary that came with the challenge Andretti was undaunted, finishing 10th in the 500 before immediately boarding a private to Charlotte to pilot Billy Hagan’s #14 Ford Thunderbird. His day at Charlotte however did not turn out as successful, with Andretti having to pull out of the race with a blown engine on lap 220.
Andretti’s attempt at the double helped to open the floodgates for a number of other drivers to attempt the challenge of double duty. In 1997 Robbie Gordon competed in both events in a highly funded effort organised by Nascar team boss Felix Sabates. It would be the first of five occasions that the Californian would take on the challenge, with his most successful effort in 2002 seeing him fall just one lap short of completing the full 1,100 mile distance. Tony Stewart would twice achieve the feat in 1999 and 2001, with his 2001 effort seeing Stewart leading both races before settling for 6th and 3rd places finishes at Indy and Charlotte respectively, and leading to the former IRL champion becoming the first man to ever complete all 1,100 miles of racing in a single day.
The most recent attempt at Double Duty however came in the form of Kurt Busch in 2014. Unlike his predecessors, Busch had not raced in the Indycar series prior to his double duty effort, with the 500 mile showpiece set to be the Las Vegas native’s first competitive single seater event. Despite this however, Busch was quickly on the pace, qualifying in a credible 10th place despite an accident in practice. After dropping through the field in the race’s early stages, Busch used a combination of high attrition and pit strategy to slowly move through the pack, finishing in sixth place and earning rookie of the year honours in the process. Busch’s day at Charlotte however would prove less fruitful, failing to finish the 600 due to a mid-race engine failure.
Busch’s performance at Indy helped to put the concept of Double Duty back on everyone’s radar, and with three months to go until this year’s 500 speculation remains ripe over whether some of Nascar’s best will take on the challenge for Indy’s 100th running.
In today’s video an episode of the NBC Sports series “36 Hours” focusing on Kurt Busch’s double duty attempt:
In tomorrow’s update Indycar racing goes international, thanks in part to the most high profile rookie ever to grace the speedway.
AdvertisementsThe telecast, back on NBC, will once again try to avoid 'Sunday Night Football.'
Some potentially good news for the Emmys — the TV kudos are returning to Monday.
NBC, which has broadcast rights to the rotating telecast in 2018, confirmed Tuesday morning that this coming year's awards show will air Monday, Sept. 17, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT. It is a clear move to avoid any interference with fall flagship Sunday Night Football, still broadcast's crown jewel despite widespread ratings fatigue for primetime NFL.
The Emmys last aired on a Monday in 2014. At the time, NBC and the TV Academy's decision raised eyebrows and (for some) blood pressures. Several series had to shift production to accommodate the workday event, and executives and publicists openly fretted about downtown Los Angeles traffic interfering with their Emmy commutes to the Microsoft Theater. But, after all that hubbub, the event went off fairly seamlessly.
Another big concern about the previous Monday move for the Emmys was ratings. Many predicted that the early start time on the West Coast, combined with traditionally lower viewing levels for that night of the week, would sink the telecast. (They ended up being the second-most-watched Emmys in a decade, averaging 15.6 million viewers.)
One thing is for sure: The Emmys need something to goose ratings. The last three years have all floundered with fewer than 12 million viewers, solidifying its status as the ugly stepchild of the big award shows. The kudocast no longer approaches the other big three — the Golden Globes, the Grammys and the Oscars.
NBC and the TV Academy will announce a host at a later date, but expect someone from the Peacock's comedy stable to take the gig.Metropolitan Warehouse will not become dorm
The Metropolitan Moving & Storage Warehouse will not become a dorm. Instead, a new undergraduate residence will be constructed “from the ground up,” most likely in West Campus.
The administration plans to reuse the warehouse “in a number of creative ways.” The building might eventually feature street-level retail, maker spaces, study spaces, and “innovation spaces,” Associate Provost Karen K. Gleason told The Tech.
“We need to renovate some of our older residence halls,” Gleason said, explaining the need for a new dorm. “[N]ew housing will allow us to accommodate the housing needs of all students while those buildings are under construction.”
Administrators are still in the early stages of planning out the work to be done. Gleason said the plans to turn the Metropolitan building into a dorm were abandoned “just over the past couple of weeks,” and timelines for each construction project have yet to be worked out but will be forthcoming.
Uncertainty and fear that it would be impossible to house students in the Metropolitan building by Sept. 2018 prompted administrators to change course.
“Certain unforeseen design constraints and construction challenges associated with renovating a 100-plus-year-old building on the National Register of Historic Places now make our estimated timeline difficult to achieve,” Gleason told The Tech in an email. “There is also a multi-step permit approval process that is likely to push the original completion schedule beyond 2018.”
At several points, students were able to give input on the design of the dorm that would have been built in the Metropolitan building.
“Students on the Met Warehouse Advisory Group and the Chancellor’s Student Housing Advisory Committee provided valuable insights throughout the design process,” Gleason said. “Their input, along with the input collected during [dorm presentations], led to important changes in proposed room sizes and floor layouts as well as aspects of the dining, maker, and community spaces envisioned for a Met undergraduate residence hall.”
“On more than one occasion, the team completely reworked floorplans based on our input. The design, in its final iteration, reflected a sincere respect for students’ opinion and insight into their own living spaces,” DormCon President Yonadav Shavit ’16, who serves on Metropolitan Warehouse Advisory Committee, said in a statement that was approved by the Chancellor’s office.
“I am happy that the Metropolitan Warehouse will be used for something else; no matter how well the design process went, there was only so much we could do to turn the warehouse into a home,” he said. “I believe that in this next dorm’s design phase, informed by our recent discussions but no longer constrained by architecture, we can build a really great dorm.”Under the plan, New Yorkers will no longer need to sort their recyclables, “dramatically increasing the city’s recycling rate,” de Blasio said.
SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): Mayor de Blasio announced Tuesday that the city will roll out single-stream recycling by 2020 as part of a larger plan to speed up the reduction of greenhouse gases.
Under the plan, New Yorkers will no longer need to sort their recyclables, “dramatically increasing the city’s recycling rate,” de Blasio said.
The initiative is part of a larger plan de Blasio announced Tuesday to limit global warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius as called for in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
Under the plan, all homes by next year will have a drop-off for organic waste and the city is working to institute “advanced energy codes” for new building by 2019, Hizzoner said.
“In the Trump era, cities have to lead the way when it comes to fighting climate change. Hotter summers and powerful storms made worse by climate change are an existential threat to a coastal city like ours, which is why we need to act now,” the mayor said.
President Trump has been threatened to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement – a pact signed by 195 nations to lower carbon emissions over the next decade.
He claimed the accord was a bad deal for American businesses.
The US emits more carbon into the atmosphere than any country except China.
Courtesy: https://wasteadvantagemag.comIdentification of genetic changes that allow a species to adapt to different environmental conditions is an important topic in evolutionary biology. In this study we analyzed whole-genome resequencing data of Atlantic herring populations from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and identified a number of loci that show consistent associations with spawning time (spring or autumn). Several of these loci, such as thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor (TSHR), have a well-established role in reproductive biology, whereas others have never been implicated in controlling reproduction. Genetic variants associated with adaptation to spring or autumn spawning are shared to a large extent among populations across the Atlantic Ocean and the Baltic Sea, providing evidence for parallel adaptive evolution.
Abstract
Atlantic herring is an excellent species for studying the genetic basis of adaptation in geographically distant populations because of its characteristically large population sizes and low genetic drift. In this study we compared whole-genome resequencing data of Atlantic herring populations from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. An important finding was the very low degree of genetic differentiation among geographically distant populations (fixation index = 0.026), suggesting lack of reproductive isolation across the ocean. This feature of the Atlantic herring facilitates the detection of genetic factors affecting adaptation because of the sharp contrast between loci showing genetic differentiation resulting from natural selection and the low background noise resulting from genetic drift. We show that genetic factors associated with timing of reproduction are shared between genetically distinct and geographically distant populations. The genes for thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor (TSHR), the SOX11 transcription factor (SOX11), calmodulin (CALM), and estrogen receptor 2 (ESR2A), all with a significant role in reproductive biology, were among the loci that showed the most consistent association with spawning time throughout the species range. In fact, the same two SNPs located at the 5′ end of TSHR showed the most significant association with spawning time in both the east and west Atlantic. We also identified unexpected haplotype sharing between spring-spawning oceanic herring and autumn-spawning populations across the Atlantic Ocean and the Baltic Sea. The genomic regions showing this pattern are unlikely to control spawning time but may be involved in adaptation to ecological factor(s) shared among these populations.Rise of the Tomb Raider update - Has AMD Performance Ryzen?
Performance changes - 1080p, 1440p and 4K
Performance changes - 1080p, 1440p and 4K
Thanks to the strict time constraints of Computex, the time for in-depth testing is limited but thankfully Rise of the Tomb Raider does have a built-in benchmarking utility to provide us with some before and after performance numbers for Rise of the Tomb Raider's new Ryzen patch.
Anyone who is well acquainted with Rise of the Tomb Raider will know that the minimum framerate results for this benchmark can be unreliable, so we will be sticking to the game's average framerate numbers, which see a healthy increase at both 1080p and 1440p. 4K results remain within a 1% margin of error, confirming that there are no GPU related changes in this patch.
With our Ryzen 7 1700X at 4GHz, we see a 9.7% performance improvement, which is huge considering the fact that this is with an overclocked 8-core with 3200MHz memory. At the higher resolution of 1440p, where the game would be a lot less CPU limited, there is still a 3.9% performance gain, showcasing that even high-resolution gamers can benefit from CPU performance optimisations.
Larger performance gains could be possible in situations where the game is more CPU limited, like when a lower clocked CPU is used or when lower speed memory is utilised. The Ryzen CPU we have used here is at 4GHz and with 3200MHz memory, which is pretty much a best case scenario for Ryzen, making these performance gains the very least that Ryzen users should expect from Rise of the Tomb Raider.
- Update - We have now updated our testing with stock performance results for our Ryzen 7 1700X, showing an even larger (14%) increase in framerate and post patch results that closely match the results from the same system in an overclocked state.
This proves that the game is now GPU limited and also that the performance gain from this patch can be much larger depending on how CPU limited your system is.
We can see below that our stock Ryzen 7 1700X now performs better at stock than the same system did while overclocked before this patch, which is an impressive change in itself.
1 - Rise of the Tomb Raider update - AMD Performance Ryzen? 2 - Performance changes - 1080p, 1440p and 4K 3 - Conclusion «Prev 1 2 3 Next»
Most Recent CommentsHigh School To Collect Students’ Hair For Mandatory Drug Tests
Rockhurst High School, in Kansas City, Missouri, early this month approved program to start collecting hair from students for mandatory drug tests.
The school plans to start the random drug testing during the 2013-2014 school year, reports Christa Dubill at KSHB. Administrators at the Jesuit-run school said that about 60 strands of hair will be cut from selected students’ heads or bodies and sent off for testing by a company called Psychemedics.
A staff member at Rockhurst is a barber, and will reportedly be handling the hair collection.
The school plans to test for a number of substances, including marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, PCP, opiates, and methamphetamine.
“Our point is, if we do encounter a student who has made some bad decisions with drugs or alcohol, we will be able to intervene, get the parents involved, get him help if necessary, and then help him get back on a path of better decision making, healthier choices for his life,” claimed Rockhurst Principal Greg Harkness.
“It’s a huge shift,” Harkness said, reports Joe Robertson at The Kansas City Star. “But it’s one we need to do.”
If a student tests positive for any of the substances, a guidance counselor is notified. The counselor will then bring in the parents and the student to “have a conversation” about “how to best get the student help.” Blech…
If a student tests positive again at the 90-day point, the dean of students is notified (big whoop). Students with a second positive are forced to “consult with” a school psychologist to determine why rehab failed, reports William Browning at Yahoo! News. A third positive test, which happens 180 days after the initial positive, means the student will be expelled from the school.
Rockhurst’s policy is considered the first of its kind in the Kansas City area since it tests all students. Some area private schools administer urinalysis and breath tests, but none of those programs are as thorough — or as expensive — as Rockhurst’s.
Rockhurst recently surveyed students, using an outside consulting company, and supposedly found that “students’ perceptions about drug use were actually much different then reality.” That can almost certainly be roughly translated as “They’re not buying the bullshit we tell them about marijuana.”
“On the one hand, there are students who’ve come to me and the administration saying that this is a great thing — they’ve been needing to do this for a while now; they’re very impressed that Rockhurt has taken this step,” said Matthew Brocato, 17, the junior class president at Rockhurt.
“On the other hand, there’s the students who think this is an invasion of privacy,” Brocato said. “Some parents think they’re taking the role of parenting away from them.”
“When you hear ‘drug testing,’ you think cops,” Brocato told Joe Robertson of The Kansas City Star. “At first you’re taken aback. Is it for the better?”
The American Civil Liberties Union believes school drug testing, though permissible, is unnecessary.
“Nothing prohibits it,” said Doug Bonney, legal director for the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri. “But it is a colossal waste of money.”
Schools risk false positive drug tests, according to the ACLU, and the tests take money away from other programs. They can also undermine trust and drive away students who might otherwise have been motivated to learn.
Private schools are allowed to test all students, while public schools are restricted by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
In public schools, random drug testing can only be performed for those participating in extracurricular activities such as athletics or band, or upon those who drive themselves to school. Private schools, where students and parents pay for everything, have no such restrictions.BMW is planning a major push into all-electric vehicles. Engineers in Munich are working on a program called Project i20, also known internally as iNext, that will see an all-electric car – to be called the i5 or i6 – hit BMW dealerships in late 2021. In addition to a pure electric drivetrain, the car will also feature the most advanced autonomous capability yet from BMW.
One of the big learnings from the i3 and i8 programs that their all-carbon fiber construction remains expensive despite BMW’s pioneering of mass production techniques using the ultra-light material. As a result, Project i20/iNext is being based on an evolution of the hybrid aluminum/steel structure used in current BMW sedans, with recycled carbon fiber used wherever possible.
The i20/iNext will boast a choice of motors ranging from 136 hp to 247 hp, four-wheel drive, an exceptionally low center of gravity, and an extremely tight turning circle. Visually, think of it as a bigger, prettier, and more aerodynamic i3. A fully autonomous version is planned for 2025.
As for the i3, it is due for replacement in 2022. BMW is currently evaluating three proposals for the car, one of which emulates the current car’s carbon-fiber construction, another uses all-aluminum construction, and the third features a blend of five or six materials. Production volume is expected to remain in the five-figure bracket until 2025, by which time improvements in battery performance, charging infrastructure, and the availability of broadband Internet will make pure EVs more viable.
The i8 sports car is also due for replacement in 2022, but may slip to 2023. The current i8’s three-cylinder, range-extending internal combustion engine will be ditched in favor of three high-revving (25,000rpm) electric motors producing a total of 750 hp and more potent batteries capable of delivering a 300-mile range. Also part of the package are four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, torque vectoring, and an active suspension system that scans the road ahead.Canada played a crucial role in the secret negotiations that restored U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations after more than 50 years, hosting seven back-channel meetings that brought the neighbours out of their Cold War-era isolation.
Senior American and Cuban officials began meeting in Ottawa and Toronto 18 months ago, officials said, paving the way for a deal announced Wednesday that will see the U.S. open an embassy in Havana and begin lifting sanctions.
Both U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro thanked the Canadian government for facilitating the high-level talks. Canada did not participate directly in the negotiations, the officials said.
“Canada was pleased to host the senior officials from the United States and Cuba, which permitted them the discretion required to carry out these important talks,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said after the surprise announcement.
On friendly terms with both nations, and trusted not to leak news of the delicate talks, Canada was uniquely placed to host the delegations, said Prof. Dane Rowlands, director of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, Ottawa.
While the U.S. severed ties with Havana after the 1959 revolution, Canada resisted pressure to isolate Havana. Although Canada later joined the U.S. in criticizing human rights in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Pierre Elliott Trudeau were on such good terms the former Cuban leader was an honorary pallbearer at the prime minister’s funeral.
“As a consequence, if the United States was going to turn to anybody to perform these kinds of services, Canada was the obvious choice,” Prof. Rowlands said.
The U.S. asked Canada to host the talks, saying it needed a discreet forum where it could meet Cuban officials. The matter remained a closely guarded secret. Only a few Canadian senior government officials knew until Wednesday’s announcement.
“This is a pretty rare occurrence generally in international affairs where you don’t have direct diplomatic linkages to a country so you have to rely on somebody else,” said Prof. Rowlands.
“In a situation like that where you can’t re-establish communications or diplomatic relations with a country for political reasons, you have to have some kind of a back-channel … but this is a more substantive one because it’s actually talking about a reconciliation or a normalization of relations.”
He said other possible venues may have included Mexico and Brazil. The final meeting took place at the Vatican with the support of Pope Francis, culminating in an historic phone call Tuesday between President Obama and President Castro.
“I think part of the problem with going elsewhere, at least in the South American context or the Caribbean context would have been, how quiet could this have been kept? Whereas in the Canadian context, I suspect that they felt a little bit more secure, that the Canadian government wasn’t going to play this in any way,” Prof. Rowlands said.
“Our relations with the United States are just too important to have played politics around this kind of stuff. And I think that we had a genuine interest in seeing normalization brought about as well.”Google clearly landed on a fantastic formula when it built Chromecast, and that product's standout success has led other companies to push out their own HDMI dongles in recent months. Roku's got its $49.99 Streaming Stick, and now Microsoft is trying to create a worthy competitor with the brand new Wireless Display Adapter. No, names don't get much more generic than that. But Microsoft's device shares a lot in common with Chromecast. Its primary purpose is sending something you're viewing on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop to the TV screen (or a projector, since Microsoft is also targeting business users here). It's also powered by USB, but unlike Chromecast, it looks like the USB cord is hardwired and can't be unplugged or replaced, Whereas Google's approach is based around the company's own Cast technology, Microsoft is relying on Miracast to make the Display Adapter work.
The protocol is picking up steam with plenty of Windows and Android hardware, and there are some significant benefits that come with choosing Miracast. First, individual apps don't need to bake in support as they would with Chromecast; if the device running an app has Miracast, it should work. Second, since Miracast is made possible by Wi-Fi Direct, there's no need for an actual internet connection. So Microsoft's Wireless Display Adapter should theoretically work when there's no web connectivity available or in hotel rooms where the connection may be awful. If there's one negative, it's that Microsoft isn't competing on price. The new adapter is $59.95. That's not quite double Chromecast's cost, but it's still significantly more expensive. The Wireless Display Adapter may be a hard sell for consumers when it's lined up next to Chromecast at Best Buy starting next month.HILLSIDE, NJ – January 24, 2017 – WizKids today announced their plans for the upcoming 2017 WizKids National Championships as well as an exciting reveal of the DC Comics HeroClix: Superman vs. Muhammad Ali Convention Exclusive Set. This year, there will be numerous National Championships around the globe where players can win limited edition prizes, purchase convention exclusives figures, and qualify for the 2017 WizKids World Championship, to be held at Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio.
For the first time, HeroClix fans will be able to bring The Greatest of All Time to the tabletop with the DC Comics HeroClix: Superman vs. Muhammad Ali Convention Exclusive Set! This special HeroClix set that will only be available at events on or after April 1st.
In 1978, legendary boxer Muhammad Ali proved that he truly was the Greatest of All Time by defeating the strongest man on Earth – Superman – in the pages of DC Comics’ historic Superman vs. Muhammad Ali issue. Far from a grudge match, this battle would ultimately set the two up to save the planet from an alien invasion, ending in the proclamation “WE are the greatest!”
Players will be able to purchase this commemorative set in the U.S. for the first time at the 2017 WizKids U.S. National and World Championships, this June.
This year’s events will be bigger than ever and WizKids will be offering even more incentives for players to come out and compete. Players can prepare for the biggest WizKids gaming events of the year by attending a WizKids Open Regional Championship and earning a National Championship Qualification in HeroClix or Dice Masters. More details on specific dates and locations of upcoming championships will be announced soon, so keep a look out for more information on the WizKids Info Network.
– The WizKids TeamHOUSTON – The Houston Rockets announced their 2016 preseason schedule today, highlighted by their participation in NBA Global Games China 2016 presented by Master Kong. All seven of the Rockets preseason games will be broadcasted by ROOT SPORTS and on radio on SportsTalk790.
The Rockets will play New Orleans in Shanghai on Sunday, Oct. 9 at the Mercedes-Benz Arena, followed by a rematch with the Pelicans in Beijing on Wednesday, Oct. 12 at The LeSports Center. This marks the Rockets first visit to Shanghai since playing the inaugural NBA game in China on Oct. 14, 2004.
Prior to departing for China, the Rockets will play a pair of home games at Toyota Center on Sunday, Oct. 2 vs. the Shanghai Sharks and Tuesday, Oct. 4 vs. New York. The Sharks are owned by Rockets legend and soon to be inducted Hall of Famer Yao Ming. Rockets forward Michael Beasley played for the Sharks in 2014-15.
Upon returning from China, the Rockets will host Memphis at Toyota Center on Saturday, Oct. 15 before closing out their remaining preseason schedule at Dallas on Wednesday, Oct. 19 and at San Antonio on Friday, Oct. 21.
Below is the entire Rockets 2016 preseason schedule:
Opponent Time (CT) Location TV Radio Shanghai Sharks 6 p.m. Toyota Center (Houston, TX) ROOT SPORTS SportsTalk 790 Knicks 7 p.m. Toyota Center (Houston, TX) ROOT SPORTS SportsTalk 790 Pelicans 6:30 a.m. Mercedes-Benz Arena (Shanghai, China) ROOT SPORTS SportsTalk 790 Pelicans 6:30 a.m. LeSports Center (Beijing, China) ROOT SPORTS SportsTalk 790 Grizzlies 7 p.m. Toyota Center (Houston, TX) ROOT SPORTS SportsTalk 790 Mavericks 7:30 p.m. American Airlines Center (Dallas, TX) ROOT SPORTS SportsTalk 790 Spurs 7:30 p.m. AT&T Center (San Antonio, TX) ROOT SPORTS SportsTalk 790
ROOT SPORTS ™ is the television home of the Houston Rockets and Houston Astros. The network reaches approximately 4.2 million households across five states and delivers more than 250 live events each year- all of which are available in high definition. ROOT SPORTS Southwest is owned and operated by AT&T Sports Networks, which also operates regional sports networks in the Northwest, Pittsburgh and Rocky Mountain regions. The four networks combined reach approximately 13 million households across 22 states and own exclusive rights to produce and distribute live events from more than 25 teams and conferences.Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
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Debra Messing had one request when she signed on to NBC’s “Will & Grace” reboot.
“The only thing that I asked for was that Grace be a feminist,” she told an audience at the Tribeca TV Festival on Saturday night. “That she have a voice.”
Like Messing in real life, on top of being a feminist, Grace Adler is also a democrat. In the premiere episode, Grace will compromise her political beliefs to take a design job.
The 49-year-old actress has been extremely vocal about her political beliefs in the last election, even getting into a Twitter squabble with Susan Sarandon after the staunch Bernie supporter said she would vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
Messing also talked about the challenges of coming back to her famous role 11 years later.
“I think it took a little bit,” she admitted. “I think the language was there and that I recognized right away and my body recognized it, but you know, its been 11 years and I think that I was a little tentative. I think eventually by the third episode I just sort of relaxed and I was like, ‘OK, she’s back.'”
The ninth season of “Will & Grace” premieres on Sept. 28.Hillary Clinton has come under fire after claiming half the supporters of her presidential rival Donald Trump belong in a "basket of deplorables" of racists, homophobes, sexists, xenophobes, and Islamophobes.
The Democratic nominee later said she regretted her words as Mr Trump accused her of "insulting" millions of Americans.
The remarks were made at an LGBT fundraiser in New York, where Mrs Clinton said: "You can put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables... the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic - you name it.
Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people. I think it will cost her at the Polls! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2016
"Unfortunately there are people like that, and he has lifted them up... some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but they are not America."
The other half, the former US Secretary of State claimed, are individuals "desperate for change" who felt let down by the government and the economy, who need sympathy.
Race For White House Enters The Final Straight
"Basket of Deplorables" quickly became a trending topic on Twitter, with displays of support and fury at her comments.
In a statement backtracking somewhat on her remarks, Mrs Clinton said: "Last night I was 'grossly generalistic,' and that's never a good idea. I regret saying 'half' - that was wrong."
But she went on to list a number of "deplorable" features of Mr Trump's campaign, which she said had been "built largely on prejudice and paranoia."
Image: First Presidential Debate to get under way on 27 September
"It's deplorable that he's attacked a federal judge for his 'Mexican heritage,' bullied a Gold Star family because of their Muslim faith, and promoted the lie that our first black president is not a true American.
"So I won't stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign," she said.
Mr Trump was quick to slam Mrs Clinton on Twitter, writing: "Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people. I think it will cost her at the Polls!"
He then released an angry statement in which he accused his rival of making the "worst political mistake of the season."
Hillary Clinton: Would You Vote For Her?
"Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of herself, and this proves beyond a doubt that she is unfit and incapable to serve as President of the United States
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-the-pack in terms of job security. But given Florida's recent history — both Ron Zook and Will Muschamp were fired after three seasons — it's clear athletics director Jeremy Foley isn't afraid to make a change if he needs to. McElwain won't be under much pressure in Year 1, but 2016 will be crucial.
9. Kevin Sumlin, Texas A&M: Since his 11-2 debut in 2012, Sumlin has been one of the hottest coaches in all of football, rebuffing interest from a bevy of college and NFL teams to stay in College Station at $5 million per year. But that contract comes with much higher expectations than he delivered in 2013 and 2014. If Sumlin doesn't contend for an SEC title in the next two years, he'll start feeling heat for the first time.
Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin speaks to the media at the Southeastern Conference NCAA college football media days. (Photo11: Butch Dill, AP)
10. Mark Stoops, Kentucky: Took over a bad situation, made an initial recruiting splash and has improved the talent level across the board. Still, last season's crash from 5-1 to 5-7 took a bit of bloom off the rose. Kentucky is investing big in football, including a $120 million renovation of Commonwealth Stadium, and Stoops needs to get the Wildcats to a bowl game sooner rather than later.
11. Mark Richt, Georgia: Within the coaching world, there's a strong belief Richt will walk away from Georgia and go do missionary work if he sees the writing on the wall. Despite his consistency over 14 seasons, Georgia fans have largely grown frustrated with perceived underachievement (his last SEC title came in 2005). If he goes a third straight year without winning a weak East, Georgia could start itching for change.
12. Les Miles, LSU: Since 2011, a season that extinguished talk of Miles being on the hot seat, LSU is just 15-9 in the SEC. The Tigers were plagued by quarterback issues last season, and defensive coordinator John Chavis bolting for Texas A&M could be a major setback. Miles, who once seemingly had Saban's number, has lost four in a row to Alabama dating back to the 2011 national championship game.
LSU Tigers coach Les Miles addressed the media during SEC media days. (Photo11: Kelly Lambert, USA TODAY Sports)
13. Steve Spurrier, South Carolina: There's no chance Spurrier is getting fired, but he's at the point where every season could be his last. That's how it is at age 70, coming off a season in which the Gamecocks plunged to 7-6. Spurrier acknowledged he thought about retirement last year before a rejuvenating bowl win against Miami. If there are more signs the program is headed backward, Spurrier won't need to be nudged to hang up his whistle.
14. Derek Mason, Vanderbilt: Following James Franklin turned out to be a pretty tough gig, but Mason simply didn't look ready to be a head coach in Year 1. To his credit, Mason made staff changes and acknowledged that last year's quarterback carousel wasn't a constructive way to run a football team. Still, if Vanderbilt looks as haplessly unprepared as it was last year, don't be surprised if the school tries to quickly correct a mistake.
VIDEO: Coaches welcome high expectationsFounding through Civil war (1790-1865)
1 Dolley Madison, first-lady spy First lady Dolley Madison established an observation post on the White House roof in 1814 to watch for the approaching British army. While fleeing to avoid capture, she saved the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington before the White House was set ablaze. White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
2 Winder Building Signal Corps cupola One of the highest points in Washington at the time of the Civil War, the cupola of the Winder Building was chosen by the Union Signal Corps for point-to-point visual communications with nearby camps and forts. 600 17th St. NW
3 Lowe balloon launch site Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe conducted the first aerial combat reconnaissance in our nation’s history from a tethered balloon west of Washington. On June 24, 1861, he observed and reported Confederate Cavalry activity. Fort Taylor Park, North Roosevelt Street and Ridge Place, Falls Church, Virginia
4 Mansion House Hotel Sarah Emma Edmonds claimed to have donned multiple disguises and personas as a Union spy, including a young man, Irish peddler, Southern gentleman and African American laundress. Later, she worked as a nurse at the Mansion Hotel, which had been converted to a Union hospital.The hotel, once located in front of the Carlyle House, has since been demolished. 121 N. Fairfax St., Alexandria, Virginia
5 Kirkwood House Hotel The Kirkwood House Hotel was at times home to Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow, a spy of many disguises, who has been called the “Confederate James Bond.” George Atzerodt, a conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, also stayed at the hotel; he was assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson, who lived at Kirkwood House, but he lost his nerve, drank heavily and fled. 12th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW
6 Gardner's Gallery Alexander Gardner’s photographs provide an invaluable historical record of the Civil War, but at the time they were also used to identify spies and for cartography. His photographs of Ford’s Theatre following Lincoln’s assassination are among the first crime scene photographs. 511 7th St. NW
7 Old Capitol Prison Sprawling across the site of what is now the Supreme Court building, the Old Capitol Prison held two of the most infamous and flamboyant Confederate spies, Belle Boyd, who was arrested many times and released, increasing her fame, and Rose O’Neal Greenhow, whose information aided the Confederacy in its victory at the First Battle of Bull Run. 1st and East Capitol St. NE
8 Surratt boarding house Southern sympathizer Mary Surratt ran a boarding house that served as a safe house and base of operations for conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination. 604 H St. NW
Post-Civil War to World War II (1866-1945)
1 Van Deman offices Maj. Gen. Ralph Van Deman deserves the title “father of modern military intelligence”. As America entered World War I, he built the country’s first professional military intelligence organization in the Old Executive Office Building. 639 17th St. NW
2 A. Mitchell Palmer residence In an act of World War I era terrorism, an anarchist blew himself up while bombing the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in June 1919, causing extensive damage. 2132 R Street NW
3 Bellevue Hotel In 1941, Soviet intelligence defector Walter Krivitsky was found dead in his room at the Bellevue Hotel, now known as the Hotel George, from a single gunshot to the head. Although ruled a suicide, suspicions still linger that Soviet intelligence directed the killing. 15 E St. NW
4 East Building, Office of Strategic Services headquarters The East Building on Medicine Hill was headquarters to the OSS and later the first home of the Central Intelligence Agency. Today the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its clandestine history. 23rd and E streets NW
5 Vint Hill Several original buildings remain at the former Vint Hill top secret cryptographic school and signals-intercept site, although in recent years the area has been redeveloped into a residential and business community. 4263 Aiken Drive, Warrenton, Virginia
6 Vichy French Embassy At the Vichy French Embassy, World War II spy Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, wearing only a necklace and high heels to throw off a guard, aided a safe-cracking operation to steal diplomatic codes. 2129 Wyoming Ave, NW
7 Arlington Hall Arlington Hall Junior College for Women became the location of America’s World War II code-breaking programs. The majority of the 10,000 workers were young women with an aptitude for math. 4000 Arlington Blvd., Arlington, Virginia
8 Mayflower Hotel Over the decades, the prestigious and popular Mayflower Hotel has offered quiet venues for clandestine meetings involving Nazi saboteurs, Soviet agents and American spies such as CIA agent Aldrich Ames, who spied for Russia, and government scientist Stewart Nozette, who attempted to sell classified information to the Mossad. 1127 Connecticut Ave. NW
Cold war espionage (1946-1991)
1 British Embassy diplomats and Soviet spies Harold “Kim” Philby, the senior MI6 British liaison officer to the FBI and the CIA, was secretly a Soviet spy and leader of Britain’s Cambridge Spy Ring. Another member of the ring, diplomat Guy Burgess, was a frequent guest in Philby's home. Both men worked at the British Embassy. 3100 Massachusetts Ave. NW (embassy), 4100 Nebraska Ave. NW (Philby house)
2 Air America Air America, a CIA proprietary company, operated one of the world’s largest airlines during the 1950s and 1960s, with 20,000 employees and 200 aircraft. Its pilots flew hazardous missions, landing at remote jungle airfields and dropping supplies under enemy fire. 918 16th St. NW
3 Pullman House The mansion was acquired by Russia in 1913 and served as the Russian and Soviet Embassy until becoming the Russian ambassador's residence in 1994. Soviet and Russian espionage operations were planned and run from here. 1125 16th St. NW
4 Steuart Motor Company One of the most unlikely clandestine sites in Washington, the Steuart Motor Company building also housed the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. Not so subtly, perhaps, guards armed with machine guns surrounded the building when unprocessed top-secret film from U-2 photos of Cuban missile sites was delivered. 5th and K streets NW
5 Exchange Saloon During the 1970s, the Exchange Saloon was a capital hot spot for swingers. The husband-and-wife spy team of Karl and Hana Koecher of the Czech intelligence service Statni Bezpecnost spent time at the saloon looking for potential agents. 1719 G St. NW
6 Hanssen signal site Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent turned Russian spy, used the Foxstone Park entrance sign as a signal site to communicate with his Soviet handlers. When a horizontal piece of adhesive white tape appeared on the sign, they knew that their spy had loaded the dead drop, code-named ELLIS, at the first footbridge inside the park. 1910 Creek Crossing Rd. NE, Vienna, Virginia
7 Aldrich Ames site Ames, a career CIA officer, spied for nearly 10 years while living in an upper-middle-class house that had been purchased with money received from the KGB. When driving to his CIA office in 1994, he was boxed in after stopping at an intersection a few blocks from his home. Pulled from behind the wheel, he was thrown over the hood of his beloved maroon Jaguar, handcuffed and arrested. North Quebec Street and Nelly Custis Drive, Arlington, Virginia
8 Jonathan Pollard meeting site In a scene worthy of a John le Carré novel, Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and spy for Israel, conducted a clandestine meeting with his Israeli handler on a bench in the gardens of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. In the idyllic setting, the two negotiated the pay Pollard would receive for classified documents. 1703 32nd St. NW
Today's spies (1992-2016)
1 CIA memorial A simple public memorial outside the CIA’s campus pays tribute to the two CIA officers murdered by Pakistani terrorist Mir Aimal Kansi on Jan. 25, 1993. CIA headquarters, McLean, Virginia
2 Cuban Embassy After the United States and Cuba broke diplomatic relations, Cuba maintained limited official status in its former embassy as an “interest section” operated through the Swiss government. Cuban intelligence officers met with reporters and others in the second-floor Hemingway Lounge and Bar. 2630 16th St. NW
3 Ana Montes residence Nicknamed the “Queen of Cuba” for her research as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Montes showed uncommon discipline in her 17-year career as a Cuban spy. But an error in tradecraft -- failure to wipe incriminating evidence from her computer -- exposed covert communications with Cuban intelligence and led to her arrest in 2001. 3039 Macomb St. NW
4 Stanislav Gusev operation Exactly how Russian intelligence implanted a microphone and transmitter in a chair rail in the State Department remains a mystery. The operation was exposed in 1999 after FBI agents observed Gusev, a Russian technical officer, repeatedly repositioning his vehicle in different parking places nearby to remotely control the bug. 2201 C St. NW
5 Tysons-Pimmit Library By using computers at public libraries, Brian Patrick Regan sought anonymity while planning espionage activities. Showing care for security, he devised a sophisticated private cipher that baffled investigators seeking evidence against him. But he was eventually tripped up in 2001 by his spelling errors. 7584 Leesburg Pike, Falls Church, VirginiaAn often drawn comparison to real world late medieval Knights is to that of a tank. This description has found its way in to modern gaming as well, when talking about your front line, damage absorbing fighter. The Armiger takes this to the next level, being a master of all things defensive.
I like this character and can see where it would fulfill a definite roll in a party that already has a front line fighter type. The Armiger is well built and well balance, fulfilling the role of secondary fighter and primary brick wall. That is, they gain personal defensive bonuses and the use of certain weapons while using a shield and also grant some bonuses to those around them.
Sword and board taken to the next level.
While I don’t think this would be a good character to introduce as the sole fighter class in a party I think it would be outstanding as an additional fighter – and that’s how the folks at OtherWorld Creations designed it. It’s not a flaw in the build but a deliberate difference.
I would have quite a bit of fun running a campaign with a player choosing the Armiger and I think many others would as well. 5 out of 5 stars
[tags]armiger, pathfinger, rpg, role playing games, pfrpg[/tags]Laguna Ten Bosch, the new home to the life-sized boat modeled after the Straw Hat Pirates’ Thousand Sunny, will be showing a special movie called “The Ones Who’ll Inherit the Will of D“, the official One Piece website announced.
According to the website, the movie will start showing at the Laguna Ten Bosch theme park from April 25 as part of the new attractions featuring all three brothers (Ace, Luffy, Sabo). The brothers will be featured in their adult appearances for the first time in Japanese history to commemorate the Thousand Sunny’s relocation to Laguna. Of course there will also be limited edition goods and original food menu’s available for fans to enjoy!
The main visual for the event featuring the three brothers will be released officially in the Weekly Shônen Jump on April 6 and advanced sale tickets will be on sale starting April 1.
1) ASL – The Fiery Bonds of Brothers
Connected by their “Blazing Bonds”, this attraction makes you look back on these three brothers Ace, Luffy and Sabo’s, now adults, past. “This display of dreams’s 3 brothers appearing together is a must-see”
2) “The Quest of Fire – Solve the Puzzle Hidden in the Brothers’ Bonds”
Choose any of the three brothers you like and try to clear the quest!
3) “The Ones Who’ll Inherit the Will of D – Sensations Theater”
An original movie themed after the Will of D.Building Mathematics: The Maker Faire in Pictures
[Update 18/3/10 The student from my Communicating Maths course who helped out with the stall over the weekend has put his story up on the course’s blog: Maths Students Read the Newspaper.]
Last weekend I had a lot of (exhausting) fun at the Maker Faire in Newcastle. It was a wonderful event so many congratulations to the Centre for Life for laying it on. I was of course there attempting to corrupt people into mathematics, and we had almost more interest than we could handle. Many thanks to both the LMS and the University of Leicester Maths department for their support.
It was also a chance to build Sculpture 2 with Sculpture System No. 5. It will be heading soon to the lair of the JamJar collective somewhere in Leeds:
Enjoy the photos:Image caption Trade negotiators have spent the week in Brussels attempting to hammer out a deal
A week of trade talks in Brussels have taken the European Union and the United States a little closer to a deal to liberalise bilateral trade.
EU officials say the trade relationship with the US is already the biggest in the world, worth more than 2bn euros (£1.7bn) a day.
But barriers remain, and removing them could make it even bigger.
If it happens, the agreement would be huge, capable of changing the shape of global trade.
Trade talks are never quick and easy. They can be fiendishly technical and contentious politically.
They are also wide ranging - the great cliche of trade negotiations is: "Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed." But there is clearly a political will on both sides of the Atlantic to make it work.
Both parties to the talks believe there are significant economic gains to be made from reducing trade barriers.
A study for the European Commission estimated the combined gains for Europe and the US at more than 300bn euros a year.
A whole range of trade barriers are under the microscope in these talks.
Double regulation
Much of what they are discussing is regulation. Up to 80% of the gains could come from this area.
This is not just about unnecessary red tape that can simply be removed, though there may be some of that.
It is in part a response to the lack of progress in global talks at the World Trade Organisation.
The problem is that businesses often have to comply with two sets of regulation if they want to sell goods in both markets. That means all the associated costs have to be paid twice over.
The regulations often have the same objective - frequently safety. There are different rules, for example, on car lights and door locks and many other components.
If they mean the same level of safety then in principle each side could accept anything that has met the other's standards.
That idea - "mutual recognition" as it's called - is one of the key features of the EU's own internal market that eases trade between EU countries.
There are some areas where mutual recognition will be a political minefield.
Genetically modified (GM) food is the obvious case, where Europe takes a very sceptical approach to allowing new examples to be sold.
It is a very unwelcome barrier to exports as far as American farmers are concerned.
GM wasn't even discussed this last week according to the negotiators. It will be tough when they do.
Environmental concerns
There are concerns that regulatory reform might lead to the lowest level protection becoming the standard - "harmonising down" as it has been called.
The environmental group Friends of the Earth has said the result of the negotiations could be "a dangerous deregulation of environmental and public health safeguards".
The lead negotiators from both sides insisted that would not happen.
After the Brussels talks, the chief American negotiator Dan Mullaney said: "Nothing we do to reduce unnecessary regulatory barriers will undermine the high standards of public health and safety and environmental and consumer protection that citizens on both sides on the Atlantic expect and enjoy."
Another type of barrier to trade is tariffs, taxes that apply only to imported goods. Technically they are relatively easy to deal with - you can simply cut them.
But politically it is more difficult as there will often be objections from industries and workers that lose protection.
In this case the potential gains are limited because average tariffs imposed by the US and the EU are already relatively low. There are exceptions for some types of goods, but that is the general picture for these two trade powers.
These negotiations continue a pattern in international trade in which countries have increasingly sought to free up trade bilaterally or among small groups.
It is in part a response to the lack of progress in global talks at the World Trade Organisation.
They started 12 years ago and have yet to yield an agreement. So we can expect more of these bilateral initiatives, though none quite as important as this one, between the two biggest economies in the world.TARTU, Estonia (Reuters) - Leila, Liina and Lily Luik from Estonia will make Olympics history when they cross the start line for the women’s marathon in Rio.
Twins competing in the same event is not uncommon at the Olympic level. But the Luiks are believed to be the first identical triplets to compete against each other.
The blond, blued-eyed sisters from the southern Estonian university town of Tartu, now 30 years old, only took up serious distance running when they were 24.
“We have been active since childhood, we love dancing, we love to be active and this pushed us to professional sports,” Lily said.
Liina, who got the sisters to start running, said that long-distance running appealed to them more than the highly technical nature of sprinting.
After a couple of years, they realised they were good enough to take part in international competitions. They decided to try for the Olympics, adopting the slogan “Trio to Rio” to give shape to their hopes of all three competing in the Olympics.
“We saw... after one year we had good results in Estonia and we thought we could achieve something good also outside of Estonia and to do some big competitions like European Championships and the Olympic games,” Lily.
In competition, the sisters say they support each other emotionally and even in race tactics, such as taking it in turns to act as wind breakers.
The sisters live separately in Estonia and sometimes have to train apart. But they regularly spend winters together at a high-altitude training camp in Kenya, and they appear to enjoy each other’s company, chatting away while running. They will all be training in northern Italy from June for Rio.
“It is boring to train alone,” said Leila.
The sisters are not favoured to end up on the podium at Rio. Ethiopian superstar Tiki Gelana set the Olympic record of 2 hours, 23 minutes and 7 seconds in London in 2012. The silver and bronze medal times were 2:23:12 and 2:23:29.
By contrast, Leila, the oldest of the triplets, has the fastest personal best at 2:37.12, set in Shanghai in 2013. She is followed by Liina, whose personal best is 2 minutes and 30 seconds slower and Lily, the youngest, who is a further 45 seconds back.
Slideshow (12 Images)
But all three said their goal for the Rio games was to finish together, to set personal bests and to finish with a smile. Asked if they expected to bring home an Olympic medal, all three chimed in.
“It would be great... it’s like our dream, and we know that we have to live in reality. It is very hard to compete against the Kenyan runners. We are not at the same kind of level as they are now, but in two or three years we can do that.”
(This May 26, 2016 story was refiled to correct the nationality of Tiki Gelana to Ethiopian in paragraph 11)Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved (Courtesy: WKRG)
WKRG web staff - BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WKRG) - A Muslim civil rights organization is asking management at a McDonald's located in Decatur, Alabama to identify and fire the staff who allegedly hid pieces of bacon in 14 chicken sandwiches ordered by a Muslim family.
The Alabama chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Alabama) called the franchise today with the request after the family sent them a video taken yesterday, after they each found a small piece of bacon on each sandwich. Eating pork products are strictly prohibited in Islam.
"Based on the evidence in this incident, as well as the unprecedented spike in anti-Muslim bigotry nationwide, we believe this was an intentional act of religious and ethnic bigotry," said Khaula Hadeed, Executive Director at CAIR-Alabama.
A representative from CAIR-Alabama says they also contacted McDonald's corporate management in order to put pressure on the franchise to provide surveillance of the incident as well as an apology for the employees' actions.
"McDonald's should investigate this incident, identify and terminate the employees responsible, and take proactive steps to satisfy this American family's concerns, starting with an apology," Hadeed said.
In July, CAIR-Alabama called on state and federal law enforcement authorities to investigate vandalism targeting a Muslim family as a possible hate crime in Helena, Alabama.
Helena Police Chief Pete Folmar told Al.com that vulgar graphics and racial slurs were spray painted on the vehicles. Folmar added that the police department would not tolerate "such things," referring to crimes targeting any person based on ethnicity or religion.
So far, neither McDonald's nor the Decatur-based franchise have responded to the allegations.Text size
A pair of European-listed, closed-end funds offers individuals a cheap way to invest with prominent hedge-fund managers Bill Ackman and Daniel Loeb.
These closed-ends, Ackman’s Pershing Square Holdings (ticker: PSH.Netherlands, ) and Loeb’s Third Point Offshore Investors (TPOU.UK), both trade at sizable discounts to net asset value. They offer other advantages as well, including daily liquidity and no investment minimums.
The Pershing Square Holdings closed-end, which has a market value of $3.6 billion, trades actively in Amsterdam and more lightly on the Pink Sheets under the ticker PSHZF. At $15, the shares trade at a 16% discount to NAV.
The Third Point fund is smaller, at $700 million, and trades in London. Also recently $15, the shares are priced at a 14% discount to NAV. The fund also has very thinly traded Pink Sheet shares (TPNTF). The fund invests directly in Loeb’s Third Point Offshore hedge fund. “The Third Point fund offers exposure to a world-class money manager at a discount. What’s wrong with that?” says David Feinman, a private investor in Larchmont, N.Y., who has long invested with Loeb.
The two overseas funds can be purchased through many brokerage firms, including Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, and Interactive Brokers. Morgan Stanley, however, restricts purchases to high-net-worth clients because the funds aren’t registered in the U.S. Shareholders in taxable accounts receive a Passive Foreign Investment Company tax form.
THE BIG DISCOUNT ON THE PERSHING SQUARE fund is understandable, given its poor performance; it dropped a total of more than 30% in 2015 and 2016 when the Standard & Poor’s 500 index returned 13%. Ackman also has become a poster child for the hedge-fund industry’s performance and fee issues.
By contrast, Loeb has a great 20-year record during which Third Point’s returns doubled those of the S&P 500. But in the past two years, results have been mediocre. Third Point fell 2.6% in 2015 and rose 6.1% in 2016, trailing the S&P in both years.
Pershing Square is a bet on Ackman’s revival, while Third Point is a play on a return to its historically good performance.
Loeb and other hedge-fund managers are betting that President Trump’s policies will produce market volatility, which is good for nimble active managers. “We do not plan to trade the tweets, but we expect an increasing number of real, and even better, fake dislocations, to create some extremely rewarding investing opportunities,” Loeb wrote in an investment letter earlier this month.
He also notes that most investors “underestimate” the operating leverage of banks in a rising rate environment, both from wider lending spreads and better trading activity. Third Point, like many hedge funds, has a mix of longs and shorts, with a net exposure of 62% at the end of January. This ought to dampen volatility relative to the stock market.
ACKMAN HOLDS just 13 equity positions in the closed-end fund. Three stocks— Mondelez International (MDLZ), Air Products and Chemicals (APD), and Restaurant Brands International (QSR), parent of Burger King and doughnut chain Tim Hortons—account for nearly half the Pershing Square fund. Valeant Pharmaceuticals International (VRX), which torpedoed the fund in 2015-16, can’t do much more damage. After falling 95% from its 2015 high, it’s now just a 3% holding in the fund.
Loeb operates a fairly concentrated portfolio including Baxter International (BAX), Dow Chemical (DOW), Constellation Brands (STZ), and JPMorgan Chase (JPM). It also has significant bond exposure.
The Third Point closed-end offers individual investors a way around the hedge fund’s minimum investment of $10 million. Another way in is Third Point Reinsurance (TPRE), a Bermuda property and casualty reinsurer that went public in 2013. Its investment portfolio is run by Third Point. The reinsurer, now around $11.85, trades at a 13% discount to its third-quarter 2016 book value of $13.55. Fourth-quarter results haven’t yet been reported.
The closed-end fund charges a 2% management fee, plus 20% of profits, while the reinsurer gets lower fees of 1.5% and 20%. In all, Loeb runs more than $14 billion.
INVESTOR DAVID EINHORN of Greenlight Capital has run a similar reinsurer, Greenlight Capital Re (GLRE), since 2007. It trades around $23, a slight premium to its third-quarter book value of $22.
Both companies offer investors a tax-advantaged play on top managers; investment income is virtually untaxed in the tax havens where the two insurers are based. The managers, meanwhile, get more or less permanent capital to invest, which is nice given the risk to hedge funds of withdrawals in bad times.
Neither reinsurer, however, has been a big winner. Third Point trades below its initial public offering price of $12.50, and Greenlight Re is up just 20% in the 10 years since its IPO. Neither has ever paid a dividend. The culprit in both cases has been weak underwriting performance. This validates Warren Buffett’s observation that it’s easy taking in property and casualty insurance premiums but hard to turn a profit; his own Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) has long been an exception.
Third Point Re, however, looks appealing given its discount to book value, the company’s intention to repurchase stock at 90% of book value, and good investment returns in January, when the closed-end fund gained 2.6%. The shares trade for about six times projected 2017 earnings of about $2, but that estimate is based on continued strong investment performance.
That said, Third Point Re suffers from an underwriting drag that isn’t present with the closed-end fund.
Indeed, analysts generally are lukewarm on the two reinsurers. “Third Point has a good investment and underwriting team but it’s very hard to get excited about any reinsurer now because it’s a difficult environment,” with pricing under pressure, says Meyer Shields, a KBW analyst who has a Market Perform rating and $14 price target on the shares.
Barron’s featured these investments nearly a year ago (“How to Buy Bill Ackman, Dan Loeb on the Cheap,” March 26, 2016). Since then, Third Point Offshore has returned almost 20%; Greenlight Re, Third Point Re, and Pershing Square Holdings, about 10%.
Pershing Square offers a plus. The fund is way below its peak level, or high-water mark, meaning that investors won’t pay an incentive fee unless the portfolio appreciates by 40%. Investors do have to pay the base annual management fee of 1.5%. Despite Ackman’s woes, he is still running $11 billion.
Investors also could benefit because Ackman is unhappy with the large discount on the closed-end fund, calling it “unacceptable” in a December investor letter. He went on to say that the fund is “exploring potential steps to narrow the discount to NAV.” No plan has been announced yet.
FOR TAX PURPOSES, overseas funds are treated like master limited partnerships. Investors are taxed on the funds’ ordinary income and capital gains whether they’re distributed or not. This assumes they choose “Qualified Election Status,” as most holders do, according to New York tax expert Robert Willens.
In an email, he wrote that as a “practical matter” there isn’t a big difference from a tax standpoint between U.S. mutual funds, which generate 1099 forms, and overseas funds. To retain their tax-favored status, U.S. mutual funds “distribute virtually all of their taxable income.”
There may be a place in investment portfolios for funds run by historically successful managers. The Pershing Square and Third Point closed-end funds offer an attractive way to get that exposure at a discounted price. The Third Point and Greenlight reinsurers offer a similar play for those wanting U.S.-listed shares.
Correction: A previous version of this story stated Pershing Square Holdings fund’s market value as net assets.
Email: [email protected]
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When he was summoned for Sportsnet’s postgame interview on Dec. 19, 2016, the Edmonton Oilers winger had banked on discussing two basic topics: his team’s 3-2 road win over the Blues, and his tying third-period goal against his hometown team in St. Louis. He did not, however, expect this: a slow-motion replay of his 8-year-old son, Anthony, wearing a No. 19 Oilers jersey and raising one fist, jumping in the Scottrade Center stands to cheer dad’s goal, flashing a gapped smile that probably deserves a visit from the tooth fairy.
“Seeing his face and his smile, it was truly amazing,” Maroon says later. “It choked me up. That’s what happens when you don’t see someone for so long. You miss the joy they bring to your life. It just hit me.”
The full exchange between Maroon and Sportsnet reporter Gene Principe lasts only 80 seconds, but it instantly became one of this season’s most raw and indelible moments. (If YouTube views are your choice measurement of popularity, it’s nearing 390,000.) Maroon fighting back tears and forcing out words. “Pretty cool,” he repeats. “Pretty emotional.” Principe resting a hand on Maroon’s shoulder and graciously ending the interview by saying, “Hey, Patrick, thanks a lot, Christmas is on the way. More time with Anthony.” The soft smile of thanks from Maroon, who replies, “Absolutely,” before walking away to wipe his eyes dry…
A deeper story accompanies those tears, one Maroon isn’t shy about sharing. As the 28-year-old enjoys the best year of his NHL career, a 20-goal scorer for the first time while riding shotgun with Connor McDavid on Edmonton’s top line, Anthony attends second grade in the St. Louis area, where he lives full-time with his mother. They still FaceTime daily, Patrick and Anthony do. They also spent Christmas together, like Principe promised; Patrick reports Anthony unwrapping Nerf guns, Pokemon gear, and an Xbox One. But in-season, in-person meet-ups are sparse. Since the St. Louis game was the first of ’16-17...waterworks. “Anyone in that situation would cry, if they knew what kind of situation I was in,” Maroon says. “Anyone would’ve done that.”
His buddies loved it. Typical Pat, for one thing. “A gentle giant,” says his agent Allain Roy. “Like a Labrador puppy.” Says Kyle Kraemer, a childhood friend who watched the game from a Scottrade Center suite: “He’s a soft kid. He acts tough in the rink, but he’s a big teddy bear. He wears his heart on his sleeve.” For another, those close to Maroon understand the additional layers baked into that night, Anthony and family notwithstanding. To them, it was also about the sheer improbability of Maroon returning to St. Louis in an opposing NHL uniform for the fifth time, and then scoring against the Blues for the first. Around them, the words “proud” comes up often. “He had all the odds against him,” Kraemer says. “I would say maybe a couple handful of people believed in Pat. I think that’s why they’re so happy.”
***
Growing up, though, even Maroon’s most faithful friends teased him with an unfortunate nickname. “A lot of people called him Fat Pat,” Kraemer says. “But what 12-year-old kids are worried about what they’re eating? He was just bigger at that age.” So Kraemer, remembering how young Pat always seemed to be rooting around the refrigerator whenever he visited the Maroon household, settled on something slightly more imposing. “F---,” Kraemer realized. “He’s the Icebox.”
Maroon was certainly capable of bruising opponents like one, but youth coaches struggled to see beyond his beefy build and choppy skating. “Some guy can have 10 donuts and not put on a pound,” Roy says, “and some guys can look at two donuts and put on five. That’s how his metabolism works.” Jeff Brown, the former NHL defenseman, remembers Maroon from one minor bantam team in St. Louis, when he was 12 or 13. “He basically couldn’t move,” Brown says. “He couldn’t get there. There was no way I could take him.”
Maroon learned to compensate, stickhandling a golf ball in his garage for hours and honing his toe-drags at roller rinks around St. Louis. Tournaments often featured six games crammed into a single weekend, the entirety of which Maroon would spend strapped into his skates. In 2010, along with another local friend named Shawn Gawrys, he and Kraemer led the United States to gold at the IIHF InLine
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-time bidding” and is widely adopted, including by Google via the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and by Yahoo via Right Media. It is often used to target people who visit an e-commerce website and browse for a particular type of product, urging them to come back and complete a purchase.
Facebook’s ad product director Gokul Rajaram hinted in July that the exchange was performing well, telling Wired Business that the “pre-alpha” system had “many, many people chomping at the bit to be let in and to ramp up their campaigns.” But he clammed up in a September interview with Ad Exchanger, stating “I can’t say anything about success because it’s still in beta right now.”
Coelius, who says he’s been authorized to speak by Facebook, says Facebook Exchange generates about four times as many clickthroughs per dollar spent when compared with its competitors (a measure known in the industry as "click-through return on ad spend"). That’s based on data from two Triggit advertisers, Shutterfly and Surveymonkey, but Coelius says “we are seeing this data across all... three dozen advertisers” whose ads it has sent to Facebook Exchange. (He elaborates in this blog post.)
Coelius attributes Facebook’s performance to a “highly engaged audience” and to the fact that people tend to log on to the social network at both home and work, making them much easier to track. A chart prepared by Triggit (below) shows traditional ad exchanges like Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange (grouped together on the left) tend to to be dormant during the workday and to sell most of their ad impressions at night, when people get home from work. Facebook Exchange, in comparison (on the right), sells more than half as many ads at 10am as it does at 6 p.m.
A comparison of when people click on ads from traditional "Real Time Bidding" exchanges like Google DoubleClick Ad Exchange, left, and when they click on ads on Facebook Exchange, right. Source: Triggit
Being able to target consumers around the clock is crucial to the merchants, app sellers and other transaction-driven advertisers who tend to use ad exchanges. “In our business, an expression of intent – a desire to find a pair of shoes, for example – goes stale very quickly,” Coelius says.
Many of Triggit’s advertisers would like Facebook to lift the exchange’s experimental status so they can spend more money on it, but the social network’s reticence to do that is understandable. Because they are based on your past web behavior, including searches and site visits, exchange ads can seem creepy to users, and Facebook has already ignited more than its share of privacy controversies and must tread carefully with its massive user base.
Unlike some of the initiatives of Facebook’s past, Facebook Exchange does not take the company into virgin territory; its competitors are already there. And it might make Facebook ads less annoying. “The relevance of the ads outweighs any concerns [users] might have,” Coelius says.
Given the state of Facebook’s stock – and Facebook Exchange’s potential to lift it – the social network no doubt hopes that’s true.This has been by far the most challenging few weeks in my professional life. I understood cognitively that I was facing a crossroads in my evolution as a governor and as a man, and that it came with exceptionally difficult choices. What I didn’t truly understand, however, was the range of emotions I would feel during this process.
The primary mandate I had for making this decision was to have it based on the potential for my growth as a politician — as that focus has guided me throughout my career.
I’m from Indiana originally, but Washington, D.C. truly raised me. It taught me so much about what it means to be a politician. From pushing divisive social issues to failing to lead on the economy, I learned everything I’ve done as governor from my time in Congress.
This week, I had to decide: Do I really want to be governor of Indiana? Or do I want to publicly beg for Donald Trump to rescue me from this job?
Today, I’ve announced my decision: I want to take my talents to Washington, D.C. I want Donald Trump to choose me as his vice presidential nominee.
I fully understand that it would be harder for me to run for governor after publicly begging Donald Trump for a promotion. And I’m willing to accept that.
Two months ago, I told you I didn’t want to be vice president, and that “My focus is on Indiana.” But my focus was never about Indiana alone. No, it was always about something much bigger: Mike Pence.
Thank you Indiana, for being my stepping-stone. I wouldn’t be in this position had I not been able to use the governor’s office as a rung in the ladder of my political career.
That’s why I blocked federal pre-K funding, passed the job-killing RFRA law that cost the state more than $60 million, and signed an anti-women’s health law that even Republican legislators said was too extreme.
Why did I do this? To elevate my national profile.
As I weighed this decision, know that it is a true honor to be presented with the chance to set aside my governorship to pursue my national ambitions. I think I’ve made it clear where I prefer to be.
Thanks for the memories, Hoosiers.Foxtel Now's TV commercial as the company takes on the streaming market
FOXTEL will take the fight for online audiences up to its TV rivals, announcing bold new plans for a budget streaming service.
At an all-star gala party in Sydney, the pioneering pay-TV company unveiled a new look logo and on-demand platform, Foxtel Now, which will give viewers low-priced and flexible subscriptions to their favourite lifestyle, drama, sport and movie programming.
FOXTEL launch of Foxtel Now reveals its star talent
An evolution of the existing Foxtel Play package, Foxtel Now will ensure subscribers have greater freedom and access to Foxtel’s content, from as little as $10 a month.
Foxtel CEO Peter Tonagh said: “Foxtel Now represents our most flexible and affordable entertainment service and brings with it HD streaming, a great new look and feel and the freedom to jump in and out based on your viewing preferences.”
Foxtel Now will feature five entry level packs to match viewers’ interests, including drama and pop packs ($15 each or $25 for both); or lifestyle, documentaries or kids packs for just $10 each.
The drama and pop packs are expected to be the most popular, allowing access to Foxel’s award-winning HBO slate including Westworld, VEEP, Big Little Lies and the upcoming season seven of Game Of Thrones for only $15 a month; as well as the stunning local dramas including A Place To Call Home (starring Abby Earl), Wentworth and new productions including Picnic At Hanging Rock.
Foxtel Now’s movies pack is available for $20 per month in addition to an entry level pack; while the sports pack is available for an extra $29 per month, meaning sports fans can now get access to Foxtel’s extensive sports programming from $39 per month.
Mr Tonagh said: “We believe everyone deserves to experience the world’s best entertainment.
“Foxtel is already famous for offering award-winning homegrown drama, plus unrivalled live sport, new movies, new shows and more complete seasons than anyone else in Australia.
Unfortunately, not enough Australians are able to enjoy this incredible programming.
“We think it’s time to change that, so we’ve taken some big steps to diversify our service to offer the biggest, most affordable, range of options for everyone.
“From tomorrow, all Australians can watch what they want, when they want and where they want at a price that suits them best, from low-price, no-commitment, HD streaming up to a state-of the art viewing experience via our cable and satellite iQ3 set top box.”
Australia’s premier pay-TV service has invested more than $100m each year on local programming (outside of news and sport), with its Foxtel Original productions garnering numerous industry awards in recent years.
Foxtel Now, which launches tomorrow, will be available on PC/Mac via the Google Chrome browser, Telstra TV, iOS and Android mobiles and tablets, and Chromecast.
Additional devices will be updated in the coming months, until then, other devices, including PlayStation 3 and 4, Xbox One and select Smart TVs are able to stream Foxtel content in SD via the Foxtel Play app.
Broadening its Foxtel On Demand library, Foxtel will now offer a selection of more than 16,000 titles of on demand TV and movie programming with over 1,200 of the hottest movies available, including 98 of the top 100 box office movies of 2016.
Foxtel’s 20th Century Fox recent-release titles arrive 12 months before Netflix and Stan, including blockbuster movies Eddie The Eagle, X-Men: Apocalypse, Independence Day: Resurgence and Ice Age: Collision Course.
TV trailer: Game of Thrones season 7 1:48 Game of Thrones returns with what promises to be one of its most chaotic seasons.
News Corp, publisher of this website, owns 50 per cent of Foxtel.February 18, 2014 10:23 am ET by Luke Brinker
Nationally syndicated columnist and National Review Online (NRO) contributor Dennis Prager declared that the "radical and extreme" notion of marriage equality leaves "no plausible argument" against polygamy or marriages between brothers and sisters or parents and children.
In his February 18 syndicated column, Prager assailed a spate of recent judicial decisions opposing state bans on same-sex marriage or, in the case of Kentucky, calling on state officials to recognize same-sex unions performed in other states.
Challenging the court rulings, Prager cited the margins by which state voters have approved bans on marriage equality - a standard by which bans on interracial marriage would also have been valid; in 1958, 94 percent of Americans opposed such unions. But Prager assured readers that same-sex and interracial unions are in no ways analogous (emphasis added):
For [marriage equality supporters], it is identical to ruling that laws that banned interracial marriages were unconstitutional. But that argument is utterly flawed. First, the analogy is false because there is no difference between black people and white people, while there are enormous differences between males and females. Second, no great moral tradition or thinking ever forbade interracial marriages (inter-religious marriages were sometimes forbidden). Moses, for example, married a black woman, and neither the Bible nor God hinted that it was wrong.
In other words: God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And because gay people have been historically disenfranchised, there's no reason to start granting them equal rights.
Prager proceeded to predict the consequences of allowing marriage equality to take root (emphasis added):
Proponents of same-sex marriage regularly label opponents "radical" and "extremist." However, given that no society in thousands of years has allowed same-sex marriage, it is, by definition, the proponents of same-sex marriage whose position is radical and extreme. You cannot re-define marriage in a more radical way than allowing members of the same sex to marry. You can argue that is the moral thing to do. But you cannot argue that is it not radical. [...] This is another example of the lack of serious thought -- as opposed to serious passion -- that underlies the movement to redefine marriage. If American society has [in the words of Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled against California's Proposition 8] a "constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis," then there is no plausible argument for denying polygamous relationships, or brothers and sisters, or parents and adult children, the right to marry.
Prager's prediction dovetails with those of other marriage equality opponents who similarly suggest that necrophilia and bestiality might become commonly accepted practices if gay couples are allowed to marry. But in the 10 years since Massachusetts became the first state to legalize marriage equality, there hasn't been a rush to legalize polygamous unions. Meanwhile, most states that allow incestuous marriages are right-leaning states where same-sex marriage currently isn't allowed.
As Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has observed, the problem with "slippery slope" arguments of the kind advanced by Prager is that they ignore the deep differences between allowing a committed, loving same-sex couple to get married and permitting, say, a brother and sister to get married. Incestuous relationships, Lithwick notes, are often exploitative and psychologically destructive, with severe consequences for children's health.
Of course, expecting Prager to offer a fact-based take on marriage equality and its consequences is a fool's errand. He's made a name for himself offering hyperbolic anti-equality arguments, likening the Supreme Court's marriage equality decisions this summer to Egypt's military coup and denouncing anti-discrimination laws as harbingers of "fascism."
Previously:
NRO's Prager Desperately Touts More Matthew Shepard Trutherism
NRO's Dennis Prager: LGBT Non-Discrimination Efforts Breed "Fascism"
NRO's Prager: Marriage Equality Ruling Is Just Like Egyptian Military CoupCAMBRIDGE, Mass. — BRAZIL is potentially poised to become the third and largest country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage, following a judicial order on Tuesday. Argentina was the first, in 2010, after the government brushed aside objections from Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, now the pope. The Uruguayan legislature followed suit last month. Mexico City has allowed such unions since 2010, and the Mexican state of Quintana Roo since 2011.
How can we reconcile these developments with the stereotype of Latin culture as a bastion of religiosity and machismo? How is it that the continent the Catholic Church looks to as its future (along with Africa) is home to what is said to be the largest gay-pride celebration in the world, in São Paulo, Brazil?
The church’s presence in Latin America is undeniable, but its influence on social policy is nothing like that of conservative Christian evangelicals in the United States, nor have the rising numbers of Pentecostals been obsessed with homosexuality like their conservative counterparts up north. Mexico, for instance, has long emphasized separation between church and state and recognizes only civil marriage — that is, clerics can officiate at weddings, but are not empowered to legally marry couples.
Political history is another factor. Since the 1970s, protest movements helped end military dictatorships or long periods of one-party rule; this democratic opening empowered left or center-left governments that have strongly emphasized human rights and individual freedom. Rafael de la Dehesa, a social scientist at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, has shown how gay and lesbian activists piggybacked on this wave of democratization.Dec 10, 2014; Orlando, FL, USA; Washington Wizards forward Kris Humphries (43) dunks against the Orlando Magic during the first quarter at Amway Center. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
It was mid-July and the Washington Wizards were coming off a successful playoff run. After defeating the Chicago Bulls in the first round, eventually going on to lose in the semi-finals to the number one seeded Indiana Pacers, the Wizards had finally accomplished something meaningful.
The future was still uncertain, though. With Marcin Gortat, Trevor Ariza, and Trevor Booker–who all played a major part in the Wizards’ success–entering unrestricted free agency, the Wizards had to find a way to keep their core intact.
Gortat appeared to be the team’s number one priority in the summer, and it didn’t take long for the Polish big man to ink a 5-year deal with the team. Still, team president Ernie Grunfeld and coach Randy Wittman knew they had to find a way to retain the other pieces to remain successful.
Trevor Ariza decided to join the Houston Rockets, declining virtually the same offer from Washington in order to avoid state income taxes. A few days passed and reports indicated that Trevor Booker would sign with the Utah Jazz after the Wizards declined to give him a qualifying offer worth nearly $5 million.
The Washington Wizards went on to surprise everyone, signing future Hall-of-Famer Paul Pierce, effectively replacing Ariza from the starting lineup. But, the hole left by Booker’s departure remained. The once fan-favorite in D.C. was gone, and the Wizards had to find a way to replace his production.
It was later announced that the Washington Wizards had agreed to two separate deals, acquiring both DeJuan Blair and Kris Humphries by using multiple trade exceptions.
Fast-forward a few months, and Humphries has played a crucial role for the Wizards, and Grunfeld seems to have found a perfect replacement for Booker.
Coming into the season, the Wizards knew that the oft-injured Nene would inevitably miss some time. They had to find someone who was capable of contributing along side the starters and while also coming off the bench. Prior to joining the Wizards, Kris Humphries had averaged a double-double for two consecutive seasons before getting relegated back to the bench in 2013.
As a veteran with 10 years of NBA experience, Humphries doesn’t seem to mind playing off the bench, and calls it a privilege to share the court with the likes of Andre Miller and Rasual Butler. Coach Wittman acknowledged Humphries’ professionalism after the Washington Wizards dismantled the Boston Celtics at home last night:
“He has been a guy that has been in the starting lineup, been on the bench. He just likes to play, and that has been great for us obviously. We’ve had him in both areas, starting and now back on the bench. He gives that unit a good spring to it. I thought he was really big tonight.”
While Kris Humphries may be known more for his life off the court, he’s been a solid contributor in the league for over a decade. He’s averaged slightly over 8 points and 6 rebounds per game for the Wizards this season, and Washington seems to have gotten a bargain by signing him for slightly over $4 million per season.
His ability to rebound, defend, and knock down the 15-foot jump shot has made him a great fit along side the starters and the reserves. Like Booker, the fans and his teammates genuinely enjoy watching him play. It’s been a long time since the Wizards had players come to work every day and accept their role, but with additions like Kris Humphries, it’s become the norm.
Kris Humphries’ put-back dunk against his former team–the Boston Celtics:
It might have taken Kris Humphries some time to adjust to his new team after suffering a hand laceration in his first preseason game against the Chicago Bulls, but he’s become a major contributor in the nation’s capital.
He might not be the cereal lover that Trevor Booker is, but Kris Humphries has been the perfect replacement. Sorry, Clinton, Hump is no longer a secret weapon.AN EXHIBITION entitled Renaissance to Goya: Prints and drawings from Spain will be on display at the British Museum from September 20, 2012 to January 5, 2013.
This exhibition, drawn from the British Museum collection, brings together for the first time important prints and drawings by Spanish and other European artists who were working in Spain from the mid-sixteenth to the nineteenth century.
Through exhibiting these works, many of which have never before been on display, the exhibition will provide new insights into the visual culture and history of Spain, a country renowned for its painting and architecture, but not so well known for its graphic arts in comparison to its European counterparts, Italy and France.
Outside of Spain, the British Museum has one of the best collections of Spanish drawings from the seventeenth century, a period often considered to be the ‘Golden Age’ of Spanish arts and literature.
All of the most important artists are represented by key works in this display; Diego Velázquez and Alonso Cano in Madrid, Bartolomé Murillo and Francisco Zurbáran in Seville and Jusepe de Ribera in Spanish Naples. Francisco de Goya, who is universally regarded as one of the most important and compelling graphic artists of the period, is represented through the Museum’s remarkable collection of his prints and drawings.
The lack of study and appreciation of Spanish prints and drawings is partly due to the misapprehension that Spanish artists did not draw, an attitude that has since been revised through further research on the subject.
The reasons for these assumptions are complex, but can perhaps be rooted in the confiscation of Church possessions that took place in the nineteenth century, and subsequent dispersal of collections of Spanish art. The exhibition will consider the reasons behind this misapprehension and demonstrate the distinctive character of art in Spain during this period.
The exhibition begins exploring the mid-sixteenth century with the building of Philip II’s monastery of the Escorial near Madrid that drew a large number of foreign artists, mainly Italian. The internationalism of Spain in the sixteenth century is key to understanding the nature of the work made at this time.
The first part of the exhibition will be devoted to the foreign artists who worked in Spain, such as the Italians Pellegrino Tibaldi and Federico Zuccaro. The engravings made by the Flemish printmaker Pedro Perret in Madrid depicting the Escorial are among the most remarkable architectural prints from the sixteenth century.
However, whilst foreign influence may be unmistakable, artistic groups in Spain maintained their own traditions, and the process by which the Spanish absorbed the work of foreign artists is a complex one.
By the seventeeth century, each region of Spain was operating as an independent artistic ‘centre’, resulting in artistic practice being more segregated than the smaller countries of France or Italy. The exhibition is arranged into regions: Madrid and Granada; Seville and Córdoba; and Valencia/Naples, in order to highlight the differences.
The last part of the exhibition will be devoted to Goya and his contemporaries, including the Tiepolo family who arrived in Madrid in the 1760s and whose etchings revolutionised printmaking in Madrid.
The selection of Goya’s work that will feature will demonstrate the huge range of his graphic ability and the subjects that absorbed him. Much has been written of Goya’s ‘lone genius’ but this exhibition will explore how his art should be seen in the context of the unprecedented scientific, social and artistic developments that were taking place in Spain and the rest of Europe during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Examples of his Tauromaquin series can be seen in the exhibition, a collection of aquatint etchings of bullfighting subjects, which portrayed some of the most famous bullfighters of the day. In this series Goya has completely mastered the aquatint technique, achieving remarkable theatrical effects through the contrasting light and dark.
Proofs from Goya’s Disasters of War print series will also be on display, demonstrating his reaction to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and the horror that followed.
It is through Goya and his contemporaries that we can see first-hand how the work they were producing helped to propel Spain to become an artistically dominant force, whilst changing the artistic landscape of Spain forever.
An accompanying catalogue has been published by the British Museum Press. Written by Mark McDonald, the curator of Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings from Spain, it is a beautiful and comprehensive volume that examines for the first time the rich history of more than four hundred years of drawing and printmaking in Spain.
Priced £25 (paperback) and £45 (hardback), it is available from the British Museum Book Shop and online at britishmuseum.org.
Renaissance to Goya Gallery
Shakespeare: staging the world continues at the British Museum until November 25, 2012.
Also at the British Museum until September 30, 2012, is The horse: from Arabia to Royal Ascot.
British Museum, Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3DGThe US military has just dropped a big bomb in Afghanistan.
The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, also called the “mother of all bombs” or MOAB for short, is the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used by the US military on the battlefield. The 11-ton weapon was first tested in 2003 but had never been used in combat prior to Thursday — when a US MC-130 aircraft dropped one on what it claims was a network of ISIS tunnels. 36 ISIS fighters were killed, according to the Afghan government, and the US military has not found any evidence of civilian casualties.
The obvious question, following such a high-profile show of strength, is what this means. Does this mean ISIS is a bigger threat in Afghanistan than we previously thought? Is this President Trump just following through on his campaign promise to “bomb the shit out of ISIS”? Is the Trump administration trying to send a signal to countries like North Korea and Iran that it means business?
According to experts on weapons and foreign policy, it seems this was a military decision, not a political one, based on the realities on the ground in Afghanistan right now. There’s no reason to assume this was something out of the ordinary, even though the bomb was bigger than ones typically used by the US military.
For one thing, a general, not the president, appears to have made the call to use the bomb — Gen. John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, specifically. For another, the nature of ISIS’s presence in Afghanistan means that it actually kind of does make sense to use this bomb. Finally, Trump himself suggested it was not intended to send any kind of message.
“I don’t know if it this sends a message; it doesn’t make any difference if it does or does not,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “This was another very, very successful mission.”
The speculation, in short, was way over the top.
“There is so little trust... in the Trump administration to make basic tactical decisions that everyone sort of assumes something crazy and weird is going on,” says Rob Farley, a professor at the University of Kentucky who studies the Air Force. “But I’d suggest not jumping to conclusions about what this particular weapon means.”
The more important questions here are the standard ones you should ask after any US airstrike. Did the strike accomplish its objectives? Are the initial reports that there were no civilian casualties correct? Were the appropriate precautions taken to minimize the risks of the strike? Was the strike proportional to the threat, and did the value of the military target justify the risk of killing innocents?
The fact that these questions remain unanswered, however, is normal at this point — they usually take a while to fully investigate, and we just heard about the bomb. But just because a larger-than-normal bomb was used here doesn’t mean there’s necessarily anything out of the ordinary.
Why the US military would use a MOAB
The MOAB is not only powerful but also extremely large in a physical sense. It’s so big that it can’t be delivered by a normal bomber; you need to put it in a cargo plane like the MC-130 in order to get it to a target. Cargo planes are easier to hit with anti-aircraft missiles than bombers, which means the MOAB is inherently somewhat riskier to use than smaller bombs.
The MOAB is designed to destroy a lot of targets on the surface — unlike the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), the only US conventional bomb that’s larger than the MOAB (and one that has yet to be used in combat). The MOP is designed to destroy hardened tunnels and bunkers, whereas the MOAB is designed to destroy buildings and things just below the surface, like caves.
“The blast radius goes up to a mile,” Farley explains. “That does not mean everything within a mile dies — it means that everything within a mile has a potential to be affected. Structures that are a mile off, or three-quarters of a mile off, may not be destroyed based on how strong they are.”
These two facts of the MOAB — that it’s delivered by a cargo plane and that it destroys stuff on the surface — explain why it’s not used very commonly by the US military. Since the weapon was made ready for use in 2003, the US has fought a lot of missions in densely populated urban areas and/or specifically targeting smaller enemy troop deployments.
Those aren’t optimal situations for MOAB use because of the danger of collateral damage, and the added risk created by dropping it from a cargo plane means the US military rarely has a need to use it.
“It’s a weapon that has a narrow target set,” an Air Force official told me. “It’s primarily intended for soft to medium surface targets — targets like a cave and canyon environment.”
The area hit in Afghanistan appears to be one of the few targets that fit this profile.
The bomb site was in Achin District, a heavily agricultural area near the Pakistani border. Achin is also a hub of activity for ISIS-Khorasan — the name ISIS uses for its Afghanistan branch (Khorasan is a historical name jihadists often use for Afghanistan). If the US military is right — and we don’t know that it is — then a significant group of ISIS fighters were holed up in a large network of caves and tunnels in a relatively remote part of Afghanistan. It’s the rare case where using a MOAB makes sense.
As the group suffers mounting losses, Gen. Nicholson said in a statement emailed to press, it has begun to use things like bunkers and tunnels “to thicken their defense.” "This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive,” Nicholson said.
This means less than you think
It’s easy to fixate on the use of such a huge bomb. But the truth of the matter is that the use of the MOAB means virtually nothing significant outside of the immediate area where the bomb was dropped. The mere use of a large bomb, in and of itself, is not strategically significant. There’s no evidence so far that the MOAB was used for any reason other than that it made sense to use it against this specific ISIS target.
It may be tempting to see this as evidence that the US is increasingly worried about ISIS’s influence in the country. But the truth appears to be closer to the opposite: ISIS’s forces have dropped by about 75 percent since their peak in late 2015, and the group has lost significant territory since then.
“By NATO's own estimates, it's something like 800 fighters countrywide, a big drop over past year,” Colin Cookman, an Afghanistan expert at the United States Institute of Peace, tweeted.
Nor does this bombing, in and of itself, augur a larger US intervention in that country.
“[It] means they are going after ISIS, otherwise nothing,” Barnett Rubin, a professor at Columbia University who studies Afghanistan, told me when I asked what he thought of the strike.
It has even less significance elsewhere. After the bomb was used, speculation turned almost immediately to the idea that President Trump was trying to intimidate American enemies. The Daily Mirror tabloid called it a “terrifying message to North Korea and other countries muscle-flexing against the US.”
But everything the US government has said so far suggests that the bomb was dropped for specific tactical reasons in Afghanistan, nothing more. Nor, experts say, does it really make sense as a way of threatening those countries.
“If you think about what a target profile might look like in either Iran or North Korea — both of those countries have air defense systems,” Farley says. “This is a weapon dropped from a C-130, which is not a stealthy aircraft and not really a combat aircraft at all. This is not a weapon you can drop on someone who has an active defense of the target — fighters or any kind of surface-to-air missile.”
Some overexcited coverage has even compared this bomb to a nuclear weapon, which nuclear experts think is completely absurd.
“Don't be fooled by the claim circulating in some quarters that the explosive yield of the MOAB rivals that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,” Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, tells me. “The reported yield of the MOAB is approximately 11 tons. The Hiroshima bomb was approximately 15 KILOtons."
The breathless speculation and obsession over this bomb, which you’re seeing on both social media and cable news, needs to stop. This isn’t a toy or some kind of geopolitical game — it’s a weapon that just killed actual humans.
The questions we should be asking aren’t the kinds of things you would ask in a game of Risk. They are the ones we should always be asking of our military: Who was actually killed in the attack? Did they absolutely have to be killed? And was this the best way to go about doing that?
This is a bombing raid like all other US bombing raids, just with a somewhat novel device. We should focus on the deadly nature of the bombing raid itself — and not the technological wonder.Sorry, Urban Outfitters, but Amazon is the biggest vinyl retailer of all time. Of all time.
Last week, Urban Outfitters chief administrative officer Calvin Hollinger announced that the retailer was the world’s largest seller of vinyl records. Turns out he was wrong according to Billboard’s recent survey of music labels, distributors and wholesalers:
“A Billboard analysis shows that Amazon is the largest seller of vinyl in the U.S., with about 12.3% market share, followed by Urban Outfitters with 8.1% market share. While Billboard’s survey covered the U.S. market, label sales and distribution executives point out that Amazon has a much larger music presence internationally than does Urban Outfitters, which has about 50 stores outside the U.S. compared to the 300 or so they have in this country.”
Billboard also notes that independent retailers are “the backbone of vinyl’s growth, and they are still selling tons of it.”
Better luck next time, Urban Outfitters. At least this slip-up didn’t involve discriminatory merchandise.The Autobahn with Inscription "Fanget An! 21/3/1934" ("Get Started")
Hitler begins the Autobahn digging in 1933 The best possible way to bring the German people back into work is to set German economic life once more in motion through great monumental works... This is not merely the hour in which we begin the building of the greatest network of roads in the world, this hour is at the same time a milestone on the road towards the building up of the community of the German people.
-- Adolf Hitler Perhaps best known throughout the world for its superior engineering and open stretches without a speed limit, the Autobahn was Hitler's invention from his dreams about an interstate highway system. Over 2000 km were built by 1938 and today approximately 11.000 km cover Germany. True to stereotypes about German engineering and maintenance, road designs are solid without a single pothole, with 4% or lesser grades, long acceleration and deceleration lanes, gentle curves, and free-resistant surfaces. Just as Hitler insisted on having buildings and other infrastructure that would last 1000 years, the engineers of the Autobahn design things right the first time and perform critical inspection and thorough maintenance to keep the best highway system in the world at peak operational performance. Copyright © 1999 - Hitler Historical Museum - All Rights ReservedBolivian President Evo Morales. (Photo: Alain Bachellier / Flickr)Imagine the aircraft of the President of France being forced down in Latin America on “suspicion” that it was carrying a political refugee to safety – and not just any refugee, but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale.
Imagine the response from Paris, let alone the “international community,” as the governments of the West call themselves. To a chorus of baying indignation from Whitehall to Washington, Brussels to Madrid, heroic special forces would be dispatched to rescue their leader and, as sport, smash up the source of such flagrant international gangsterism. Editorials would cheer them on, perhaps reminding readers that this kind of piracy was exhibited by the German Reich in the 1930s.
The forcing down of Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane – denied air space by France, Spain and Portugal, followed by his 14-hour confinement while Austrian officials demanded to “inspect” his aircraft for the “fugitive” Edward Snowden – was an act of air piracy and state terrorism. It was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world and the cowardice and hypocrisy of bystanders who dare not speak its name.
In Moscow for a summit of gas-producing nations, Morales had been asked about Snowden, who remains trapped in Moscow airport. “If there were a request [for political asylum],” he said, “of course, we would be willing to debate and consider the idea.” That was clearly enough provocation for the Godfather. “We have been in touch with a range of countries that had a chance of having Snowden land or travel through their country,” said a US state department official.
The French – having squealed about Washington spying on their every move, as revealed by Snowden – were first off the mark, followed by the Portuguese. The Spanish then did their bit by enforcing a flight ban of their airspace, giving the Godfather’s Viennese hirelings enough time to find out if Snowden was indeed invoking article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”
Those paid to keep the record straight have played their part with a cat-and-mouse media game that reinforces the Godfather’s lie that this heroic young man is running from a system of justice, rather than preordained, vindictive incarceration that amounts to torture. Ask Bradley Manning and the living ghosts in Guantanamo.
Historians seem to agree that the rise of fascism in Europe might have been averted had the liberal or left political class understood the true nature of its enemy. The parallels today are very different, but the Damocles sword over Snowden – like the casual abduction of the Bolivian president – ought to stir us into recognizing the true nature of the enemy.
Snowden’s revelations are not merely about privacy, nor civil liberty, nor even mass spying. They are about the unmentionable: that the democratic facades of the United States now barely conceal a systematic gangsterism historically identified with if not necessarily the same as fascism. On Tuesday, a US drone killed 16 people in North Waziristan, “where many of the world’s most dangerous militants live,” said the few paragraphs I read. That by far the world’s most dangerous militants had hurled the drones was not a consideration. President Obama personally sends them every Tuesday.
In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, Harold Pinter referred to “a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.” He asked why “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities” of the Soviet Union were well known in the West while America’s crimes were “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged.” The most enduring silence of the modern era covered the extinction and dispossession of countless human beings by a rampant America and its agents. “But you wouldn’t know it,” said Pinter. “It never happened. Even
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Tudor — should not be worried. "We are not in any way indicating that Her Majesty (Elizabeth II) shouldn't be on the throne," Schurer said.
Researchers said it was the first time there was scientific evidence that questioned medieval lines of succession in the monarchy.
Other academics said history is littered with claims and counter-claims of royal legitimacy.
"When Richard took the throne, he said his brother Edward should never have been king because he was illegitimate," said Steven Gunn, a tutor in history at Oxford University.
Gunn said it was unlikely anyone would ever learn the truth behind the most damaging rumours about Richard — that he murdered his young nephews to hang onto his crown. Still, Gunn said, a more complex picture of the king is now emerging.
"This opens up a new posthumous discussion about Richard's legacy," the historian said. "He has been misrepresented as just a king with scoliosis."Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, called Montana Congressman-elect Greg Gianforte an “alleged criminal” on Thursday night after he defeated Democratic opponent Rob Quist in the special House election despite being charged with assaulting a reporter.
Bharara reposted a quote by John Adams on his Twitter feed and addressed the tweet to Gianforte.
"I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress,” the Adams quote read, with Bharara tweeting, “Repost in honor of alleged criminal Greg Gianforte's election.”
Repost in honor of alleged criminal Greg Gianforte's election. If he were an immigrant he'd face deportation; now he sets immigration policy https://t.co/vN8QdEU04S — Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) May 26, 2017
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Gianforte’s victory in the race to fill the seat left vacant by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke came the day after a physical altercation with reporter Ben Jacobs of The Guardian. Following the altercation, the local sheriff charged Gianforte with misdemeanor assault.
Bharara, who was fired by President Trump after refusing to resign in March, has emerged as a frequent critic of the White House and the GOP since he was removed from office.
Earlier this month he blasted Trump’s explanation for firing former FBI Director James Comey, questioning whether anyone believed the ouster was about Comey's handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE's use of a private email server.Get the biggest Everton FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
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Unknown on the European stage until this season, FC Krasnodar have quickly proved they can compete at this level.
The Russian outfit were only founded six years ago and were promoted to the first division – despite finishing fifth – in 2011. Not to be confused with FC Kuban Krasnodar, who they drew 1-1 with in their domestic derby earlier this month, they have made considerable strides since making this season’s Europa League.
They earned the right to occupy their spot in Group H courtesy of a 3-0 elimination of Real Sociedad in the qualifying stage, but have not won a game in the competition since; with three draws and two defeats so far.
As a result Krasnodar can’t progress beyond Thursday’s dead-rubber Goodison tie, but they’re currently fourth in the Russian League, just a point behind Dynamo Moscow as they chase the considerable consolation of Champions League football next term.
Manager Aleh Konanaw is not short of attacking options to test a raw and youthful Toffees defence either, as he looks to go out in style.
Ari, known as Ari Da Silva Ferreira to his family, the Brazilian has been in Russian football with Spartak Moscow since 2010. A striker who can play up front but also provide from a wide position, he notched six goals in 18 appearances last season and can form a fearsome trident with Vladimir Bystrov and Marat Izmailov.
Everton officials are advising supporters to arrive as early as possible for Thursday’s game (kick off 8.05pm).
Tickets are still available but fans are encouraged to secure their seat in advance to avoid potential queues at the ticket office on the night.
To help this, the Blues have activated the print-at-home option, meaning fans can buy ticket online, print them off and simply walk up to turnstiles when they arrive at Goodison.
Alternatively, supporters can purchase via telephone by calling 0871 663 1878 or in person at Everton Two in Liverpool One or TicketQuarter in Queen Square.
Blues updates throughout the day in our live EFC rolling news feed hereUnder current drafts of the legislation, fines would run as high as 100 million euros, ($137 million) or 5 percent of a company’s global annual revenue, whichever is higher, rather than a cap of 2 percent, which was the figure proposed by Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for justice, who wrote the original draft of the legislation.
Lawmakers want to pass the final bill before spring, partly to burnish their chances of success in European Parliament elections in May. That timetable is strongly supported by Ms. Reding.
European leaders are expected to meet in Brussels on Thursday and focus their discussions on using technology to drive economic growth and create jobs. A document circulated before the meeting also indicated that leaders planned to acknowledge a need “to foster the trust of consumers and businesses in the digital economy.”
The committee vote on Monday night, which Mr. Albrecht said had been delayed twice since April by intense lobbying, gives Mr. Albrecht a mandate to begin negotiating the final legislation with the European Council, the body representing member governments.
Two years ago, Washington successfully lobbied Europe to abandon a similar measure that would have shielded Europeans from requests by American authorities to share online data gathered by some of the biggest American Internet companies, many of whose users live in Europe.
For technology companies, the concern about the pending legislation is likely to focus more on the high fines for infractions, and on restrictions on sharing personal data that could limit their ability to gain revenue from advertising and offering new services.
Andrew Sheridan, an intellectual property lawyer at the firm Freshfields in London, said the level of fines was a concern to many companies. “The most dramatic part of the reforms are the potential financial penalties,” Mr. Sheridan said before the vote on Monday. “If you get data compliance wrong, there’s a lot more at stake.”As for the restrictions on data sharing with American authorities, Mr. Sheridan said he expected “a pragmatic compromise” in the end.Not to be confused with OpenSSH
OpenSSL is a software library for applications that secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping or need to identify the party at the other end. It is widely used in Internet web servers, serving a majority of all web sites.
OpenSSL contains an open-source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols. The core library, written in the C programming language, implements basic cryptographic functions and provides various utility functions. Wrappers allowing the use of the OpenSSL library in a variety of computer languages are available.
The OpenSSL Software Foundation (OSF) represents the OpenSSL project in most legal capacities including contributor license agreements, managing donations, and so on. OpenSSL Software Services (OSS) also represents the OpenSSL project, for Support Contracts.
Versions are available for most Unix and Unix-like operating systems (including Solaris, Linux, macOS, QNX, and the various open-source BSD operating systems), OpenVMS and Microsoft Windows.
Project history [ edit ]
The OpenSSL project was founded in 1998 to provide a free set of encryption tools for the code used on the Internet. It is based on a fork of SSLeay by Eric Andrew Young and Tim Hudson, which unofficially ended development on December 17, 1998, when Young and Hudson both went to work for RSA Security. The initial founding members were Mark Cox, Ralf Engelschall, Stephen Henson, Ben Laurie, and Paul Sutton.[3]
The OpenSSL management committee currently consists of 7 people.[4] There are 13 developers[5] with commit access (many of whom are also part of the OpenSSL management committee). There are only two full-time employees (fellows) and the remainder are volunteers.
The project has a budget of less than one million USD per year and relies primarily on donations. Development of TLS 1.3 is sponsored by Akamai.[6]
Major version releases [ edit ]
Algorithms [ edit ]
OpenSSL supports a number of different cryptographic algorithms:
(Perfect forward secrecy is supported using elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman since version 1.0.[18])
FIPS 140-2 compliance [ edit ]
As of December 2012, OpenSSL is one of two open source programs involved in validation under the FIPS 140-2 computer security standard by the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP).[19] (OpenSSL itself is not validated, but a component called the OpenSSL FIPS Object Module, based on OpenSSL, was created to provide many of the same capabilities).[20]
A certificate was first awarded in January 2006 but revoked in July 2006 "when questions were raised about the validated module's interaction with outside software." The certification was reinstated in February 2007.[21]
Licensing [ edit ]
OpenSSL is double licensed under the OpenSSL License and the SSLeay License, which means that the terms of both licenses apply.[22] The OpenSSL License is Apache License 1.0 and SSLeay License bears some similarity to a 4-clause BSD License.
As the OpenSSL License is Apache License 1.0, but not Apache License 2.0, it requires the phrase "this product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit" to appear in advertising material and any redistributions (Sections 3 and 6 of the OpenSSL License). Due to this restriction, the OpenSSL License and the Apache License 1.0 are incompatible with the GPL.[23] Some GPL developers have added an OpenSSL exception to their licenses that specifically permits using OpenSSL with their system. GNU Wget and climm both use such exceptions.[24][25] Some packages (like Deluge) explicitly modify the GPL license by adding an extra section at the beginning of the license documenting the exception.[26] Other packages use the LGPL-licensed GnuTLS and MPL-licensed NSS, which both perform the same task.
OpenSSL announced in August 2015 that it would require most contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), and that OpenSSL would eventually be relicensed under the terms of Apache License 2.0.[27] This process commenced in March 2017.[28]
Notable vulnerabilities [ edit ]
Timing attacks on RSA Keys [ edit ]
On March 14, 2003, a timing attack on RSA keys was discovered, indicating a vulnerability within OpenSSL versions 0.9.7a and 0.9.6. This vulnerability was assigned the identifier CAN-2003-0147 by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) project. RSA blinding was not turned on by default by OpenSSL, since it is not easily possible to when providing SSL or TLS using OpenSSL.
Denial of Service ASN.1 parsing [ edit ]
OpenSSL 0.9.6k had a bug where certain ASN.1 sequences triggered a large number of recursions on Windows machines, discovered on November 4, 2003. Windows could not handle large recursions correctly, so OpenSSL would crash as a result. Being able to send arbitrary large numbers of ASN.1 sequences would cause OpenSSL to crash as a result.
OCSP stapling vulnerability [ edit ]
When creating a handshake, the client could send an incorrectly formatted ClientHello message, leading to OpenSSL parsing more than the end of the message. Assigned the identifier CVE-2011-0014 by the CVE project, this affected all OpenSSL versions 0.9.8h to 0.9.8q and OpenSSL 1.0.0 to 1.0.0c. Since the parsing could lead to a read on an incorrect memory address, it was possible for the attacker to cause a DoS. It was also possible that some applications expose the contents of parsed OCSP extensions, leading to an attacker being able to read the contents of memory that came after the ClientHello.[29]
ASN.1 BIO vulnerability [ edit ]
When using Basic Input/Output (BIO)[30] or FILE based functions to read untrusted DER format data, OpenSSL is vulnerable. This vulnerability was discovered on April 19, 2012, and was assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2012-2110. While not directly affecting the SSL/TLS code of OpenSSL, any application that was using ASN.1 functions (particularly d2i_X509 and d2i_PKCS12) were also not affected.[31]
SSL, TLS and DTLS Plaintext Recovery Attack [ edit ]
In handling CBC cipher-suites in SSL, TLS, and DTLS, OpenSSL was found vulnerable to a timing attack during the MAC processing. Nadhem Alfardan and Kenny Paterson discovered the problem, and published their findings[32] on February 5, 2013. The vulnerability was assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2013-0169.
Predictable private keys (Debian-specific) [ edit ]
OpenSSL's pseudo-random number generator acquires entropy using complex programming methods. To keep the Valgrind analysis tool from issuing associated warnings, a maintainer of the Debian distribution applied a patch to the Debian's variant of the OpenSSL suite, which inadvertently broke its random number generator by limiting the overall number of private keys it could generate to 32,768.[33][34] The broken version was included in the Debian release of September 17, 2006 (version 0.9.8c-1), also compromising other Debian-based distributions, for example Ubuntu. Ready-to-use exploits are easily available.[35]
The error was reported by Debian on May 13, 2008. On the Debian 4.0 distribution (etch), these problems were fixed in version 0.9.8c-4etch3, while fixes for the Debian 5.0 distribution (lenny) were provided in version 0.9.8g-9.[36]
Heartbleed [ edit ]
A logo representing the Heartbleed bug
OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f had a severe memory handling bug in their implementation of the TLS Heartbeat Extension that could be used to reveal up to 64 KB of the application's memory with every heartbeat[37][38] (CVE-2014-0160). By reading the memory of the web server, attackers could access sensitive data, including the server's private key.[39] This could allow attackers to decode earlier eavesdropped communications if the encryption protocol used does not ensure perfect forward secrecy. Knowledge of the private key could also allow an attacker to mount a man-in-the-middle attack against any future communications.[40] The vulnerability might also reveal unencrypted parts of other users' sensitive requests and responses, including session cookies and passwords, which might allow attackers to hijack the identity of another user of the service.[41]
At its disclosure on April 7, 2014, around 17% or half a million of the Internet's secure web servers certified by trusted authorities were believed to have been vulnerable to the attack.[42] However, Heartbleed can affect both the server and client.
CCS Injection Vulnerability [ edit ]
CCS Injection Vulnerability (CVE-2014-0224) is a security bypass vulnerability that exists in OpenSSL. The vulnerability is due to a weakness in OpenSSL methods used for keying material.[43]
This vulnerability can be exploited through the use of a man-in-the-middle attack,[44] where an attacker may be able to decrypt and modify traffic in transit. A remote unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by using a specially crafted handshake to force the use of weak keying material. Successful exploitation could lead to a security bypass condition where an attacker could gain access to potentially sensitive information. The attack can only be performed between a vulnerable client and server.
OpenSSL clients are vulnerable in all versions of OpenSSL before the versions 0.9.8za, 1.0.0m and 1.0.1h. Servers are only known to be vulnerable in OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.0.2-beta1. Users of OpenSSL servers earlier than 1.0.1 are advised to upgrade as a precaution.[45]
ClientHello sigalgs DoS [ edit ]
This vulnerability (CVE-2015-0291) allows anyone to take a certificate, read its contents and modify it accurately to abuse the vulnerability causing a certificate to crash a client or server. If a client connects to an OpenSSL 1.0.2 server and renegotiates with an invalid signature algorithms extension, a null-pointer dereference occurs. This can cause a DoS attack against the server.
A Stanford Security researcher, David Ramos, had a private exploit and presented it before the OpenSSL team where they patched the issue.
OpenSSL classified the bug as a high-severity issue, noting version 1.0.2 was found vulnerable.[46]
Key Recovery Attack on Diffie Hellman small subgroups [ edit ]
This vulnerability (CVE-2016-0701) allows, when some particular circumstances are met, to recover the OpenSSL server's private Diffie–Hellman key. An Adobe System Security researcher, Antonio Sanso, privately reported the vulnerability.
OpenSSL classified the bug as a high-severity issue, noting only version 1.0.2 was found vulnerable.[47]
Forks [ edit ]
Agglomerated SSL [ edit ]
In 2009, after frustrations with the original OpenSSL API, Marco Peereboom, an OpenBSD developer at the time, forked the original API by creating Agglomerated SSL (assl), which reuses OpenSSL API under the hood, but provides a much simpler external interface.[48] It has since been deprecated in light of the LibreSSL fork circa 2016.
LibreSSL [ edit ]
In April 2014 in the wake of Heartbleed, members of the OpenBSD project forked OpenSSL starting with the 1.0.1g branch, to create a project named LibreSSL.[49] In the first week of pruning the OpenSSL's codebase, more than 90,000 lines of C code had been removed from the fork.[50]
BoringSSL [ edit ]
In June 2014, Google announced its own fork of OpenSSL dubbed BoringSSL.[51] Google plans to co-operate with OpenSSL and LibreSSL developers.[52][53][54]
See also [ edit ]03 February 2015
Canterbury University law Professor Ursula Cheer says the main purposes for suppression orders are to protect victims or those connected to the accused, and to ensure an accused gets a fair trial. In order for suppression orders to be granted, those factors must outweigh the rule of open justice.
“When I see instances where the media think far too many [suppression orders are] granted, and too easily, this mightn’t always be the case because it’s in the media’s interests to oppose them.”
In fact, figures issued under the Official Information Act in September show 880 people were granted permanent name suppression in 2009 – of whom 218 were convicted – and the figure dropped steadily each year, reaching 354 granted in 2012, including 222 convicted offenders.
While suppression order numbers were declining even before the Criminal Procedure Act 2011, reasons for the trend can be attributed to the legislation changes that see a clearer, more prescribed model for judges to abide by, Ms Cheer says.
The new legislation also provides standing for the media, as representatives of the public, to have input into whether name suppression ought to be granted. “The courts have a duty to be rigorous when it comes to the set-out guidelines. The figures show the principle of ‘open justice’ is being preserved as much as possible.”
The New Zealand public can be very punitive insofar as naming the accused is seen as part of the punishment in some sort of way and the media tend to follow suit, she says. “But that said, a person is entitled to a fair trial so they shouldn’t be shamed in the meantime. People need to think about it as a procedural thing where a number of grounds have to be satisfied. If name suppression is granted it doesn’t mean the person has gotten away with it.”
Celebredom would not amount to sufficient grounds for name suppression orders, despite popular belief, she says.
On the right to a fair trial
Law Society criminal law committee convener Jonathan Krebs says when name suppression isn’t granted, mud sticks, even if the allegations are not found to be true in a legal sense.
“Mud sticks, like an unpleasant scent in the air. You have to wonder whether there should be more of a force where name suppression should be granted until a charge is dealt with. Very few people will remember the outcome of a case, but they will remember the allegation.”
Defence lawyer Michael Vesty, of Resolution Chambers in Nelson, says a fair trial can, in some cases, only be achieved by taking a position that appears irreconcilable with public perception.
“It seems perverse for a sentenced murderer to have his name suppressed in advance of his next murder trial, but that’s exactly what happened on the West Coast in a trial I was involved in some years ago.”
Mr Vesty says a defendant is entitled to be tried on the facts of the case. The law allows only relevant prejudicial evidence, not any prejudicial evidence.
“The risk is that the jury loses the wood for the trees and cannot get past the defendant’s past offending when considering the facts before them.”
Victim protection
Social justice activist Nicole Skews says suppression orders are crucial for ensuring victims aren’t identified.
“I support the freedom of press but not at the expense of the identities of people who have already been victimised.
“Part of the public concern with suppression orders is how many high profile people seem to be granted suppression, and much of that is due to media reporting. You’re far more likely to read about a sportsperson or entertainer with name suppression in court.”
Many survivors who wish to speak out about their cases, or have their perpetrators named, have a hard time in doing so, Ms Skews says.
“In cases where there’s a clear guilty verdict and the survivor is asking for suppression to be lifted, I think their wishes should be considered paramount.
“I’m not sure that the general public understands the frequency with which suppression orders are granted to protect victims who are family members and could therefore be easily identified without one, and it’s my view that this should be a priority for media to communicate.”
Ms Skews recalls a high profile case where a well-known entertainer sexually abused his 4-year-old daughter, and he was granted permanent name suppression.
The focus of name suppression in this case became about the public’s outrage at the judge’s comments relating to the importance of the perpetrator’s work.
There was a drive to name and shame the entertainer, rather than giving his daughter the right to grow up without being constantly identified as a victim of sexual abuse, she says.
“If there’s reason to suspect a link can be made between naming the perpetrator and identifying a victim who does not want to be identified, any press breach of suppression is, in my view, unethical.”
In a case in December where a prominent businessman was charged with sexual violence offences relating to an alleged “dungeon” where he reportedly abused young women in exchange for drugs, two of the victims’ mothers called for name suppression to be lifted. However, other than what was reported in the media, “we don’t know if any of his other victims are relatives, or if the safety of the defendant’s family is at risk, or other contributing factors in the suppression order”.
“It’s my view that media need to tread carefully in cases where it’s unclear why name suppression has been granted, as unless all survivors are openly calling for the suppression to be lifted, the media ends up prioritising some survivors over others.”
What the media has to say
The media have an important role representing the public in the courts, and reporting on cases of public interest, Newspaper Publishers’ Association editorial director Rick Neville says.
“It is fundamental to a democratic society and the principle of open justice that the media have free access to the courts.
“There is no doubt that making an offender’s name public can comprise part of the punishment, which is why there are instances where reporters and editors are threatened by defendants, and occasionally their legal representatives, against publishing someone’s name. But it is part and parcel of the open justice system we have in this, and similar, countries.
“The media believe that in an open society such as ours, justice should also be open – and be seen to be open. This is why media object when they believe suppression orders are being granted too easily.”
The media accept there are occasions when suppression orders are appropriate, such as protecting the identity of children, and ensuring that a person charged receives a fair trial, he says.
“However, many members of the media believe the application of suppression orders in this country is inconsistent and that is why on occasion newspapers, TV networks and radio stations will challenge the granting of such an order.”
Mr Neville says the media strives for fairness insofar as reporters are trained to apply balance to the reporting of court cases to ensure, as far as is possible within the constraints of space and time, that both sides of an argument are presented. This approach is also taken in the editing process, he says.
Furthermore, the current law allows media to report names unless a suppression order is requested and granted in which case the name will not be published. Media operate within the law applying at the time, he says.
Meanwhile, according to retired High Court Judge and Press Council independent chairman Sir John Hanson, the Council occasionally considers a complaint about a breach of a suppression order, but only if the complainant can provide confirmation that the police are not taking up the matter.
“The Press Council can only consider the matter on an ethical basis, as we do not rule on legal issues. Such complaints are therefore generally dealt with under the ‘fairness’ aspect of the ‘Accuracy, Balance and Fairness Principle’.”MUMBAI: "I am the chief minister of all the people of Maharashtra. Nobody should be excluded from state policy," said Prithviraj Chavan amidst rousing cheer from the state's transgender community.In a possible first for any CM in the country, Chavan spent an evening interacting with the state's transgender population at YB Chavan Auditorium on Thursday. Chavan says his government will work towards setting up a transgender welfare board and initiating sensitization programmes for policemen on the issues facing the third gender. He has also promised to work towards an art academy for transgender individuals, awards for talented artistes from the community, funding for cinema on transgender and projects supporting health and education for Maharashtra's third sex.Members of the community narrated stories of abuse and neglect before the CM. The event was sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme, the state department of woman and child development and organizations working with transgenders, was held in light of the state's newly proposed women' policy that included two chapters on transgender for the first time.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
European adventures act as the reward for a year’s hard work, but Ger O’Brien insists St Patrick’s Athletic won’t be getting carried away this week.
For the Premier Division leaders, the trip to Lithuania to take on Zalgiris Vilnius is one that they are looking forward to but not allowing it to distract them from their title assault.
The Saints have not lifted the league title in 14 years and now that they are top of the table – three points ahead of Derry City – they are determined to continue setting the pace.
Yet, O’Brien knows that they must enjoy their European exploits as they return to Europa League combat, because it is something that Airtricity League players don’t experience too often. “We kind of know the opposition that we will be playing and there is nothing really overly to fear, but we won’t be going over there thinking that we just have to turn up to win,” said O’Brien.
“They are a good side and have seven or eight players who have represented their countries, so obviously they are decent footballers but so are we. Hopefully we can get a good result and bring it back to Richmond Park.
“These nights are fantastic for the players. They are stuff that unfortunately us as players will never get on a regular basis, but when we do it is something that we savour.
“We also know that we have the league to come back to, so we certainly won’t be letting one dictate the other. If it’s good enough, it’s good enough, if not, then we’ll come back and focus on the league.”
Saints boss Liam Buckley echoed the thoughts of O’Brien and called on his players to keep producing the kind of form that has put them in pole position for the league title.
Buckley believes it was vital that they secured a 2-0 victory over Bray Wanderers last Friday night, so that they keep the momentum going with a fixture pile-up on the horizon.
“We had the distraction of [Europe], so it’s a great win, from our point of view, because it keeps us top of the table, where we want to be,” stated Buckley.
“We want our performance to be good, we want to be at the top end of the table, we want to be in Cup finals and winning stuff. The best way to do that is by playing the way we are.
“We just need to keep ourselves focused and with a bit of luck with injuries and suspensions don’t damage us too much – let it roll on. If we can keep it going it would be great.”Share. Amanda Schull will also star in the Syfy pilot. Amanda Schull will also star in the Syfy pilot.
Nikita’s Aaron Stanford has found his next role. The actor, who recently wrapped up his four-season stint on the CW series (the final season debuts November 22nd), will star in 12 Monkeys, the new Syfy pilot based on Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film. Stanford will play Cole, the lead character, described as “a desperate and haunted time traveler from the post-apocalyptic near future who appears in present day on a mission to locate and eradicate the source of a deadly plague that will eventually decimate the human race.” Prior to Nikita, Stanford played Pyro in X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand.
Starring alongside Stanford is Suits’ Amanda Schull, playing Cassandra Railly, “a brilliant doctor who is forced to choose between her idyllic life or joining Cole’s mission to uncover the dangerous conspiracy.”
Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett (full disclosure: they’re friends of mine and Travis used to work here at IGN) wrote the 12 Monkeys script and are co-executive producing. The duo are also just wrapping up a two-season stint on Nikita and there’s even one more Nikita connection – Schull guest starred in a Season 3 episode, where her character had a memorable fight in a morgue with Maggie Q’s title character.
Also joining 12 Monkeys are Natalie Chaidez (In Plain Sight, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), who will serve as executive producer and showrunner and Jeffrey Reiner (Friday Night Lights), who will be directing the pilot and will also executive produce.
Stanford’s casting comes on the heels of his fellow Nikta alum Shane West being cast in the upcoming series Salem.A short history of the "Shays' rebellion" in Massachusetts in the wake of the American Revolution, in which many poor farmers and war veterans attempt to shut down the state's courts in protest at the debt burden on veterans and high taxes on farmers.
For an anarchist the real history of any country is the history of those people who find themselves in conflict with the government, a conflict which is often unexpressed except in the acts of those who are fed up to the point of rebellion. There is no period in the history of any land when many of the people haven't found their interests different from those of the state. There is no period in the history of any country where some of the people are not in outright revolt for the right to control their own lives. It is true that sometimes it seems to be only a trickle but at other times it reaches floodtide proportions.
United States history as presented in textbooks is aimed at government funded high schools and universities. In the history they present, full accounts of those who have opposed the government are generally repressed. Many incidents of real peoples' history are omitted. Others are treated briefly and summarily dismissed. Those involved in genuine protest or rebellion are often referred to as misled, misfits, or madmen.
In most history books there is an elitist bias which romanticizes leaders, kings, generals, politicians and dramatizes their role without mentioning the struggles of the common people for the necessities of life and control over their own existence. Most history books, whether of a liberal bourgeois or "Marxist" bent, ignore the real struggles of the people and instead glorify this or that government and its leaders.
There is a great need for good anti-establishment history, for the return of that which has been repressed. This is not to say we need to view history as a spectacle for our entertainment, or as an escape from reality into the glories of the past.
If history has any use it is for the living, for examples and encouragement, to show us what is possible. In history can be found models of the way things might be done to change the future, and models of what has failed; and errors not to be repeated. The resurgence of the repressed in history can give strength to the anarchist, the radical, and those who would struggle for control of their day-to-day lives. If we learn well from history we know we are not alone, we have never been alone, and the future is ours if we make it so. It is for the living generation to fulfill the repressed and forgotten attempts at rebellion, at revolution, at taking possession of our own lives.
In issuing this pamphlet on Shays' Rebellion, we at Solidarity Books hope we are issuing the first of what will be many pamphlets bringing forth the repressed in history in the United States. We hope those living elsewhere will take possession of the repressed in history where they live and share that with us.
The time is particularly ripe for anarchist accounts of the American Revolutionary period and afterward. Nixon has already set researchers, paid by the government, to the task of preparing for the Bi-Centennial of the American Revolution, 1776-1976. In the works are a pro-nationalist, pro-patriotic, pro-government propaganda campaign distorting the events of the American Revolution to government purposes.
An organization called the People's Bi-Centennial Commission is planning opposition to this move by the government, by making plans for what amounts to a counter-propaganda campaign by radicals. This seems to us a good idea, worth serious consideration. How-ever, from what little is known about the People's Bi-Centennial Commission, a lot of their material is likely to be nationalistic, and at worst authoritarian Marxist-Leninism wrapped in the flag to make it palatable.
The repressed is surfacing, people's history is needed, but who shall write it? Here's hoping that many anarchist brothers and sisters attempt it!
As to the account of Shays' Rebellion that follows, Shays' Rebellion is but one incident in a historic current. In the western regions of the coastal states, on the frontier, lived farmers who were in great debt and burdened by distant and unresponsive governments during the depressions preceding and following the War of the Revolution. Under British or American government there was little relief for those suffering under heavy taxes and excessive rents. There was a period of about fifty years of economic exploitation and discrimination by East Coast rulers. The farmers participated in many disorders and upheavals from the 1740's, when the Jerseyites refused to pay rents and Massachusetts men marched in Boston in support of a land bank law, until the 1790's, when the Fries Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion were fomented by Pennsylvania mountain men. In 1781 there was a mutiny of the Pennsylvania line of the Continental Army against exploiting "gentry" officers, some of whom were executed by their own men. These revolutionary soldiers elected officers from the ranks and continued to fight for the revolution. There were other mutinies at this time.
There were waves of revolts 'known by such names as The Wars of the Carolina Regulators in North and South Carolina, The Wars of the New Hampshire Grants in New York and Vermont, Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts, and the Fries and Whiskey Rebellions in Pennsylvania and neighboring states. In many states the western counties were in rebel hands for a number of years. No taxes could be collected and the courts were closed to prevent mortgage foreclosures. In reading the following account, we ask that you see it not as an isolated incident or an aberration, but as a small part of a continuous stream of action by people to wrest control of their lives from the state.
--D.B.
Mention of Shays' Rebellion brings to mind a vague memory of a textbook reference to irate farmers with pitchforks. Among the countless instances of suppressed history, Shays' Rebellion is one of importance, as it reveals much of the true nature of the American Revolution, or at least of the aims and ideals of the "Embattled Farmer," who provided the backbone of the resistance to England; as one of the people involved put it, "We have lately emerged from a bloody war in which liberty was the glorious prize aimed at. I earnestly stepped forth in defense of this country, and cheerfully fought to gain this prize, and liberty is still the object I have in view." The rebellion was a defense of the revolution by the people who had made and won the revolution in opposition to the counter-revolution of the merchants, which has gone down in the history books as the real revolution. As a result, suppression of knowledge about the rebellion is necessary in order to cover up the greater falsification of history regarding the revolution as a whole. Nor was the rebellion in any way a localized affair: resistance to the counter-revolution was widespread throughout the country; Massachusetts was merely the place where it was the strongest.
The first thing that must be realized is that the rebellion was not "Shays'." Shays was the leader only in a purely military sense; despite government attempts to label him a dictator (and English agent), he did not
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human disease (as it is only too clear that AIDS' ancestor had!), and this disease occurs in a species used to produce vaccines given to many hundreds of millions of people around the world for many years, then even if scientists had been well aware of this disease and its danger, and had had an excellent test available, and had all along been taking the greatest possible precautions to prevent its entry into our species, even so it is clear that as time passes and the vaccine batches mount into the thousands and tens of thousands, almost certainly someone is eventually going to get careless, or a test is going to give a false negative result, and a contaminated batch is going to get through. No system is perfect; and a system that requires perfection in order to avoid disaster is in fact little more than a recipe for disaster. Regardless of the precautions scientists might have been taking, it simply goes without saying that when, two decades after embarking on such a procedure, the monkey disease is found to have crossed over into our species, the first place one should then look is to the procedure, and not to a monkey bite. If under these circumstances six years had been allowed to pass after discovery of this worldwide disaster before finally turning to the obvious, the failure would have been monumental.
But in fact, of course, the vaccine researchers had no knowledge of SIV and no means of testing for it until four years after AIDS had been discovered and 28 years after beginning mass vaccination using these monkeys. Unbelievable as it may seem, the oral polio vaccine consisted of nothing more than the culture fluid from the polio-inoculated monkey kidney cell cultures after passage through a filter small enough to remove bacteria but large enough to permit passage of the polio virus, and whatever other viruses may have been infecting the monkeys before they were killed. This filtered culture fluid constituted the finished vaccine fed to hundreds of millions of people around the world [40] There were no methods used to prevent those viruses already present in the monkey kidneys from contaminating the vaccine and no methods used to kill the viruses after contamination. The scientists' only hope of avoiding contamination lay in eliminating all the sick monkeys they could find beforehand and all the contaminated batches they could find afterwards. The former approach would have missed all those monkeys still in the incubation period (not even to mention the fact that most SIVs do not seem to cause any illness at all in those species they infect naturally, while being fatal to species which have no previous experience with them).
The latter method was even less useful. Retroviruses are very difficult to detect, especially using the crude tests available in the earlier years of vaccine use, before reverse transcriptase was even known to exist. It is hardly surprising that no variety of SIV was among the more than 75 previously-unknown monkey viruses that were found through polio vaccine testing, despite the fact that substantial proportions of African green monkeys were infected [41]. And with these methods of manufacture it is clear that contamination would be common. Indeed, the most likely outcome is for contamination to occur every time, or virtually every time, an SIV-infected monkey is used [42]. The researchers' tests for contamination did not catch 100 percent of SIV-contaminated batches. They did not catch a grossly-unacceptable 99.9 percent. They caught zero percent.
Practically every AIDS researcher around the world who was remotely interested in AIDS' origin would have read the 22 November 1985 Science article tying AIDS to SIV, tying SIV to green monkeys, and tying green monkeys to polio vaccination [24]. Why did the article's authors not pursue this obvious important lead? Why did no single one of the thousands of AIDS researchers who would have read the article pursue it? Everyone in any way connected with or knowledgeable about vaccine research was additionally aware of the huge potential for contamination, and of the actual contamination of many batches of several different vaccines with the monkey virus SV-40, and several other viruses. This group managed to produce only a single letter-to-the-editor, four years later, suggesting the role of oral polio vaccine in the origin of HIV should be investigated [43]. Finally, those who worked on the early live polio vaccine knew in addition that its original test site was not in a world center of medical technology, as anyone would have expected, but in the middle of Africa. And I dare say that there is not one among the many individuals who knew that fact who did not also know this was the location of AIDS' greatest ravages and the location many had suggested for its origin. By late 1985 this was common knowledge even among the general public. Yet no single polio vaccine researcher pursued the question either.
The monumental failures so far described apply to the entire fields of AIDS research and vaccine research. In addition, lesser degrees of failure attach to all related fields in diminishing proportion to their distance. The reflection on all the life sciences is very grave. How could they have allowed their colleagues to be so irresponsible about such important matters for all these years? Indeed, the reflection reaches much further. These were not abstruse matters only a specialist could understand. Not only scientists from all fields but reporters and the general public have followed the AIDS issue with intense interest. Why did no physicist, no geologist, no newspaper or television reporter who read the Science article go to an AIDS researcher and ask the simple question: "How do you know AIDS did not come from the monkeys through your vaccines?" There is no possible remotely satisfactory answer to this question.
But of course it is much worse even than this. Obvious as the lead may have been, and straightforward as the research required, there is still a vast difference amounting to several orders of magnitude between researching a topic oneself and merely understanding the results of someone else's finished and clearly presented research. I spent weeks sifting through hundreds of articles and distilling them down to a picture so clear no one could have failed to understand it. I carefully cited every reference, listing in addition to the usual information, the particular relevant page or pages of each article so as to further simplify the process of verification. The research the scientists should have done themselves a long time ago, I did for them. I put it all together and handed it to them on a silver platter. They had nothing to do but check it out, using the references I had supplied, references from their own medical journals. Even this was beyond them. And it is not a matter of a single editor or scientist being particularly stupid or particularly irresponsible. It happened over and over. Unless one is prepared to argue that those journals and researchers I sent my work to were a few rotten apples entirely unrepresentative of science as a whole, one must reach the conclusion that people of this calibre typify science. That is certainly my conclusion. And anyone taking the other side will have a very hard time explaining how all the good and responsible scientists who never had the benefit of seeing my work managed to miss finding so obvious and important a point themselves for all these years.
We take the kidneys from great numbers of SIV-infected monkeys, add a little polio virus, grow whatever will grow for several days, filter the solution, and feed it to hundreds of millions of children around the world. Then, a quarter century later, when we discover SIV now infects humans too, we say, "What could have happened? It must have been a monkey bite."
Part V
I will leave it to others to discuss the ethics of using a subject people as guinea pigs when testing a vaccine whose safety is in question, and what should and could be done to redress an error now made that will almost certainly destroy a number of countries and kill more Africans than died in 300 years of Western slavery. I will leave it to others to discuss the ethics of the early vaccine researchers in ignoring commonsense safety precautions and dismissing obvious objections in their zeal to combat polio and earn their place in history. It is hard to know, looking back on it now, and in full knowledge of what did happen, how harshly they should be judged. But a great error was made, and if these people are even in part excused on the ground that they could not have been expected to see with the clarity of hindsight, then blame must instead attach to the obscurity and unforeseeableness of the dangers of twentieth-century science itself, and the advisability of any further travel along a road so irredeemably hazardous should be seriously questioned. I will leave it to others to discuss the, in my view, completely inexcusable actions of these same polio researchers in not coming forward six years ago when they first began to worry -- they would have had to begin to worry -- that their vaccine might have been responsible for AIDS. It would have been an easy enough thing for any one of them to prove what had happened, but every one of them failed to investigate the question. What possible reason could there be for not looking into so important a matter so close to their central concerns, except that they were afraid of what they would find? I will leave it to others to discuss the ethics of the various AIDS researchers and other scientists who ignored the information I sent them and risked millions of lives on their unexamined opinion that I was wrong, when I was not. Any one of them could have brought this information to public attention long ago. Every one of them failed to do so. I will concentrate here specifically on the ethics of the various editors who used their positions to withhold this information from the world.
# # #
The editors of the world's learned journals are the gatekeepers of knowledge. Their decisions determine what becomes known and what remains unknown. Indeed, their decisions determine even what can be debated. Society is dependent on the efficient performance of their jobs for one of its most basic and vital commodities: information. In a world such as the modern one, where decisions made by political leaders or political bodies determine basic facts of existence for countless millions now alive and still to be born, and where scientific errors have the potential, already partially realized, to bring about worldwide holocaust, then incorrect knowledge presents a threat of enormous magnitude. The editors of the world's learned journals are at the interface between knowledge and society. Their power is enormous. Their responsibility is enormous. How can things have gone so terribly wrong?
It is my strong view that these editors are entirely culpable. There is nothing comparable to the hindsight excuse of the vaccine workers. These people had the benefit of hindsight, but it did them no good. There is much ancillary blame that can be placed on the system itself, which exerts a tremendously powerful force for conformity. The system crushes those like Nelson-Rees who dare to speak unpopular truths. But the system exerts its force and achieves its censorship of dissident views through the actions of the individual human beings who make it up. Each individual editor was faced with the physical fact of a manuscript making claims that were clearly matters of life-and-death urgency for vast numbers of people if they were true. It was each editor's job to decide this question, making completely certain the claims were false before rejecting the manuscript. On matters of such grave importance, one does not have a right to be mistaken. One proves one's case beyond a shadow of a doubt, aware that a 10 percent or a 1 percent chance of error means a 10 percent or a 1 percent chance of the loss of millions of lives. If one tries one's best and cannot prove it wrong, then one has no choice but to print it anyway, perhaps with an editorial comment to the effect that the publication does not stand behind the author's claims but that they are far too important to be dismissed until they have been decisively refuted. Surely a 10 percent or a 1 percent chance that AIDS had come through vaccines via a process that would almost certainly lead to still other new diseases demands the most prompt and careful investigation. It demands precisely the opposite of being buried as deeply and thoroughly as possible.
And yet I find it inconceivable that even my harshest critics, yelling as loudly as they may care to that my case is still unproven, will be able to examine the evidence I have provided and show the likelihood to be even so low as 90 percent. In my own opinion the case is proven far beyond 99 percent, far beyond such commonly-accepted facts about AIDS as its non-transmissibility through casual contact (a claim that may well be true, but for which glaring holes in the evidence exist that are easily sufficient to reduce its likelihood below 90 percent [44]). AIDS' origin is in fact better proven than almost any other important claim about the disease, except for the identity of its cause, HIV.
Against this mass of evidence, the editors did not raise a single concrete objection. They did not question a single point of fact or of reasoning. Yet they rejected it anyway, thereby sending who-knows-how-many present and future people to a horrible and pointless death. It was clear this would be the result, and to make certain there was no mistake they were clearly told this would be the result. Yet they did it anyway. They did it anyway despite being unable to point to a single error. I can see no conceivable excuse that can be made for them. If there is anything that they can say in their own defense, I would like to hear it.
Editors seem to be under the impression that they have an absolute right to reject anything they like regardless of the consequences. When those consequences include millions of deaths, and to individuals in many countries beyond the editor's own, and continuing indefinitely into the future, then I should think society would have a thing or two to say about that.
I have some specific recommendations for the minimal form these societal interventions should take. I will discuss them at length elsewhere. To broach this topic now would take us too far afield, and the recommendations will be given much greater weight if I wait until my claims have been investigated and confirmed.
There are some ferociously dangerous microbes infecting the world's fauna, and society has an overwhelming interest in preventing their transfer into our species. The various barriers society has erected to keep them out have proved themselves woefully inadequate in the face of the various bridges science is constructing that conduct them in [45]. Much more must be done. There are in the world a great many scoundrels, fools, and incompetents, and society has an overwhelming interest in keeping them out of positions of vast power where their errors could kill millions. Current barriers have again proved woefully inadequate in the face of a system of science that is promoting precisely these people into precisely these positions. Much more must be done. Solving the latter problem would go far towards solving the former.
Part VI
No one should have been surprised by the response of the scientific community to the information that it had started AIDS. When large mistakes are made in any field, they are almost always covered up. It is entirely predictable. Indeed, it is very much like a prediction I did make, in 1986, in another unpublished paper on the maladaptedness of the world system, with AIDS as a particular case study: "How many of the cigarette companies have admitted their product causes lung cancer? At least in the U.S. the answer is zero. Is there any reason to believe that cigarette companies are atypically evil? Isn't this how we should expect any company to react in similar circumstances? If a few years down the line it should turn out that microwave ovens, say, are an even deadlier cause of cancer, what are the odds the manufacturers will meekly say 'We didn't know' and remove their product from the market? How much more likely is it that they will mount a fierce public relations campaign disputing the evidence, however indisputable?" This was written a year before I knew anything about the manner of AIDS' origin.
It is a sad and sobering fact to realize that not only the average human being but nearly every human being, if faced with a choice between risking their job and risking millions of lives, will unerringly choose the latter. This has been proven over and over again in AIDS research. I am not saying they will do this consciously. They will find a way to rationalize their decision. Or they will find a way to avoid perceiving that this is the decision that they have made. Or they will decide the risk to the millions is too slight to be taken into consideration, and will avoid looking at the question too closely lest they be forced to change their minds. But however they manage to do it, the bottom line is that the jobs will be protected and the lives will be risked.
Human beings have a positively astounding ability to rationalize whatever it is they strongly want to do, in order to make it appear to be entirely moral and just. And humans have a similarly astounding ability to rationalize whatever it is they strongly want to believe, in order to make it appear entirely reasonable and logical. This is as true of the intellectual elite as it is of the average person. Indeed, it requires great cleverness to manage to avoid the more obvious facts, and often the most gifted among us are those who lead the way.
Science has failed abysmally to take adequate account of this human weakness, a weakness that caused vaccine researchers to ignore clear signals of the catastrophic dangers of their procedure, that caused their failure to acknowledge the catastrophe after it had occurred, that caused the failure of editors and others to believe my claims about the increase of AIDS' transmissibility, and that caused their failure even cursorily to investigate the evidence of AIDS' origin. A science which ignores all evidence in order to believe what it prefers to believe is a science not worthy of the name. And now we see the results of this science in name only: a number of deaths very likely comparable to or greater than that to be expected from a full-scale nuclear war.
The philosopher Robert Nozick writes: "I do not recall any philosopher reporting in distress that on some fundamental question he is forced to conclude that the truth is awful, worse than the third best way he would want it.... We may wonder whether a philosophy with a foregone conclusion can have any value at all" [46]. In the case of modern biology, with the power to unleash unimaginable destructiveness, the value of a science with a foregone conclusion can be a great deal less than nothing at all.
This tendency to believe whatever is most comfortable overshadows all of AIDS research and colors the final product in many ways. Investigative avenues that threaten to lead to dire conclusions are simply not pursued, however basic and important they may be. This biased selection of topics is then biased further as each researcher unconsciously emphasizes the optimistic. Editors then select among these results. Papers reaching hopeful conclusions are printed despite awesome errors; papers reaching the most pessimistic conclusions are rejected despite overwhelming evidence. This first stage of published bias is then sent back through the system and magnified: those who read these papers ignore or manage to find fault with or simply forget their darker aspects while accepting and remembering the more hopeful parts. When they write papers of their own, based on this heavily biased sampling, they bias the results even further towards the optimistic. Those with the clearest view are forced to be their own censors in order to get their work published. The end result bears little resemblance to reality. The reality is much worse.
The tendency to believe whatever is most comfortable is of course not limited to AIDS research or to science. There are many other examples from many different fields of endeavor. And by the very nature of the problem, they disproportionately involve matters of grave concern. I do not have time to give examples here. Again, by the very nature of the problem, extensive arguments are required in order to force people to accept such unpleasant conclusions as this one against their will. I will merely quote two more brief passages, from letters to two correspondents, written not long after I began my AIDS research. From a 15 February 1987 letter to Peter Singer: "There are great obvious holes in many disciplines where all the terrible things have been dumped together and ignored." From a 24 May 1987 letter to Robert M. May referring to the same paper from which I took the cigarette quotation: "My long unpublished paper took the position that societal failure was more important in making this such a terrible disease than the admittedly frightening properties of the disease itself. The new information I have... makes the disease even worse than I had realized, so I am not sure I would still hold to that position. On the other hand, society appears to be failing even more thoroughly than I predicted there."
I suspect the recipients of these letters thought the views were too extreme. However, the first comment was made three months, and the second, seven days, before I heard Eva Lee Snead's broadcast of 31 May 1987, and learned of the greatest, most obvious dumphole and largest societal failure of them all.
Part VII
Over the last four years I have tried a great many different approaches to getting this information made public, including several less conventional ones I have not listed here. No matter how clever the effort I launched, there was always somebody there ready to bat it down. For four years they intercepted every attempt. In even the most modestly well-constructed society information of life and death importance to many millions is easy to deliver. One but speaks it to any public official, or any person of influence, or just whispers it in the streets, and soon it reaches the proper ears. What we have constructed is a society where precisely the opposite is so, an Alice-in-Wonderland society where the officials most directly responsible for disseminating this information have been most directly blocking its dissemination, a Madison Avenue society where all is hype, where the truth does not count so long as everyone buys the product, a Yuppie society full of Yuppie scientists, pursuing not science, nor the public welfare, but their Yuppie careers [47]. It should not have been difficult to bring this story out; it should have been impossible to keep it quiet.
One can view AIDS as a disease which is exploiting not only weaknesses in the human immune system but also in the human mind, the human character, and in the structure of society. And just as HeLa found its allies, so also AIDS has found allies of its own (and among some of the same sources). And these allies, ably deflecting every threat, can be thought of as AIDS' immune system, protecting it against the assaults of a hostile world. Unlike our own immune system, AIDS' immune system has been strikingly effective.
I have already discussed a number of the weaknesses AIDS is exploiting. There are a great many more I will not have time to pursue. In the specific area of scientific publication, I have already listed the intellectual/character weakness of editors refusing to believe what they don't want to hear, and the weakness of the social structure which has given editors the power to make decisions of immense worldwide, and indeed immense historic, significance with no accountability and at their whim. It is a bad combination, and AIDS has been a clever enough adversary to have found and exploited both these weaknesses to great advantage.
I will briefly mention four other weaknesses of the information distribution network that AIDS has been exploiting. I will not have time for the lengthy discussion each deserves. There are many more examples I am not even listing.
Reality is a seamless whole where virtually everything affects virtually everything else. There are, however, various concentrations of interaction or causation, and we have somewhat artificially divided these up into "disciplines." There is a certain amount of overlapping at the edges of many closely-related disciplines, and this is good. There is a certain amount of bridging that is done even between more distantly-related disciplines, and this is also good. But there is much about the structure of reality that is missed by this artificial classification. There are important connections between information fitted into separate disciplines that are being badly overlooked. These weaken our man-made structure. And there are important gaps in the seams between adjacent disciplines. We have a leaky structure where information that we need to encompass is leaking out. Another way of putting it is that AIDS has found these cracks in our defense and is getting in. And these inherent weaknesses in our way of dealing with reality by dividing it into self-contained, graspable chunks, become magnified by social interactions within each discipline that tend to draw it into itself and thereby widen the gaps: the tendency of disciplines to develop a jargon and often a dogma and to some extent a clique, all of which make it more difficult to bridge the gaps. This is further magnified by a tendency for research not to push out the borders of the discipline at the edges, nor to establish connections to other disciplines, but rather to superspecialize and plunge ever deeper into the minutiae of the subject until it is impossible to be an expert except by expending all one's effort in the field, with little or nothing left over to become even cursorily familiar with other disciplines. Superimposed on all this is a greater or lesser degree of frank territoriality. Finally the publication process steps in, with its journals rigidly demarcated along disciplinary lines, and bars the gate to anyone foolish enough to attempt to bridge the gaps or describe the connections the information structure is leaving out. Thus the cracks become gaping holes, and it is no great compliment to AIDS that it has been able to find them.
In the current situation, widespread ignorance among vaccine researchers of the seriousness of epidemics of new diseases was a prerequisite for the original experiments that started AIDS. Widespread ignorance about techniques of vaccine production and about the recent history of their own discipline are prerequisites for medicine's continuing to deny responsibility for AIDS' origin. Widespread ignorance and misunderstanding about the most basic mechanisms of natural selection in large part account for how it is possible for AIDS researchers to remain unaware of AIDS' increasing transmissibility. There are many, many other examples of gross ignorance masquerading as common knowledge in the field of AIDS research.
The second weakness in the structure of the information network is its too great emphasis on form over content. Even within a single discipline, if information doesn't fit into the ordinary length requirements, for example, it is virtually unpublishable. There are important pieces of information being overlooked either because they inherently require a longer or otherwise different format from what normally appears in the journals, or because their authors are unable to make them conform. Whosever fault it is, important information is escaping the information structure through this route. When information is important, then somehow means must be found to accommodate it. A single piece of information of great importance is far more valuable to society than any journal, or any hundred journals. No matter what hundred journals you pick, the world would not change in any material way if they suddenly ceased to exist. The single preventable error of AIDS has already changed the world in a far profounder way, and in my view it is likely that only a fraction of one percent of AIDS' ultimate death toll has so far been realized.
The third weakness in the information structure is an unconscionable tolerance for errors and a very great disinterest in getting to the bottom of things. While this is more true of AIDS research than any other field I have encountered, it is in fact a very widespread phenomenon. On matters of the utmost importance, due care is not taken. Glaring errors that should never have been made in the first place abound, and then no one steps in to correct them. All attention is directed toward endless strengthening of the points that are already strong; the weak points, at least the important ones, are ignored for fear of the consequences (both to the field and to the researcher) should they be found to be in error. This piece has given important examples from at least the fields of AIDS research, vaccine research, and editorial practices. Michael Gold's book [1]. certainly presents a striking example in the field of tissue culture. However, this is a large topic and these examples barely scratch the surface.
The fourth weakness is a lack of perspective on what is important and what is trivial. Material of fundamental significance is ignored even as tremendous resources are being poured into the nonessential. Again this is a large topic, again examples abound, and again Gold's book is a particularly good one. This is not only because it presents such a frightening picture of a field which had no sense of perspective, but even more because the book itself is a most striking example of the phenomenon. I don't know a lot about tissue culture, and for this reason I read the book twice and spent more than a week beyond that in checking out Gold's claims before including him in this piece [48]. I am convinced that the story he tells is accurate. And if it is accurate, then his book is indeed among the most important of our time. It was favorably reviewed in the New York Times. Articles appeared in Science Digest and Reader's Digest.[49]. No one has refuted his claims. Yet in the five years since its publication, it has been cited only four times in the 3200 professional scientific journals listed in the Science Citation Index. Here is one of the most important books of our time, with enormous implications for all of scientific research, and much beyond. For a brief moment the information structure held it in its grasp. But it too slipped through the gaps.
The fundamentally important question of SIV's manner of spread in wild monkeys has received almost no attention. Clearly it is not spread through needles, and almost as clearly not in the main through anal intercourse. Whatever the method, it will almost certainly become a significant source of human spread once the virus has adapted more fully to our species (unless, of course, it is spread through biting or some other means that does not have an important human counterpart). This is one of the first things that should have been investigated, particularly since the very similar maedi-visna virus of sheep has been known since the 1950s to be spread through airborne droplets [50].
There are many, many more examples. One should also note how, as in this last case, the various weaknesses interact to strengthen one another.
# # #
I cannot conclude without pointing out the obvious. The origin of AIDS was a low-technology error, easy to see and -- one would have thought and hoped -- foresee. Nevertheless it was done not by a single inept scientist but by a number of the world's foremost researchers, was done in public, not in an obscure or minor way but in some of the most heavily publicized experiments of the twentieth century, all well documented in the scientific literature. Yet the mistake -- not some insignificant mistake but the greatest yet made by the human race -- once made was not caught even by the largest medical effort ever mounted against a disease, despite evidence that should have been unmistakable, and was not acknowledged even four years after it had been explicitly called to their attention, and done so multiple times (by someone from outside their field and finally published in a periodical from outside their field). Do you understand how easy all this should have been? Do you understand how utterly the system failed?
We are now entering a much different era. Many times more researchers, 99 percent of them less competent than those who gave us AIDS, almost all of them more focused on their own specialty and more ignorant of everything else, are engaged in countless high-tech experiments whose untoward consequences may legitimately be hard to foresee, may indeed be impossible to foresee, by anyone and particularly by an outsider, are doing many of these behind the closed doors of corporate research facilities where secrecy is the watchword and profit the bottom line, are doing them all over the world, largely unsupervised. Before proceeding further with such a hazardous enterprise, one should be able to come up with at least a half-way plausible argument that the likely benefits of such science outweigh the likely costs. This is another fundamental piece that is missing from the structure. I think there will be more such disasters and that they will outweigh any conceivable benefits many times over. At the very least this will be true under the system of science as currently practiced [51].
It does seem to me that this is a conclusion that follows so immediately and obviously from all that I have said that the only way around it is to show that my scientific allegations about AIDS' origin and transmissibility are very badly wrong. Much that I have said in this piece is of an extreme nature, and extremely uncomplimentary to scientists, editors, and indeed the whole human race. But again, these conclusions follow so immediately from the extremity of the facts, if they are as I allege, that the best if not only way around them is to disprove the allegations. You are quite welcome to try. I think you will find there is a good deal more evidence for my position than I have given here. And I do not think you will find a single thing (that is both valid and of any significance) that can be said on the other side. I think that in fact I have understated things, in places quite considerably.
Part VIII
When an organism suddenly finds itself in a new ecological niche, if it is capable of reproducing within that niche, then little by little over the generations (and it will happen rather rapidly) it will adapt itself better and better to this new niche, shaping itself to the mold it has fallen into. Thus AIDS came to us able to exploit important weaknesses of the human immune system, weaknesses we did not even suspect were there. It is likely that other, related weaknesses exist which AIDS cannot yet exploit but which, as its roots grow more and more into every chink and cranny of its new niche, we shall first become aware of through AIDS' revealing them to us in its complementary impression of its surroundings. And along with exploitable weaknesses of the human immune system, AIDS has found other exploitable weaknesses in the human mind, character, and society. Again these are weaknesses we scarcely knew were there, and again AIDS' talent for exploiting these weaknesses will increase with time. And it will ferret out other weaknesses still unsuspected and reveal these weaknesses to us through a much starker image than any social critic could possibly sculpt. There is a live thing growing within us. Whether we will survive depends on the extent of weaknesses we can not find but through AIDS' help and can not fight until AIDS has already established its beachhead. I cannot guess the outcome. Anyone who can, and claims we will win, has nothing remotely resembling a grasp of our adversary. These people, those who have no inkling of what they are facing or what they are doing or what awful consequences could accrue if they slip up, are the very sort we hire to build our new organisms and to fight against AIDS. This is a profound societal weakness. AIDS has revealed it to us. Can we correct it or will it prove fatal? And what of all the others?[52].
Appendix
When a theory is met with counterarguments or with new facts that at first appear to cause a problem, then one knows that if the theory is correct, then these arguments must be invalid, or these alleged facts must be in error, or else the allegation of conflict must be mistaken. And if one looks into these arguments or alleged facts and finds this to be so, then the theory has not only survived the challenge but has been very materially strengthened thereby. A prediction based solely on the theory has been proved true, despite the fact that original appearances were to the contrary.
So far, in the four years since its formulation, and despite a welter of new research, I have seen only three facts that at first seemed to present problems. The first to come to light was convincing evidence that the 22 November 1985 Science paper [24], which had formed an important part of my original argument, contained a major error. The virus supposedly isolated from African green monkeys turned out itself to be a contaminant that had come from a completely different monkey species whose virus was being experimented with in the same laboratory [53]. A little research showed: a) While the SIV actually isolated had come from a different species, African green monkeys were indeed infected with an SIV of their own, and in the proportions the researchers had claimed [53]. Thus my theory was saved. b) The monkeys the isolated SIV had actually come from were rhesus monkeys [53], which in the early days were even more heavily used in polio vaccination than African green monkeys. My theory was doubly saved. c) The rhesus monkeys (and also cynomolgus monkeys) themselves had almost surely caught their SIV from yet another monkey species, the sooty mangabey, through other scientific experiments [54]. Scientists have inadvertently transferred SIV not only into humans but into two other species as well. And they acknowledge the likelihood of these latter two transfers. The new information not only fails to conflict with my theory, thus fulfilling the prediction, but independently adds strong support. d) Prominent researchers at a prominent institution (Harvard) equipped with much superior isolation methods nevertheless contaminated tissue cultures two separate times (their cultures from Senegalese prostitutes were also contaminated), and with virtually the same virus as contaminated the polio vaccine [53]. My theory is doubly strengthened by this new information [55].
The second potential problem was controversial (but growing) evidence that HIV-1 may have come from chimpanzees [56]. Though I was never able to find what primate species Koprowski had used, I think it is very unlikely to have been chimpanzees. However, most of the polio researchers used chimpanzees for testing their vaccines. Taking a cue from the Harvard contamination above, we might speculate that SIV from one of these test chimpanzees contaminated the vaccine cultures. This would require a modification of my theory in the case of HIV-1, but surely it is a minor modification.
A little research shows that not only did Koprowski use chimpanzees in his testing but that his usage was extraordinarily heavy. He started a chimpanzee breeding colony near Stanleyville, Belgian Congo. The vaccine used in the two African campaigns had been tested in ten chimpanzees, who were killed and their brains and spinal cords examined for signs of polio damage. Is it unreasonable to suspect that an implement used in removing a monkey's kidneys for this new batch of vaccine might not earlier have been used in dissecting a chimpanzee during testing of one of his previous experimental batches?[57]. Is it not more than a little surprising to look into the possibility Koprowski tested in chimpanzees and find such heavy involvement? How many single papers in all scientific literature can there be that indicate a greater potential for a chimpanzee virus contamination than this one, the paper describing the first oral polio vaccination campaign, mentioning both a breeding colony and ten chimpanzees killed in a single experiment?[58]. The evidence that HIV-1 in fact came from chimpanzees is comparatively weak. Perhaps it didn't even happen. But the fact that my investigation showed such unexpectedly large potential for such a source means either the chimpanzee theory is correct or else we have an impressively large coincidence here. Koprowski's heavy involvement with chimpanzees significantly strengthens the case for a chimpanzee origin. And the coming together of these two theories also strengthens my own case for AIDS' origin through Koprowski's vaccine, at least a little bit.
The final piece of evidence potentially troublesome for my theory is the case of a British sailor allegedly dying of AIDS in 1959 [59]. The "proof" of AIDS in this case was a positive test for HIV-1 in the sailor's preserved tissue specimens. There are two ways this result could be compatible with my theory. First of all, the test may have been a false positive. The test they used (the polymerase chain reaction) is so sensitive that it regularly produces positive results when even a single DNA molecule is present [60]. Extreme measures must be taken to prevent contamination, since one AIDS virus particle is
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Props to the mainstream media, the introduction of the term, fake news, has been an overwhelming success, but not as they intended. The label is beautiful; it’s a concise, unambiguous, sticky buzzword that instantly resonates with its receiver. ‘Fake news’ is the atomic bomb of persuasive labeling with the capability of obliterating a story. Yet, the mainstream media is learning that forging a game-changing weapon of […]
The mainstream media has found their story. Nothing else could possibly compare to this horrifying executive action. President Trump has officially banned the citizens of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya from entering the United States for 90 days and all refugees for 120 days. The way the media’s coverage is being displayed, […]
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It’s over. Done. The foggy, non-argument, group think, appeal to authority spell that was the Hollywood celebrity influence over politics has been lifted! Many celebrities are just now waking up to this reality; I’m afraid, still many more haven’t even considered it as a possibility. It’s no secret that marketers tie their products to famous […]In a minor reshuffle the Himachal Pradesh government today transferred five IPS and two state police service officers.
Director General of Police (DGP) Somesh Goyal would also hold the additional charge of the Prison department while Additional DG (State Vigilance and Anti Corruption Bureau) S B Negi has been given the additional charge of the CID.
Superintendent of Police (SP) Prem Thakur (under training) at the police headquarters here has been made Commandant of the 3rd IRB (Pandoh).
SP CID (Crime)-Shimla Anjum Ara would be SP Bilaspur and replace Rahul Nath who has been posted as SP Baddi.
The Commandant of the 2nd IRB at Sakoh has been transferred as Commandant Home Guards at Una.
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CID (Security) Shimla would be the new SP CID (Crime) while Rajesh Dharmani awaiting posting has been made SP CID (Security).
(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)luigi rosselli architects wrap arcadia house with a wall of white shutters in sydney
luigi rosselli architects wrap arcadia house with a wall of white shutters in sydney
image © justin alexander
located on a quiet suburb of paddington, outside sydney, luigi rosselli architects has rejuvenated this gothic revival villa. derived and named after a mythological place of peace and happiness, the ‘arcadia house’ hides away from the street and unexpectedly opens up to generous garden scenery and a private pool. wanting to be consistent with the original style of the property, the new exterior blends seamlessly with the victorian front veranda. the pattern on the ashlar masonry walls have been recreated, but uses a different material.
the upper level features a continuous series of white, detailed shutters which open up to reveal a balcony; this is complimented with the monolithic concrete wall below, creating a subtly refined base to the building. internally, the rooms is constantly illuminated with natural light and retains some original features of the house, sitting side by side with contemporary details. a concrete ceiling, is framed by recycled hardwood timber and an oak staircase connects the three leveled property together. with a neutral yet refined material palette, the home has been elegantly adapted to the family living inside.
the frangipani tree will shower the courtyard once a year with its intense, lavender colored flowers
image © justin alexander
the dining room
image © justin alexander
sheer curtains provide privacy and soften the large family room
image © justin alexander
on the left hand side of the kitchen, a hidden door leads to a pantry room and laundry
image © justin alexander
the bathroom
image © justin alexander
the shading for the upper bedroom floor is open to an infinite combination of the shutter operations
image © justin alexander
the attic has been converted into a beautifully lit recreational space
image © justin alexander
the traditional shutter façade sits on a textured concrete base
image © edward birch
image © edward birchAs I noted on 20 May, 2012, David Miscavige was going to face a “long, hot summer.” At that time, I could not share details so as not to compromise the safety of a number of important folk quietly riding the Underground Railroad. (for background on the Underground Railroad and a real time account of John “JB” Brousseau’s travel upon it, see JB Goes Mobile.)
As reported today in the Village Voice, there have been two notable departures from Scientology Inc’s international headquarters (Int base). David Miscavige’s father Ron Miscavige Sr. and L. Ron Hubbard’s granddaughter Roanne Horwich left the Int base some months ago. I have not reported on the details so as to afford Roanne and Ron time and space to resists Miscavige’s extraordinary efforts to corral them back into his prison camp (Int base, near Hemet California). As you can imagine, the efforts were extensive and some of the means were ruthless. But, Roanne and Ron (who left separately, with his wife Becky) have weathered the storm and further human trafficking efforts by Miscavige and Scientology Inc applied to them now will simply serve as fodder for more exposure on this blog and in the news media.
Ron Miscavige Sr. was the last of Miscavige’s immediate family members to remain loyal and obedient to the tyrant. The last remaining member of L. Ron Hubbard’s family still remaining loyal and obedient to Miscavige (even while silently seething toward Miscavige) is Roanne’s mother, Diana Hubbard Horwich.
In the past several months many other Int base staff and execs have departed. However, most of them – unlike Ron Sr.,his wife, and Roanne – were paid to remain prostrate, silent and owned. For any of them tuning in, please read this post, Battle of San Antonio: A Review, and ensuing posts on the matter of Debbie Cook – to begin to understand a) those silence agreements you signed are legally unenforceable, b) your sharing of the truth will at worst result in you being paid by Miscavige far more than whatever pittance he purchased your silence with, c) your personal integrity is far more valuable than any other selfish considerations, and d) the statute of limitations on assault and battery is between 2-4 years depending on the nature of the “a” and “b”.
There are a couple reasons that there have been so many defections of late from the Int base (all of them predicted for years here). The first reason is that most of the abuses Miscavige visits upon others that we have reported on this blog for the past three years continue unabated. The situation was exacerbated for Miscavige when Int base staff began to realize that a sure fire means to get ejected from Int base hell was to become pregnant. Several couples intentionally conceived children, and when discovered they were routed off and paid handsome sums to remain complicit in continuing to cover up Miscavige’s abuses by remaining silent on the outside. It became such a widespread solution, that Miscavige, in his inimitably oppressive style, banned the institution of MARRIAGE on the Int base. The institution of marriage is now a BANNED practice at the Int Scientology Headquarters base.
Predictably, Miscavige has become increasingly paranoid as his grip loosens. His answer has been to systematically dismantle the 500 acre Int base operation. He has been assigning more and more international management functions to upper middle management (at the the eleven story management building at Hollywood Blvd and Ivar Ave in Los Angeles). Further, at great expense he has been preparing to transfer Golden Era Productions functions to the former KCET studios in Hollywood that he purchased a while back. The 500 acre Int base is becoming a less populated, more closely guarded, cult compound. Its central function is increasingly becoming to serve as the high-tech, tightly guarded, and closely defended bunker for a dying dictator.
Meanwhile, Australian ABC news has reported on the far-reaching effects of Miscavige’s meltdown. ABC reports that while Wicca, Jedi and Rastafarians increase their ranks down under, the number of Scientologists is shrinking: ABC Australia.
The most important announcements about the future of Scientology will not be made at the delayed July Freewinds Annual Maiden Voyage Anniversary events. Instead, they will be announced on this blog in July. Stay tuned. What Miscavige will be announcing will amount to further nails in Scientology Inc’s coffin. What we will announce will amount to the Phoenix for Scientology’s future. In the meantime, my book What Is Wrong With Scientology? can help people prepare for the future. Finally, as I have repeated many times, for those who care about the future of Scientology the best thing you can do is to prepare to deliver independently, or support those who are doing so.Fun fact: 91% of U.S. adults read magazines. There’s something special about magazines as a content format. They’re visual, easy to consume, and low-commitment. You can spend 20 minutes flipping through an issue in a waiting room, or lounge on your couch for a couple of hours reading articles. Either way, a magazine provides a valuable, entertaining experience for the reader.
Print magazine publishers have been somewhat reluctant to shepherd their content into the digital world. However, with the widespread adoption of ereaders and tablets, pretty much every major magazine now has an online version. The majority of these are the equivalent of PDFs hosted on a webpage or within an app. Some publishers, however, have used the transition from print to digital to reimagine what magazines could be without the limitations of trim sizes and folios. The result is what we’ve come to call interactive magazines.
If you’re a designer or content creator, interactive magazines should be making you jump up and down with excitement! This new format unchains you from so many of the restrictions you faced in print. It also circumvents many of the problems that occur when you stick a print piece of content online (particularly on a mobile device).
While interactive magazines are still relatively new, there are some best practices you can follow when it comes to designing them. At Ceros, we work with a variety of digital publishers who are creating some amazing editorial content, and we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t.
To help you get started with interactive magazine design, we created a brief interactive how-to outlining some best practices when it comes to interactive magazine design. You can explore the piece by clicking the plusses in the Experience below.
We also wanted to share some inspiration with you from 3 interactive magazines that are totally killing it in terms of design and content. Read on to see them up close and personal!
Tennis Tuesday
Website
www.tennistuesday.com
Publication Type
Interactive sports magazine
What We Love
Tennis Tuesday is a publication that really brings sports front and center. Between their use of multimedia content, timely event news, and insightful editorial coverage of players and matches, they’re absolutely owning the tennis world with their interactive magazines.
A few specific things we love about Tennis Tuesday:
Dynamic How-To Content
Their how-to content comes to life with both videos and interactive step-throughs of certain techniques, which will help you master your tennis game in no time.
Helpful Navigation
Their simple navigation menu makes it easy for readers to jump right to the sections that interest them.
User-Generated Content (UGC)
They also show their playful side by integrating real-time news and user generated content from actual athletes in their Weekly Spin section. We’re totally digging Eugenie Bouchard’s mermaid tail.
Crush Magazine
Website
http://crushmag-online.com/
Publication Type
Food and lifestyle magazine
What We Love
Crush really gets content development for the digital world. They’ve taken the best parts about magazines—the features, photos, quotes, and other great editorial content—and reimagined it for an online viewing experience.
Here are just a few of the things that make us crush hard on this magazine.
Effective On-Screen Navigation
Their navigational elements are super clear—they make it easy to access the main table of contents, but they also provide helpful on-page cues like this one.
Beautiful Image and Text Pairings
In their recipes make really good use of graphics and text pairing. Rather than forcing you to scroll down a long page as you cook, they bring the second half of the recipe text up with a single click. This helps the spread stay condensed without sacrificing any necessary content.
Interactive Ads
Even their advertising is fun and interactive—just look at this piece they did for Miele.
e-motion Magazine
Website
www.peugeot.com
Publication Type
Interactive automotive magazine
What We Love
You wouldn’t necessarily think that an automotive brand like Peugeot would be producing great digital publications, but they totally are. Their quarterly magazine, e-motion, educates customers about the latest Peugeot models, but also entertains readers with other car news and editorial content.
A few things we really appreciate about e-motion include:
Diverse Editorial Content
Yes, a lot of their coverage is automotive, and they do plug their own cars here and there. But each issue also features a wide array of general interest content. For example, in their Spring 2015 magazine, they ran a really cool piece on organic engineering and its impact on art and design.
Interactive Slideshows
Peugeot’s slideshows aren’t just images. They also contain rich video content and accompanying text to help viewers get the most out of each “slide”.
Clear Social Sharing Menus
To help drive more traffic to their content, they have a persistent social share menu as part of their top nav.
They also include clear links to follow celebrities as part of their interactive interviews.
The Bottom Line
Magazines have always been a popular content format. With the power of interactive content at your fingertips, you too can create highly engaging magazines for your digital audience.How Great Science Fiction Works by Gary K. Wolfe
For years I’ve been a fan of the GREAT COURSES audiobooks, which I usually pick up at my library or at Audible. These are a series of college-level lectures devoted to a specific topic and delivered by an expert in the field. A couple of months ago they released a set called How Great Science Fiction Works. Our teacher is Gary K. Wolfe, a professor of Humanities who received a BA in English from the University of Kansas under the tutelage of science fiction writer James E. Gunn and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. Wolfe (no relation to Gene Wolfe) is well known in the fantasy and science fiction community as a critic, editor, biographer, and all-around expert.
How Great Science Fiction Works contains 24 lectures that each last about 30 minutes. They are:
1. Mary Shelley and the Birth of Science Fiction — Wolfe discusses the concept of the “monster” and gives Mary Shelley the credit for writing the first science fiction novel in 1818. He discusses the inspiration and themes of Frankenstein, and talks about the role of rationalism and science in the genre.
2. Science Fiction and the 19th Century — Wolfe describes what science fiction is and how it differs from other genres, most notably fantasy. (Simply put, science fiction is about the possible while fantasy is about the impossible.) He describes some of its earliest influences (Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne) and talks about how they inspired the first market for science fiction stories — the magazine Amazing Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback, for whom the Hugo Award is named.
3. Science Fiction Treatments of History — This lecture is about how history and the future is explored through the subgenres of alternate history, historical fiction, and time-travel stories. He takes a close look at works by Connie Willis, James Blish, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick.
4. Evolution and Deep Time in Science Fiction — Beginning with Wells’ The Time Machine and bringing in works by Olaf Stapledon, Arthur C. Clarke, Gregory Benford, Stephen Baxter, and others, Wolfe discusses how these authors have dealt with the challenges of writing about deep space and deep time and the purpose of humanity in such epically large and unknown vistas. He makes the excellent point that one of the goals of science fiction is to enlarge the imagination and create a sense of wonder, yet a successful writer must also tell a story that can touch us on a human level.
5. Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares — Wolfe examines a range of utopian and dystopian literature including Yevgeny Zamyatin, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut, Ayn Rand, Anthony Burgess, Frederik Pohl, John Christopher, and Sinclair Lewis. He mentions more modern dystopias, too, such as UGLIES, THE HUNGER GAMES, DIVERGENT, Ready Player One, and THE MAZE RUNNER.
6. The Rise of the Science Fiction Pulps — Here we learn about the first pulp magazines such as Argosy, Amazing Stories, and Astounding. We learn of the contributions of writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Edmond Hamilton, and editors such as Hugo Gernsback to the pulp tradition. Many modern readers look back on these stories with contempt, but as Wolfe explains, these stories were a source of income for many writers and they were written quickly with the simple intent to entertain readers who would be “pulping” the low-cost magazines after consumption. Nobody expected that we’d still be reading those stories today.
7. The Golden Age of Science Fiction Stories — When John W. Campbell took over the editorship of Astounding, he ushered in the first Golden Age of Science Fiction when he discovered and published Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, C.L. Moore, and Henry Kuttner and insisted that they focus on world building and characterization, not just monsters, action and gadgets. He also eliminated clumsy infodumps and insisted that authors deal with the social and economic effects of science fiction technologies. Other notable magazines were Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. After World War II, Donald A. Wollheim (from whose initials we get the DAW imprint) started anthologizing science fiction stories in hardback form, which meant that they were now available on bookstore shelves, not just pulp magazines. This introduced the genre to a mainstream audience.
8. The Spaceship as Science Fiction Icon — Using works from Murray Leinster, Robert A. Heinlein, Cordwainer Smith, Gene Wolfe, Robert Reed and Kim Stanley Robinson, Professor Wolfe discusses the concept of a spaceship as habitat and society (rather than just vehicle).
9. The Robot: From Capek to Asimov — Lecture 9 is all about robots — historical ideas and imagery, various types of robots, androids and cyborgs, and philosophical questions that robots raise about humanity, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the mind-body problem.
10. The Golden Age of the Science Fiction Novel — Around 1950, science fiction graduated and gained some respectability by moving out of the pulp magazines and juvenile section (e.g. Heinlein) to hard cover novels competing with mainstream fiction genres like mystery.
11. From Mars to Arrakis: The Planet — This lecture explores some of the famous planets of science fiction literature including Frank Herbert’s Dune and Mars as depicted by Ray Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson. Wolfe shows us how planets can be seen as new frontiers in which authors can comment on real human concerns such as racism, environmentalism, immigration and multiculturalism. In this lecture I learned that Jack Williamson coined the term “terraform” in 1943.
12. The Science Fiction Wasteland — Apocalyptic scenarios are popular in science fiction and Wolfe explores a variety of wastelands including those created by Mary Shelley, Jack London, George R. Stewart, Walter M. Miller, Cormac McCarthy, and Neal Stephenson. While wastelands seem inherently pessimistic, he makes the case that they can actually be optimistic. He also shows us how world events, such as WWII, have shaped the trajectory of science fiction.
13. Invasions, Space Wars, and Xenocide — War stories have always been popular, but stories about invasions from space represent some of our unique fears. In this lecture Wolfe discusses some of these fears and again highlights the importance of historical events and advances in military technology on the development of science fiction. He takes a close look at The War of the Worlds, Ender’s Game, Starship Troopers, and The Forever War (warning: there are spoilers for these books).
14. Religion in Science Fiction — Here Wolfe looks at how science fiction approaches the nature of religious faith, most notably Christianity, and invents new religions. He also talks about how religious people have contributed to both science and science fiction. Authors whose works are discussed include Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Moorcock, Robert A. Heinlein, Octavia Butler, James Blish, Mary Doria Russell, and C.S. Lewis.
15. Science Fiction’s New Wave — Science Fiction began to change in the 1960s with the New Wave movement. Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, John Brunner, J.G. Ballard, Roger Zelazny, and Harlan Ellison started pushing the genre further away from its pulp origins by experimenting with new styles and challenges. This did not come without some controversy.
16. Encounters with the Alien Other — Aliens are another science fiction element that fill us with a sense of wonder but also represent our anxieties. Wolfe examines this from a psychological perspective and discusses the works of Robert A. Heinlein, John W. Campbell, Jack Finney, Larry Niven, Stanislaw Lem, and Karen Joy Fowler.
17. Environmentalism in Science Fiction — Science Fiction has been talking about environmental concerns such as pesticides, toxic waste, drug-resistant microbes, pollution, extinction and global warming for decades, but these issues haven’t appeared regularly until more recently. Wolfe talks about how hard it is to write an interesting but realistic ecological thriller that doesn’t sound like “hysterical fear-mongering.” Books by John Brunner, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sherri S. Tepper, and Kim Stanley Robinson are discussed, as is Paolo Bacigalupi’s recent work for children and teens which, when paired with children’s fiction that depicts post-apocalyptic wastelands, may encourage them to be concerned about the environment.
18. Gender Questions and Feminist Science Fiction — In all of the previous chapters, Dr. Wolfe has been careful to keep mentioning female science fiction writers right along with the men and not in a way that sounds “token” or condescending. He devotes this chapter to the rise of feminism in science fiction. Along the way he talks about how science fiction came to be viewed as a male-dominated genre, how things began to change in the 1960s, and how, even though there are so many popular and successful female science-fiction writers these days, discrimination, stereotypes and sexism still unfortunately exist.
19. Cyberpunk and the 1980s — Thanks to the movie Blade Runner, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and rapid advances in computing, the dark edgy coolness of cyberpunk took root in the 1980s. Wolfe talks about how technology changed science fiction and how it may be changing humanity, too.
20. The 1990s: The New Space Opera — Space Opera, with its numerous gadgets, unscientific battle scenes, cardboard characters, and colonialism got a much needed facelift in the 1990s. Writers such as M. John Harrison, Lois McMaster Bujold, Dan Simmons, Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, C.J. Cherryh, Peter F. Hamilton, and Alastair Reynolds helped Space Opera shed its militaristic and Amerocentristic tone and updated it with more modern political and literary sensibilities.
21. The Artifact as Science Fiction Icon — Perhaps no element in science fiction evokes such wonder and awe as the unknown artifact or, more cynically, the “Big Dumb Object” (BDO). Think of the alien objects of Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendevous With Rama. This lecture explores this particular trope. I laughed out loud when, right after discussing Larry Niven’s Ringworld, Wolfe off-handedly mentions that a problem with BDO stories is that the wonder wears off fairly quickly and sequels rarely satisfy, a point I have made in my reviews of that series.
22. Science Fiction’s Urban Landscapes — Futuristic cities are a common setting in science fiction, and the use of such urban landscapes are one of the major way that the genre distinguishes itself from fantasy. This lecture explores some of these cities (e.g., John Brunner, Robert Silverberg, Arthur C. Clarke, H.G. Wells, and E.M. Forster) and talks about how these depictions are another way that the genre often addresses real-world concerns such as poverty, pollution, and over-crowding.
23. Science Fiction in the 21st Century — Science fiction has changed so much over its relatively short lifespan. Some of the most obvious changes have already been mentioned in previous lectures. Another recent development is the recognition that science fiction can no longer be thought of as a white American/British man’s genre. Modern science fiction includes authors, settings, characters and cultures from all over the world. This lecture features the works of such authors as Nnedi Okorafor, Lavie Tidhar, Cixin Liu, Paul McAuley, Ian McDonald, Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Lord, Tobias Buckell, Zen Cho, Samuel R. Delany and more. Some of these authors are “new” to the genre, but some have been there all along and are only now being “rediscovered” as science-fiction readers have begun to demand more diversity.
24. The Future of Science Fiction — What does the future hold? Wolfe looks forward to further shedding science fiction’s “pulp” perception as modern writers continue to focus on character and style, and as genres begin to blend. There is some evidence that this is happening. For example, Ursula K. Le Guin recently became the first science fiction writer to win the National Book Award. In this lecture, Wolfe points out many of the “literary” writers who are writing science fiction, sometimes without even realizing it!
I enjoyed How Great Science Fiction Works and even though I am more knowledgeable about the genre than the average person, I still learned quite a bit of useful information, especially about the people involved in the creation of the genre. I also added several books and stories to my TBR pile. I especially appreciated how Wolfe included female writers in each chapter without calling attention to them in a way that suggested that their love of science fiction was unusual and how he emphasized that women and people of color have always been involved in science fiction, even if they have not been the genre’s “gatekeepers.”
Dr. Wolfe has such an engaging voice and it’s probably impossible not to be caught up in his enthusiastic tour of science fiction. The only thing I’d caution readers about is that Wolfe often tells the plot of the books he discusses. He has a reason for doing this, of course, because he’s trying to make a point, but there were a couple of times when he was telling the plot of a book I haven’t read yet and I had to do this:
Other than that, I think How Great Science Fiction Works is both a wonderful introduction to the genre for newbies and also a glorious celebration for those of us who’ve been reading it for decades. I highly recommend this course to all fans.
Published January 8, 2016. Robots, spaceships, futuristic megacities, planets orbiting distant stars. These icons of science fiction are now in our daily news. Science fiction, once maligned as mere pulp, has motivated cutting-edge scientific research, inspired new technologies, and changed how we view everyday life – and its themes and questions permeate popular culture. Take an unparalleled look at the influence, history, and greatest works of science fiction with illuminating insights and fascinating facts about this wide-ranging genre. If you think science fiction doesn’t have anything to do with you, this course deserves your attention. And if you love science fiction, you can’t miss this opportunity to trace the arc of science fiction’s evolution, understand the hallmarks of great science fiction, and delve deeply into classics while finding some new favorites. These 24 captivating lectures reveal the qualities that make science fiction an enduring phenomenon that has been steadily gaining popularity. You’ll grasp the context and achievements of authors like Arthur C. Clarke, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin, and many more. You’ll experience the wonder, horror, and incredible imagination of works like Frankenstein, the Foundation series, Stranger in a Strange Land, and dozens of more recent stories as well. You’ll also see this genre’s influence in movies like Star Wars and TV shows like The Twilight Zone. Science fiction can take us places in time and space where no other form of fiction can – outer space, the far future, alternate universes, unfathomable civilizations. The best science fiction expands our imaginations and makes its mark on our reality. And while few writers would ever claim to predict the future, sometimes authors get it almost eerily right: Gernsback describing radar in 1911, Bradbury describing giant flatscreen TVs in 1951, Gibson inventing “cyberspace” in 1984, and so on.
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SHARE: FOLLOW:Wolfsburg: Retained the trophy they won in 2013
Wolfsburg carved out the first opportunity of Thursday evening's final at the Estadio do Restelo in Lisbon after 13 minutes, when Anna Blasse dispossessed Line Roddik and floated a cross into the box for Alex Popp who could only head over.
And Wolfsburg were made to pay for not converting when Veronica Bouquete strode towards the area in the 28th minute.
The Spaniard squared to Brazil star Marta, who wriggled away from one challenge before accelerating past another and lashing the ball into the bottom left corner.
Two minutes later, Swedish outfit Tyreso doubled their lead when Christen Press sprinted away from three defenders before crossing for Bouquete to hit a side-foot volley home.
Wolfsburg should have pulled a goal back just before half-time with a volley from Martina Muller but Tyreso keeper Carola Soberg palmed the ball away before comfortably saving Selina Wagner's follow-up attempt.
But the Germans came straight out of the traps in the second half and scored within two minutes of the restart. Blasse crossed from the right touchline for Popp, who made up for her first-half miss by heading home.
And less than five minutes later, Wolfsburg were level when Muller pounced on a ball over the top and rifled a shot into the bottom corner past the on-rushing Soberg.
But in the 56th minute, Bouquet headed to Marta who performed a Cruyff turn with her left foot before curling the ball right-footed into the corner to reinstate Tyreso's lead.
The lead didn't last long though, as Verena Faisst made it 3-3 in the 68th minute after latching onto a slide-rule pass from Popp before coolly finishing.
And the Germans took the lead for the first time in the match 10 minutes from the end when Nadine Kessler raced down the right before squaring for Muller to bundle home her second of the game.
Bouquete wasted a late free-kick for the Swedes as Wolfsburg hung on to successfully defend the trophy that they won for the first time when they made their debut in the competition last year.Should visitors pay to visit England’s cathedrals and historic churches? The issue has a subject of debate since Westminster Abbey and others led the way by charging entrance fees in the 1990s. Some like Bath Abbey, Durham Cathedral, and Ripon Cathedrals get by without imposing entrance charges. You do not have to pay if you tell staff at the entrance you are attending a service.
A new report from Visit England says there has been a 2 percent drop in visitors, and entrance fees seem to be putting off tourists. Some favorite religious destinations report an 8 percent drop in visits. There was a 12 percent drop among destinations that charge an entry fee.
Some of the best-known landmarks are hit hardest. Figures for 2015-16 report a drop of 27.8 percent at Westminster Abbey and 5.6 percent at St Paul’s. Canterbury Cathedral where the entry fee is £12.50, reported a similar decrease, despite an overall 2 percent rise in visitors to tourist attractions.
“Aside from places of worship, all types of attraction increased their gross revenue in 2016,” the report said. “It is worth noting that places of worship were also the category with the highest increase in admission charges.”
The National Churches Trust, which supports historic church buildings, says entrance fees are too high.
Even so, Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s, and Canterbury Cathedral remain in the top 20 of paid visitor attractions. Many famous churches and cathedrals receive very little external funding, which makes it crucial that money is raised from tourists maintain the fabric of the buildings and support their spiritual life.
A spokeswoman for the Church of England told the media: “The primary purpose of all our 16,000 churches and cathedrals is as places of worship for all. Millions of people visit our churches for this purpose each year, others visit to find peace in a busy world, explore the rich cultural heritage that these great buildings offer or to receive support in times of crisis.”
John MartinThe Fate of Konor: Imperial Victory!
The Fate of Konor campaign is over, and the Imperium has managed to clinch victory over Loebos and save the Konor System! The campaign was increasingly close towards the end, with Chaos managing to turn a poor start into a growing advantage each week, securing victory on two worlds, but the Imperium managed to ultimately take back their lead.
It’s just as well the Imperium won – a loss would have seen the Konor System devastated as Loebos was turned into a planet-killing plague missile. There are still difficult times ahead for the Imperium, though – while Mortarion may have been defeated here, his armies are just getting started, and the Death Guard are not known for giving up easily.
The full campaign results are preserved for posterity on the Fate of Konor website, and you can check them out here, whether you’re celebrating on behalf of the Imperium or commiserating with the forces of Chaos.I appeared as a witness before the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee on 15 January 2014, alongside two other academics: Prof Kenneth Armstrong (whose expertise is in EU Law) and Prof Iain McLean (who is a political scientist). You can read the transcript here. Or you can watch the evidence session online via the parliamentary website but, be warned, we were kept there for three full hours. The first question we were asked was whether we thought that the SNP’s proposed timetable for achieving independence was realistic – they have suggested that it could all be done and dusted within 18 months. We said that it was not, and this caught the attention of the press, appearing as the front page headline in the following day’s Herald. This, however, was far from the most important material we covered.
Much more important was that we brought to the Committee’s attention a number of legal errors which undermine several of the claims made by the Scottish Government in their independence white paper, Scotland’s Future, which was published to much fanfare in November.
The background is that, in terms of public international law, what would happen in the event of a Yes vote in the independence referendum in September is that Scotland would become a new State in international law and that the rest of the United Kingdom would continue as the “continuator” State. This position was authoritatively set out in the UK Government’s first Scotland Analysis Paper and in the legal opinion co-authored by Professors James Crawford and Alan Boyle that was annexed to that paper. This legal analysis has not been seriously questioned by the Scottish Government in the last 12 months.
The consequence of this is that institutions of the United Kingdom would automatically become institutions of the rest of the United Kingdom in the event of Scottish independence. Thus, for example, the UK’s security and secret intelligence services would become the security and secret intelligence services of the rest of the UK (“rUK”). The Bank of England is a UK institution. So is the BBC. As UK institutions they would not fall to be apportioned equitably between the rUK and an independent Scotland.
The UK’s assets and liabilities, on the other hand, would fall to be apportioned equitably between the rUK and an independent Scotland. The apportionment of the UK’s assets and liabilities would constitute a large part of the separation negotiations that would have to follow any Yes vote in the referendum. Whilst the details would be a matter primarily of political negotiation, those negotiations would take place within a broad framework of international law. International law provides a number of presumptions that are likely to shape such negotiations. Among these presumptions are the following:
The UK’s fixed property in Scotland (e.g. Government buildings) would
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, math and science classes. Program courses offered through MSU are focused on agriculture, including courses on topics including farm and water resource management, agriculture technologies and regulation, crop and soil sciences and more.
The program will simplify the process for students interested in continuing their education in a four-year degree program at MSU after graduating from KCC, and also allows students who have earned MSU credits through Future Farmers of America programming to apply up to six credits to the dual KCC-MSU degree and certificate program.
Lora Finch, Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources Argiscience instructor and FFA advisor at Marshall Public Schools, said the partnership is a great opportunity for students, linking education to demand-filling careers in the community.
“With the possibility of students taking a full range of high school agriculture classes, earning their state FFA degree from their involvement in leadership then to be able to earn six college credits towards this MSU program, this is a game changer for the agriculture industry in our area,” Finch said.
Kris Jenkins, assistant superintendent of Regional Career Technical Education for the Calhoun Intermediate School District, praised the program for increasing opportunities for K-12 students in the CISD’s natural resources and agriscience programs.
“Students can continue their education and stay close to home, in a field of study that they love,” Jenkins said. “The Agricultural Operations Program is a win-win for all involved in that we will have a more educated workforce ready to fill needed, skilled jobs within our region.”
Jamie Engel, director of Career and Technical Education at the Branch Area Careers Center, called the program a wonderful segue for BACC students to continue their education after graduation or in continuing their early college programming, allowing them “an opportunity to gain knowledge and skills while continuing to live in Branch County and working.”
BACC Agricultural Sciences Program Manager Carrie Preston said the BACC is excited to participate in the initiative, which “will benefit our students tremendously over the years.”
Several FFA students, community members and representatives from community organizations joined KCC and MSU officials as they signed an inter-institutional understanding agreement formalizing the ag program partnership at KCC on March 6, including state Rep. John Bizon.
Bizon called the signing “a momentous occasion” and praised the colleges for their dedication to helping guide students into agriculture careers that could lead to the maintenance of family legacy farms and new job opportunities in the future.
“The real winners here are our children, our kids, our students, those who are able to participate, and I am excited to see so many fresh young faces here,” Bizon said. “For me this is a very, very exciting day.”
While the new Agricultural Operations Program doesn’t formally launch until this fall, students can enroll in KCC courses this summer to fulfill program course requirements in advance. Registration for the Summer 2017 semester opens on April 10. Registration for the Fall 2017 semester at KCC opens June 5.
For more information about the KCC/MSU IAT Agricultural Operations Program, visit www.kellogg.edu/agriculture or contact KCC’s Admissions office at 269-965-4153.
For more information about the MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources’ Institute of Agricultural Technology, visit www.iat.msu.edu.
Pictured above, MSU IAT Director Dr. Randy Showerman, left, shakes hands with KCC President Mark O’Connell as FFA students look on after the two officials signed an inter-institutional understanding agreement formalizing the ag program partnership at KCC on March 6.
For more news about Kellogg Community College, view our latest press releases online at http://daily.kellogg.edu/category/news-releases.Silicon Valley giants faced aggressive grillings by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees Wednesday over the role their platforms have inadvertently played in Russia's meddling in U.S. politics.
Lawyers for Facebook, Twitter and Google were repeatedly criticized by lawmakers for what they portrayed as a lack of effort in addressing foreign meddling on their platforms in the past and pressed to account for what steps they would take in the future.
During its hearing, the House Intelligence Committee officially released a sampling of Facebook ads and Twitter handles tied to the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.
The Senate hearing, meanwhile, was notable for being the most aggressive and confrontational of this week's hearings on the issue, and saw the lawyers for all three companies acknowledging that they needed to do more in order to combat bad actors on their platforms.
Related: Eight questions Congress could ask Facebook
"I hear all your words, but I have more than a little bit of frustration that many of us on this committee have been raising this issue since the beginning of this year, and our claims were frankly blown off by the leadership of your companies, and dismissed," Sen. Mark Warner, the top-ranking Democrat on the committee, told the lawyers.
"We've raised these claims since the beginning of the year, and the leaders of your companies blew us off," Warner said. "Your earliest presentations showed a lack of resources, a lack of genuine effort and a lack of commitment."
Warner's fellow Democrats were similarly tough on the companies.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was present for both Tuesday's hearing and Wednesday's, said she was disappointed in the lawyers' answers to lawmakers' questions.
"I don't think you get it," Feinstein said. "What we're talking about is a cataclysmic change. What we're talking about is the beginning of cyber warfare... You have a huge problem on your hands."
Sen. Ron Wyden said, "We'd like to walk out of here knowing the changes you're going to support."
Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican who chairs the committee, went so far as to suggest Congress could supply the companies with "anti-trust waivers" to allow them to collaborate in confronting foreign meddling.
Lawyers for all three companies stressed that they did take the problem seriously and outlined some of the steps they have been taking to improve their checks on bad actors.
"We're deeply concerned. This is an issue that we talk about constantly," Sean Edgett, Twitter's acting general counsel, said at the hearing. "The first part of this year, we pointed out entire engineering, product and design team on tackling the issues of information quality, abuse of our systems and protecting our users."
Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, said at one point that Facebook had more than 10,000 people working on safety and security and would have more than 20,000 people working on those fronts by the end of 2018.
When pressed in a later exchange, however, Stretch could not say how many people at Facebook are focused primarily on addressing risks posed by state-sponsored operations. Each general counsel also struggled to name an executive at their company who is specifically tasked with overseeing the threat.
At the same time, the lawyers stressed that the problem of Russia's meddling went beyond their companies and would require help from Congress and from other industries.
"This is bigger than any one company," Stretch said at one point.
Related: 'Kill them all' -- Russian-linked Facebook accounts called for violence
Stretch also disclosed that reach of Russian-backed political content on its platforms was greater than previously stated. Content generated by the Kremlin-linked troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency reached nearly 150 million people through Facebook and Instagram, he said. Facebook had previously disclosed that 126 million accounts were served that content on Facebook. It is not clear how many of the 150 million people who were served that content actually saw it.
All three companies said they saw Russian activity on their platforms as early as the beginning of 2015, before the presidential election kicked off in earnest.
Members of both the Senate and House committees also used their time to highlight specific Russian-backed content and the influence it had on American voters.
In perhaps the most notable moment of the Senate hearing, Burr highlighted an instance in which two ads created by Russian trolls -- one by an account called "Heart of Texas," another by an account called "United Muslims of America" -- promoted two opposing events at the same location on the same date in Texas. Experts have said that the Russians' goals included promoting discord in the U.S. and inciting violence.European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker attends a debate on the priorities of the incoming Malta Presidency of the EU for the next six months at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, January 18, 2017. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission wants all EU member states to introduce minimum wages and incomes for their workers and unemployed, the head of the EU executive president said on Monday, in an effort to combat growing social inequality and poverty.
The Commission, which has limited powers in the area of social policy, is preparing an overhaul of the EU’s functions and targets and wants it to include tackling social and economic injustices that have often been successfully exploited by right-wing eurosceptic parties across the 28-nation bloc.
“There should be a minimum salary in each country of the European Union,” Jean-Claude Juncker told a conference on social rights in Brussels, adding that those seeking work should also have a guaranteed minimum level of income.
Juncker, a former prime minister of Luxembourg, said each state should be free to set its own minimum wage, but added: “There is a level of dignity we have to respect.”
Living standards and costs vary widely across the EU, and some parts of the EU, especially in southern Europe, are suffering very high levels of unemployment.
Juncker urged companies to adopt a minimum wage to help counter “social dumping” - a term that describes the employment of cheaper labour, sometimes involving migrants or moving production to lower-wage countries.
Juncker said reforming EU social policy should start within the bloc’s 19-country euro zone, which already shares a single currency and fiscal supervision.
The Commission will present its reform proposals in the coming weeks, before a summit in Rome on March 25 that will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, which laid the foundations of today’s European Union.The emerging class struggle over health care in the US
29 June 2017
Following the announcement on Tuesday that the Republicans would be putting off a Senate vote on their health care bill until after the July 4 congressional recess, the Democrats and Republicans continued their stage-managed debate over measures that will have devastating consequences for millions of Americans.
The media’s presentation of a bitter feud over the direction of health care policy is a political fiction. The newspapers and television networks report on the statements of one or another lawmaker and his or her attitude to the plan recently unveiled by Senate Republicans as if this will have any real impact on the trajectory of ruling class policy.
The more decisive verdict was delivered on Tuesday by Wall Street, which saw its biggest one-day drop in six weeks after Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put off a Senate vote this week. The message was clear: the corporate and financial elite wants its money, and it wants it now. The health care measure includes a $700 billion tax cut for the rich—a down payment on the money to be freed up by depriving the elderly and poor of their health and even their lives.
The American ruling class is engaged in a form of social arson no less criminal or deadly than the policies that led to the Grenfell Tower fire in London.
McConnell responded on Wednesday by promising that a new version of the bill will be ready by Friday for a vote sometime in July.
Charles Schumer, the Democratic Senate Minority Leader from New York, reacted to the summons of the market by reiterating his call for a “bipartisan” solution, a mantra repeated by virtually all congressional Democrats. “Democrats are genuinely interested in finding a place where our two parties can come together on health care,” Schumer said. That Schumer gets more campaign money from the hedge funds and banks than any other senator, Democratic or Republican, is sufficient to demonstrate what type of child will issue from such a union.
Schumer did not comment on the apparent contradiction between his claims to be fundamentally opposed to the Republican plan and his calls for a bipartisan compromise. His position exposes the fact that the two sides share a basic agenda.
The Democrats assert that they want to “fix” Obamacare. What does this mean? They are not talking about expanding coverage to include the 28 million still without insurance under the Democratic plan, or increasing the inadequate subsidies, decreasing absurdly high deductibles and copays, and preventing the insurance companies from raising premiums. “Fixing” Obamacare is a euphemism for incorporating the demands of the insurance industry for even fewer restraints on their profit-making and tighter eligibility requirements for consumers.
The public has seen this type of political theater countless times, and the outcome has invariably been the same. The Republicans set the marker as far to the right as possible and the Democratic “opposition” results in a deal to impose new and more drastic cuts to health care and other social programs. The most significant and fraudulent of these dog-and-pony shows was the passage of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, itself.
The Republican proposal is not in fact a “repeal” of Obamacare. It incorporates the structures set up by the Democratic measure, such as the exchanges for purchasing policies from private insurers, designed to more fully subordinate the health care system to the capitalist market and encourage the demise of employer-sponsored health coverage, placing individual workers even more at the mercy of the insurance giants.
The central purpose of Obamacare is to shift costs from corporations and the state to the working class, with health care increasingly rationed on a class basis.
The so-called “health insurance” that many people now have under Obamacare is, in effect, a transfer of funds to the giant insurance companies. Deductibles for lower-priced “bronze” plans now average more than $6,000 for an individual and more than $12,000 for a family. Deductibles for so-called “silver” plans (which make up 70 percent of the market) are on average more than $3,000 for individuals. In other words, after paying hundreds of dollars a month for health insurance, workers must pay thousands more before they begin to receive any benefits.
Corporations have been systematically cutting or eliminating coverage, encouraged by Obamacare’s coming tax on more “generous” employer-provided health care plans. More than 80 percent of employer-based plans now have an annual deductible ($1,478 on average, up 2.5 times since 2006). In countless contract disputes throughout the country, health care cuts are a central demand of the companies, invariably accepted and forced through by the trade unions.
The subsidized purchase of private insurance under Obamacare has created the framework—a voucher system—for dismantling what remains of government-provided health care. The American ruling class is setting its sights on the bedrock health care programs of the late 1960s—first Medicaid, the already grossly underfunded state-federal health insurance program for the poor, which will be effectively dismantled by the Republican bill, then Medicare, the health care program for the elderly. Behind these health care programs lies Social Security, the federal pension program wrenched from the ruling class through the explosive class struggles of the 1930s.
The hypocritical criticisms of the Republican plan by the Democrats and the various middle-class organizations that orbit the Democratic Party not only cover up for the reactionary character of Obamacare, they completely ignore the central issue: capitalism.
There is no solution to the massive health care crisis that does not take on the domination of health care by giant pharmaceutical and insurance companies, which operate under the ever-present whip of Wall Street and its demands for higher profits and dividends. These giant corporations must be expropriated and the wealth of the financial aristocracy seized to finance emergency measures to address the health care crisis and establish a system of universal health care, guaranteed as a basic social right.
Whatever tactical differences the Democrats have with the Trump administration on health care are entirely subordinate to their basic objective: escalating US military aggression in the Middle East and internationally. The hysterical Democratic campaign over alleged Russian hacking and Trump collusion with Moscow has as its central aim forcing a shift in administration policy toward a more rapid and comprehensive expansion of the US war for regime-change in Syria and a more aggressive policy toward Russia.
But as the Democrats well know, military escalation abroad is inextricably bound up with the intensification of austerity and class war at home.
In asserting its right to health care, the working class cannot allow itself to be drawn behind any section of the political establishment. It must proceed with its own methods—those of class struggle. The health care counterrevolution is generating enormous opposition, which is beginning to emerge in innumerable forms. Millions confront conditions that spell death or disaster for themselves, their parents and their children.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote earlier this month, “The interaction of objective conditions of crisis, both within the United States and internationally, and the radicalization of mass social consciousness will find expression in the eruption of class struggle. The decades-long suppression of the class struggle by the trade union bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the affluent sponsors of various forms of identity politics is coming to an end. The social counterrevolution of the ruling elites is about to encounter an upsurge of the American working class.”
The Socialist Equality Party is fighting to make conscious this objective movement. Emerging struggles against all of the deplorable conditions of life under capitalism—the destruction of health care, declining wages, unemployment, brutal working conditions, the attack on public education, mass indebtedness, the witch-hunting of immigrants—must be brought together in a common political fight against the Trump administration and both big business parties, based on a socialist and internationalist program.
Joseph Kishore
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.We all dread going through security at the airport. Even though we know we have absolutely nothing on us that should even make us act suspiciously, we still fear the buzzer going off.
It's a bit like being followed by a police car when you suddenly movie your hands to the ten-to-two position, and keep that needle directly on the speed limit.
To be fair, Kaley Cuoco's boyfriend has reason to feel worried, according to the actress he always gets stopped be security.
However, the actress explained to host Jimmy Kimmel on Jimmy Kimmel Live that when the tables turned on her, she feared that she'd never be allowed to fly again.
Credit: ABC/Jimmy Kimmel Live
"We were travelling to Australia, and Carl for some reason, my boyfriend, ends up getting the pat-down as we pass through security," she explained to Kimmel.
"He's so unassuming there is no reason he should be getting patted down."
Carl had given her fair warning ahead of going through the airport on the day of her event, telling her that'something bad is going to happen'.
Cuoco ignored the advice but was soon confronted by a security guard who questioned something that was inside her purse.
"She starts searching through and she pulls out a wine opener out of my purse. Like a real one. The one with arms. I was like, 'oh my god, that's a weapon'," she laughed.
Credit: ABC
Cuoco continued: "So in my bag I have all these little bags, and she said that they need to go through all of them.
"He takes out my make-up bag, I thought, 'he won't find anything in there', I had a second wine opener in my make-up bag, I swear.
"It was a tiny one, like somehow I'd subconsciously put it in there. I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm going to be on a no-fly list'."
"I just like alcohol. I'm always quite prepared, I love my wine."
Credit: ABC/Jimmy Kimmel Live
Cuoco then gave her reasoning for her love of wine, saying it helps her find people a lot less annoying on flights.
Jimmy Kimmel however explained that he finds the reverse true, that people who drink on flights are the annoying ones and questioned whether Cuoco was in fact just a level of annoying above everyone else.
But the stories didn't stop there, Cuoco revealed the giant swing that she has inside her house - and gave a valid reason for having one.
She also revealed a return to The Big Bang Theory despite all the chat of the show coming to an end, and the gifts that the cast buy for the crew during the holidays.
Featured Image Credit: ABC/Jimmy Kimmel LiveThe president says he took up the war against Boko Haram reluctantly, and mostly as a bid for economic survival: Chad is a landlocked country, dependent on land trade routes through the militant group’s territory.
In the process, he has embarrassed Nigeria — a small-country president cleaning up a far bigger and richer one’s mess — and he has overshadowed the militaries of neighboring Cameroon and Niger that are less well equipped, while earning the gratitude of Western leaders.
Those leaders once shunned him for his shaky human rights record, low corruption ranking, nepotism and brutal police force. In fact, those conditions have not changed. His country ranks fourth from the bottom on the United Nations Human Development Index of 187 nations, with rock-bottom life expectancy and schooling levels. The Chadian elite connected to him enjoy gargantuan villas, looming above the battered one-story dwellings of ordinary people. Last week, clandestinely recorded video images showed his police officers whipping half-naked student demonstrators. And his military forces were accused of serious human rights violations during their intervention in the Central African Republic last year.
Yet Mr. Déby, 62, is a pariah no more. Now the French foreign minister smiles at him in photographs. Although he insists he is not “Africa’s policeman,” the West is only too happy to call on his forces in a region seething with Islamist terrorists.
While his tough, turbaned soldiers occupy towns in Nigeria recently ruled by Boko Haram, his up-to-date helicopter gunships are bombing the bloodthirsty sect in other places. Already, at least three important towns in Nigeria’s northeast — Damasak, Dikwa and Gamboru — have been taken by the Chadians. And his troops, after driving thousands of miles into the desert, are still in northern Mali taking on Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.Team Season Finder
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Opp Totals - Opp FG Opp FGA Opp 2P Opp 2PA Opp 3P Opp 3PA Opp FT Opp FTA Opp ORB Opp DRB Opp TRB Opp AST Opp STL Opp BLK Opp TOV Opp PF Opp PTS - Opp Shooting - Opp FG% Opp 2P% Opp 3P% Opp FT% - Opp Per Game - Opp FG/G Opp FGA/G Opp 2P/G Opp 2PA/G Opp 3P/G Opp 3PA/G Opp FT/G Opp FTA/G Opp ORB/G Opp DRB/G Opp TRB/G Opp AST/G Opp STL/G Opp BLK/G Opp TOV/G Opp PF/G Opp PTS/G - Advanced - MOV SOS SRS Pace ORtg DRtg eFG% TOV% ORB% FT/FGA Opp eFG% Opp TOV% Opp ORB% Opp FT/FGA >= <= = Choose - Default - G W L W/L% - Team Totals - MP FG FGA 2P 2PA 3P 3PA FT FTA ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS - Team Shooting - FG% 2P% 3P% FT% - Team Per Game - MP/G FG/G FGA/G 2P/G 2PA/G 3P/G 3PA/G FT/G FTA/G ORB/G DRB/G TRB/G AST/G STL/G BLK/G TOV/G PF/G PTS/G - Opp Totals - Opp FG Opp FGA Opp 2P Opp 2PA Opp 3P Opp 3PA Opp FT Opp FTA Opp ORB Opp DRB Opp TRB Opp AST Opp STL Opp BLK Opp TOV Opp PF Opp PTS - Opp Shooting - Opp FG% Opp 2P% Opp 3P% Opp FT% - Opp Per Game - Opp FG/G Opp FGA/G Opp 2P/G Opp 2PA/G Opp 3P/G Opp 3PA/G Opp FT/G Opp FTA/G Opp ORB/G Opp DRB/G Opp TRB/G Opp AST/G Opp STL/G Opp BLK/G Opp TOV/G Opp PF/G Opp PTS/G - Advanced - MOV SOS SRS Pace ORtg DRtg eFG% TOV% ORB% FT/FGA Opp eFG% Opp TOV% Opp ORB% Opp FT/FGA >= <= = Choose - Default - G W L W/L% - Team Totals - MP FG FGA 2P 2PA 3P 3PA FT FTA ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS - Team Shooting - FG% 2P% 3P% FT% - Team Per Game - MP/G FG/G FGA/G 2P/G 2PA/G 3P/G 3PA/G FT/G FTA/G ORB/G DRB/G TRB/G AST/G STL/G BLK/G TOV/G PF/G PTS/G - Opp Totals - Opp FG Opp FGA Opp 2P Opp 2PA Opp 3P Opp 3PA Opp FT Opp FTA Opp ORB Opp DRB Opp TRB Opp AST Opp STL Opp BLK Opp TOV Opp PF Opp PTS - Opp Shooting - Opp FG% Opp 2P% Opp 3P% Opp FT% - Opp Per Game - Opp FG/G Opp FGA/G Opp 2P/G Opp 2PA/G Opp 3P/G Opp 3PA/G Opp FT/G Opp FTA/G Opp ORB/G Opp DRB/G Opp TRB/G Opp AST/G Opp STL/G Opp BLK/G Opp TOV/G Opp PF/G Opp PTS/G - Advanced - MOV SOS SRS Pace ORtg DRtg eFG% TOV% ORB% FT/FGA Opp eFG% Opp TOV% Opp ORB% Opp FT/FGA >= <= = Sort By Total Seasons Matching Criteria Season Team Name - Default - G W L W/L% - Team Totals - MP FG FGA 2P 2PA 3P 3PA FT FTA ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS - Team Shooting - FG% 2P% 3P% FT% - Team Per Game - MP/G FG/G FGA/G 2P/G 2PA/G 3P/G 3PA/G FT/G FTA/G ORB/G DRB/G TRB/G AST/G STL/G BLK/G TOV/G PF/G PTS/G - Opp Totals - Opp FG Opp FGA Opp 2P Opp 2PA Opp 3P Opp 3PA Opp FT Opp FTA Opp ORB Opp DRB Opp TRB Opp AST Opp STL Opp BLK Opp TOV Opp PF Opp PTS - Opp Shooting - Opp FG% Opp 2P% Opp 3P% Opp FT% - Opp Per Game - Opp FG/G Opp FGA/G Opp 2P/G Opp 2PA/G Opp 3P/G Opp 3PA/G Opp FT/G Opp FTA/G Opp ORB/G Opp DRB/G Opp TRB/G Opp AST/G Opp STL/G Opp BLK/G Opp TOV/G Opp PF/G Opp PTS/G - Advanced - MOV SOS SRS Pace ORtg DRtg eFG% TOV% ORB% FT/FGA Opp eFG% Opp TOV% Opp ORB% Opp FT/FGA * Default sort order is descending Use ascending order
Query Results Query Results Table Team Totals Miscellaneous Team Opponent Rk Season Tm Lg G W L W/L% MP FG FGA 2P 2PA 3P 3PA FT FTA ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS MOV SOS SRS Pace ORtg DRtg eFG% TOV% ORB% FT/FGA eFG% TOV% ORB% FT/FGA 1 1976-77 BOS* NBA 82 44 38.537 19830 3462 7775 3462 7775 1648 2181 1241 2966 4207 2010 506 263 1673 2039 8572 -1.98 0.08 -1.90 107.5 96.5 98.3.445 16.1 31.1 0.212.450 13.4 27.2 0.204 2 2013-14 BRK* NBA 82 44 38.537 19880 2931 6391 2222 4469 709 1922 1508 2002 721 2407 3128 1714 705 311 1191 1777 8079 -1.00 -0.58 -1.58 91.4 106.7 107.7.514 14.1 21.7 0.236.509 14.9 27.7 0.236 3 1976-77 DET* NBA 82 44 38.537 19730 3764 7792 3764 7792 1442 1960 1169 2495 3664 2004 877 459 1718 2200 8970 -1.04 0.04 -1.00 108.8 100.3 101.3.483 16.6 30.7 0.185.472 17.4 34.5 0.256 4 1956-57 SYR* NBA 72 38 34.528 2550 6915 2550 6915 2075 2613 4350 1282 1809 7175 -1.42 0.39 -1.03.369 0.300 5 1974-75 SEA* NBA 82 43 39.524 19880 3488 7653 3488 7653 1475 1970 1142 2579 3721 1997 837 378 1610 1977 8451 -1.09 -0.11 -1.19 105.5 96.7 97.7.456 15.9 29.3 0.193.459 17.1 33.3 0.205 6 1978-79 SDC NBA 82 43 39.524 19730 3721 7706 3721 7706 1836 2471 1392 2413 3805 1539 703 392 1623 2127 9278 -1.78 0.02 -1.76 106.3 106.2 107.9.483 15.6 37.5 0.238.491 14.7 34.9 0.226 7 1991-92 LAL* NBA 82 43 39.524 19830 3183 6977 3064 6532 119 445 1744 2278 1156 2196 3352 1803 756 400 1089 1543 8229 -1.10 0.15 -0.95 92.5 107.7 108.9.465 12.0 32.7
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out of a Box<T>, deallocating the backing storage but moving the T into another location, such as a stack-allocated local variable.
Let’s look at the remaining two approaches.
Roots Constrained To Stack (Option 2)
If roots can be stored directly on the stack (i.e. options 2 or 3 above), then when the GC initiates a root scan, it will need to find those roots.
This search of the stack can be guided by “stack maps”: For details, see Compiler Support for Garbage Collection in a Statically Typed Language, Diwan Moss and Hudson (1992). compiler-generated metadata providing a mapping from a code address This mapping need not have an entry for every address from the program instruction stream; we can make do with just the addresses of call-sites into runtime routines that could cause a GC. to the set of stack slots More specifically, the offset in a stack frame of a slot, and any relevant type information needed by the GC the compiler opted to include. that hold values of interest.
However, restricting the roots to live solely on the stack may be problematic for much the same reason that plagues the earlier idea of restricting roots to boxed values: in Rust today, one is always free to move instances of T from a stack-local slot into a member of a boxed value.
In some circumstances, we might be able to counteract these “freedom of movement” issues in a backwards-compatible manner with a compiler plugin (lint) that analyzes the source and trys to flag any code might move a root into an illegal location. (Servo already uses a lint like this for its integration with the Spidermonkey GC.)
Or, if we are willing to extend the language itself, we might add marker trait Immobile that indicates that values of such type cannot be moved. Proper integration of trait Immobile would probably require a way type for type parameters to opt-out of the capability to be moved, e.g. via a T:?Moved anti-bound, analogous to the?Sized anti-bound.
Yes, I just made up the term “anti-bound.”
But either of those options are just ways of enforcing a restriction, and it will outlaw certain kinds of program composition. An easy example of this: If you want to be able to put a root as part of the element type in a Vec<T>, then that T has to be able to be moved (since expanding the capacity of a vec will require moving its contents from one backing buffer to another).
In practice, we simply may be better off lifting such restrictions entirely. So, let us now consider our remaining option: allowing roots to be embedded in values on the stack or boxed on the Rust Heap.
Roots are Rust-Managed, But Otherwise Unconstrained (Option 3)
Now we come to what is probably the most realistic option for Rust/GC integration: allowing roots to reside anywhere that the Rust compiler or runtime knows about.
Arguably, I might well have started this discussion with this approach, since it is by definition the most general of the three, and thus if we do have a solution for it, then why not jump to it?
The reason I left it for last is that I suspect any design we adopt for GC integration in Rust 1.x is going to require a hybrid of the approaches described in the prior two sections (allocator-injected metadata and stack maps), and therefore I wanted to outline them in isolation, before I started mixing them together.
GC: “Where are the roots?”, Mutator: “…”
If we assume that roots can be embedded in values either on the stack or in boxes on the Rust Heap, then how will the GC find the roots when it needs to scan them?
The support for the GC’s root scanning capability can be seen as having three parts:
What work does the GC itself do, on the fly, to determine the roots when it needs them, What work does the mutator do (if any) as it executes the program “Mutator work” here includes code hidden in library functions the mutator calls, such as #[allocator] subroutines, or code automatically injected by the compiler, such read- or write-barriers. to support a potential root scan by the GC in a future, and, What meta-data must be gathered and emitted by the compiler to support root-scanning?
One idea for enabling easy GC root traversal was mentioned earlier: why not collect the roots together in a linked list structure? Towards this goal, we might consider maintaining an intrusive links forming a list of all roots.
This is an intrusive list because the pointers in the list are pointing into the interiors of objects. This allows traversing the list to be completely uniform (from the viewpoint of the GC, it looks like nothing more than a linked list of pairs). In this scenario, the GC does essentially zero work on-the-fly to find the locations of the roots; maintaining the list would become the reponsibility of the mutator as it creates and moves values with embedded roots.
However, Rust today does not have good support for intrusive data structures (RFC Issue 417). The already-mentioned capability to move values freely, as well as the capability to swap a pre-existing T with the value held beind a &mut T reference, are among the reasons that intrusive structures are difficult today, since it changes the addresses associated with objects, and thus requires updating of the interior links.
So, what other options do we have?
Having the GC traverse the memory of the call-stack, even with the assistance of a stack map to provide precise type information, will not give us the locations of all the roots, since some are located on the Rust Heap. A stack map cannot hold the addresses of the blocks of memory dynamically allocated for a box on the heap.
However, the stack map can hold the type information for the local variables, and that sounds promising: If we record that a local variable o has type Box<Struct>, then treat the contents of the box on the heap as owned by the stack, so that when we encounter o during the stack scan, we can recursively scan the memory of the box, using the type Struct to inform the scan about how to treat each of the embedded members.
⊕ I have slightly modified the running example to show two instances of the local x on the call-stack in separate frames, each corresponding to a distinct (recursive) invocation of the function fn f.
This is just to bring home the point that the stack map info encodes static information about the frame for a function (at a particular call-site), and thus recursive invocations of the same function can potentially reuse the same entry in the stack map.
The principle is that when control shifts to the GC coroutine, it walks through the stack backtrace, consulting the stack map for each callsite.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 stack_map_info for callsite 0x0010_ABBA in fn f: local x: offset: [...] type: Gc<X> stack_map_info for callsite 0x0020_BACA in fn g: local _: offset: [...] type: StructY stack_map_info for callsite 0x0030_C0C0 in fn h: local o: offset: [...] type: Box<StructZ>
From the stack map, it finds the offsets of relevant local variables within that stack frame, and the type information for those locals, so that it knows when it needs to dereference an pointer to inspect a block on the Rust Heap (such as the Box(O) in our running example).
The GC will need separate meta-data describing the layout of each type, with the offset and type of each field of interest:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 type_map_info for type StructY: field y: offset: [...] type: Gc<Y> type_map_info for type Box<StructZ>: field 0: offset: [...] type: StructZ type_map_info for type StructZ: field z: offset: [...] type: Gc<X>
The boxed objects may themselves own other root-holding objects on the Rust Heap, like so:
To find all the roots starting from the stack in the presence of such ownership chains (which may go through other types like Vec ), the GC will need to recursively traverse the boxes, or otherwise enqueue them onto a worklist structure. In principle, if we can prove that certain types never transitively own roots, then the GC should be able to skip traversing boxed data for such types.
Using the stack map and type map data to find all roots transitively owned by the stack is a promising approach. What is the catch, if any?
Unsafe Pointers
⊕ The from_raw method that converts a *mut T to Box<T> is unsafe, but into_raw is a safe method. Safe code can always convert a Box<T> to a *mut T, and clients expect it to also be reasonable to round-trip via from_raw. What should we do about unsafe pointers *mut T and *const T. For example, it is not uncommon for library code to convert boxed data Box<T> to a *mut T or vice versa; that is an ownership transfer.
I used local o = Box(O) above (where o: Box<StructB> ), but it is entirely possible that o has type *mut StructB.
Here are some options for how to handle unsafe pointers:
Skip unsafe pointers during root scanning. This seems almost certain to cause unsound behavior; as noted above, transmuting Box<T> to *mut T is an ownership transfer, and if T holds a root, then later code might access it. This means that the roots owned by T need to be scanned, to keep their associated objects on the GC Heap alive.
Punt the question: if a program uses GC, any use of unsafe pointers (as local variables or as members of structures) needs some sort of attribute or annotation that tells the GC how to interpret the value held in the unsafe pointer. This would be quite difficult to put into practice. Part 1 included a “Modularity” goal: A Rust program that uses GC should be able to link to a crate whose source code was authored without knowledge of GC. Requiring annotations on every use of unsafe pointers means sacrificing this goal.
Treat unsafe pointers as potential root owners: Traverse them and use their type as the basis for the scan. This seems like the most reasonable option. But, can the types of unsafe pointers be trusted?
Is the meta-data trustworthy?
We assumed the existence of stack and type maps. But where do they come from?
These maps need to be generated by the rustc compiler; after all, they rely on low-level details of the generated code, such as the offsets of fields within types, the offsets of local variables in a stack frame, or the addresses of function call-sites.
The rustc compiler, in turn, is going to generate the information based on the source code text. So far, so good.
Here’s the rub: we assumed that the stack map will tell us the types we need for all local variables of interest for all frames on the call stack.
But in practice, a value can be cast to a different type.
In particular, in today’s Rust 1.x, it is considered safe to cast between *mut T and *mut U for any T and U :
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 fn main () { let b = Box :: new ( "peanut butter" ); // (imagine if this held rooted data) let mut p = Box :: into_raw ( b ); let pb = p as * mut String ; // bogus type, but safe p = Box :: into_raw ( Box :: new ( "jelly" )); // this is where a potential GC would be worrisome println! ( "p: {:?} p2: {:?}", p, pb ); // (just demonstrating recovery of original value via unsafe code) let pb = pb as * mut &'static str ; let recover = unsafe { Box :: from_raw ( pb ) }; println! ( "recovered: {:?}", recover ); }
This is a real problem, in terms of the goals we have set up for ourselves. 100% modular GC requires that we be able to link with code that does things like the above with the owners of its roots, and that includes when the roots are indirectly held in boxes on the Rust Heap.
We may be able to add constraints on the Gc<T> type to prevent such things from occurring when the types are apparent (e.g. when one is working with a local variable of type Gc<T> ). But in general, the types will not be apparent to the code performing the cast; in particular, we would still need to address type-parametric code that performs such casts of unsafe pointers.
Solutions
What can we do about these problems?
One obvious response to the untrustworthy meta-data problem would be to change the language and make casts from *T to *U unsafe. Indeed, we may make such casts unsafe anyway; nmatsakis has said during informal conversation that he is not sure why we classified such casts as safe in the first place. This would deal with the problem at a surface level, in the sense that we would be able to at least allow a program using GC to link to a GC-oblivious crate if the latter crate did not use any unsafe blocks. But it would not be terribly satisfactory; we want Rust’s solution for GC to be able to link to as many crates as possible, and ruling out all code that does any cast of an unsafe pointer seems quite limiting.
We could also revise the set of goals, e.g. scale back our ambitions with respect to compositionality, and return to ideas like having the roots constrained to stack, as discussed above.
An alternative solution I have been considering is to try to adopt a hybrid approach for root scanning: use stack maps for the local variables, but also have the allocator inject tracing meta-data onto the objects allocated on the Rust Heap, and do a kind of conservative scanning, but solely for finding roots embeded in objects on the Rust Heap. This way, unsafe casts might become irrelevant: when encountering any native pointer (e.g. *mut u8 ), we would ignore the referenced type and instead look up whether it is an object on the Rust Heap, and if so, extract the allocator-injected tracing information.
I plan to dive more deeply into discussing solutions in a follow-up post. This post is already quite long, but more importantly, I want to get some concrete data first on the overheads imposed by the metadata injected during allocation in state of the art conservative GC’s like BDW.
Oh, and finally (but completely unrelated): Happy 2016 to all the hackers out there! Hope that you copied over all your live objects from 2015!Beans are a frugal food that has intergrity. By that I mean two things: first, it’s good for the environmental and beyond ethical reproach. And second, it’s a whole food. It’s not some processed imitation of a non-vegetarian thing. It’s its own actual thing.
Disclosure statement: This post contains affiliate links to products on Amazon that I recommend. I received no payment or free products for my review, but clicking the links and making a purchase supports this blog.
Earlier this year, I published 10 ideas of great bean dishes from Central American, Middle Eastern, Europe and the US, and I promised you recipes. So now I’m getting around to them – here we go!
Your first question may be: “How do I get my belly used to eating beans?” They sure are high in fiber, which is great for some people and scary for others. Let me put your mind at ease. There are two main tips I can offer, that I’m quite sure will work. First, eat more beans…on a schedule. Making it a weekly routine will ensure you’re consistently presenting this food to your gut. Practice makes perfect. Second, follow this recipe to cook your own beans! I’ve really found it to make a big difference in the air quality around here, if you know what I mean.
Cooking Basic Beans
This is the recipe for “big beans,” which include black beans, most of those red and white ones, Italian specialties bigger than a black bean, pintos and chickpeas. I learned most of these tips from Cynthia Lair’s Feeding the Whole Family: Recipes for Babies, Young Children, and Their Parents. That is an absolutely brilliant book which can snap you out of the routine of cooking “kid foods” and get the whole family eating healthier, more interesting meals without a fuss.
I’m going to mention some ingredients that may seem strange, first among them being Kombu, which is a type of sea vegetable. This stuff is awesome. According to nutrition educator Casey Seidenberg, it is high in iodine, iron, calcium, and vitamins A & C. But more importantly, it contains an enzyme that breaks down raffinose sugars in beans, making your digestion more effective and less gassy. It will do wonders for your gut, but it will *not* make your beans taste fishy, in case you were worried.
Easy Steps to Tender Beans
So the first thing to do is to soak your beans for at least four hours, or overnight. If you leave them more than 12 hours, you’ll want to change the water at some point in there. If you really leave them too long, they will sprout, or they might grow other microorganisms. So it’s best to get a routine whereby you soak beans every Friday night or put them in to soak on a certain morning as part of your routine. You can also do a quick soak by putting beans and cold water on the stove until it boils, then removing it from the heat and letting it sit, covered, for an hour. I think the long soak works better, though.
After soaking, drain off the soak water (give it to your plants!). Then put the beans and fresh water (at about a 1:3 ratio), along with a chipotle pepper, into a pot and put on the stove at medium heat. Removing the seeds and pith from inside the pepper will make it less spicy, but I don’t find it very spicy at all, so I usually don’t bother. While that’s heating up, soak one strip of kombu in cold water in another container for five minutes, then add to the beans.
As the beans heat up, you’ll see some foam form on top. You can skim off the foam – this may also help reduce gassiness. Then turn down to a simmer, cover, *set a timer* (yes, I’ve burned beans to the bottom of a pot before) and simmer for about an hour, or until really soft. I usually set the timer for less so that I can make sure the water doesn’t all boil off too fast.
Near the end of the cooking time, add about 3/4 tsp. salt per cup of dry beans. You could also use miso or soy sauce instead of salt.
Test for doneness by trying to mash a bean against the roof of your mouth with your tongue. I like to cook them until I can do that but before they disintegrate completely. Then I pour them into a jar or container, with enough of the liquid to cover, let it cool, and stick it in the fridge.
Eating the Beans You Cooked
Making some kind of bean salad with vinegar-based dressing is another great way to reduce gas-causing raffinose sugars. Here’s an easy recipe:
Black Bean and Corn Salad
1 cup dried black beans, cooked (or 1 can black beans)
2 ears of corn, cooked and cut off the cob
1 tomato, chopped
1 stalk celery
2 green onions
2 tbsp. fresh cilantro, parsley or basil
2 cloves garlic
juice of 2 limes
salt & pepper to taste.
Chop and combine ingredients, and enjoy!
To enjoy hot beans, I sauté some chopped onion in a skillet, then add beans to warm them up, maybe add ground cumin or hot sauce or other vegetables, and enjoy! You can also go from the soaking step directly to cooking them into soups or use recipes for seasoned beans (usually with tomato, peppers, onion, cumin, etc.). But I find that just that chipotle pepper and kombu is enough for a pretty nice flavor!
So when you’re wondering what to cook next week, remember: beans are the answer. As long as you prepare them with care, they’ll fill you up cheaply and ethically and keep those internal processes running smoothly.In China, the moon rabbit is usually called 'yuè tù' (月兔), which means "moon rabbit"! However, the moon rabbit is also called 'yù tù' (玉兔), or "Jade Rabbit", and sometimes Grandpa Rabbit, Gentleman Rabbit, Lord Rabbit, and the Gold Rabbit. Stories about the moon rabbit date as far back as the Warring States period (about 475-221 BCE).
According to legend, the moon rabbit is a companion to the moon goddess Chang'e and pounds the elixir of life for her in its pestle. It lives in the moon with the toad and can be seen every year in full view on Mid-Autumn Day, or August 15th.
In one legend told in and around Beijing, a deadly plague came to the city some 500 years ago and started killing many. The only thing that could save the city from this epidemic was the Moon Rabbit. Chang'e sent the Moon Rabbit to earth to visit each family and cure them of this plague. It did just that and asked for nothing in return except some clothes and often changed from man to woman. After curing the city of this plague, it returned to the moon.
To this day toy figurines of the rabbit wearing armor and riding a tiger, lion, elephant, or deer are popular toys among children and adults alike! They are particularly popular during Mid-Autumn Festival, or during Lunar New Year on the Zodiac Year of the Rabbit (2011).
In December 2013, China launched its first unmanned moon probe to explore a region of the moon known as Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows. This moon probe was named, appropriately enough, Jade Rabbit! Sadly enough, Jade Rabbit suffered some malfunctions on the moon's surface and completely down before the mission was complete. Fortunately, the mission was not a complete failure as it still managed to relay data back to Earth and ultimately left China's "footprint" on the moon.111th Congress reflects greater religious diversity in the U.S.
Atheists, agnostics are underrepresented: Only Fremont's Rep. Pete Stark claims no belief in God. Since 1961, numbers are down for Protestants and up for Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Buddhists, Muslims.
Catholics, at just less than 24% of the U.S. population, have gained more congressional seats since 1961 than any other religious affiliation, the report found. At 1.7% of the population each, Jews and Mormons make up 8.4% and 2.6% of Congress, respectively.
"We see much more acceptance of religious groups that have in the past... suffered some prejudice," said David Masci, a senior research fellow at the Pew Forum and coauthor of the report.
On Tuesday, when the 111th Congress is sworn in, about 30% of its membership will be Catholic, according to a recent analysis by Congressional Quarterly and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The shift reflects greater religious diversity both across the nation and on Capitol Hill.
As he ran for the White House, John F. Kennedy assured skeptical Americans that he was "not the Catholic candidate for president," but rather a "candidate for president who happens also to be Catholic." In 1961, the year he took office, Catholics accounted for 18.8% of Congress.
When Kennedy was elected, Protestants accounted for most of Congress -- 74.1%. Though their numbers have declined, they still form a majority at 54.7%, slightly higher than their 51.3% of the population.
Since the 87th Congress was seated in 1961, many major Protestant denominations have slipped in numbers, including Methodists, at 10.7% now and 18.2% then; Presbyterians, at 8.1% compared to 13.7%; and Episcopalians, who dropped to 7.1% from 12.4%. But when compared to the population, these three denominations still are overrepresented on Capitol Hill.
Yet other Protestant denominations are underrepresented: Baptists make up 17.2% of Americans but 12.4% of the House and Senate. Pentecostalists are 4.4% of the population but 0.4% of congressional lawmakers.
Slightly underrepresented are Buddhists and Muslims: Two of each were first elected to the 110th Congress and return next term. The study can be found at pewforum.org.
Though the religious makeup of the new Congress generally reflects that of the nation, the report found that members of Congress are much more likely than the overall public to claim a religious affiliation.
Only five members of the incoming Congress -- about 1% -- declined to specify their beliefs for the survey. But because of how the question was worded, it was unclear whether the lawmakers were atheist or agnostic or simply didn't want to answer the question.
Masci said he hoped to refine studies in the future. For example, he would like to better distinguish between the various strands of Christianity.
Overall, studies conducted over the years have consistently shown Americans to be a people of faith. A Pew Forum report last summer found that 92% of Americans say they believe in God or a universal spirit. It's no surprise, Masci said, that most Americans want to elect politicians of faith.
"I think there's an incentive, certainly, for a politician to have some sort of a religious affiliation," Masci said. Americans, he said, have "a desire to have people in office who, to at least to some degree, reflect your own belief."
Yet a religious affiliation does not always correlate to a certain religious belief, said Woody Kaplan, chairman of the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America.How Safeties and Tight Ends Are Changing Football
About two-thirds of every defensive play in the NFL is run out of a nickel or dime defense. This is a reaction to what offenses are doing. Offenses are making the slot receiver a primary offensive weapon, and are increasingly using tight ends and running backs in the passing game.
The Big Nickel – The NFL’s Hottest Defensive Trend
The growing trend is to use the “big nickel,” or a third safety, as part of the base defense. How did we get to the point where a third safety is so common? As always it was a back and forth game of trying to get a mismatch. First, offenses started to use a slot receiver to take advantage of a speed mismatch with the defensive linebacker that would be forced to cover the extra wide receiver. Offenses started to see a lot of production out of slot receivers, and so defenses would go into a “nickel” package, taking a linebacker out of the game and bringing in another defensive back.
So common is the Nickel that most defenses don’t reflect a 4-3 or 3-4 most of the time. They are generally in 4-2-5 or 3-3-5. But of course, some clever offensive coordinators noticed that defenses were bringing in shifty cornerbacks to cover the shifty slot receivers. So offensive coordinators adapted and started using different types of slot receivers that were bigger and taller, or using the slot receiver to clear out space for run plays – after all, there is one less linebacker on the field.
So what have defenses done? They started to use a “big nickel” defense with three safeties; the third acts as a hybrid linebacker/cornerback. With the right type of athlete, the big nickel can cover tight ends, receivers, and help in the run game. These players are being referred to as hybrid corner-linebackers, swiss army knives, big nickels, etc. The idea is to try to gain back the advantage over offenses. With more versatile defenders, defenses can mix up looks for the quarterback as the role of players is not so easily dissected by the quarterback before the snap.
“12” Personnel – The Biggest Headache Today for Defenses
The primary chess match that is going on in today’s game is between teams that are equipped to run “12” personnel, or one running back, two receivers, and two tight ends- but with tight ends and running backs that are used often and interchangeably in the passing game. When used in this way, defenses need to have very versatile players that can cover multiple positions.
The Need for a New Type of Defender
In regards to the draft, this means once again that the “super safety” type player that can cover short, middle, and deep, can blitz, and can help in the run game, are prized players. In college, this type of athlete is probably used in multiple positions- safety, linebacker, and corner- and often used on offense because they would have to be great athletes.i am busy reading Leonard Sweet’s book, ‘The Bad Habits of Jesus: Showing us the way to live right in a world gone wrong’. It has a very different way of looking at Jesus in terms of picking up some things that might be seen as bad habits – He spat, He procrastinated, He was constantly disappearing, He offended people, He hung out with bad people and so on – and showing how they point us towards the heart of God.
Here are two extracts that stood out for me from the chapter titled, ‘Jesus Offended People, Especially in High Places’:
CAUSE FOR ANGER
This first passage from the book looks at Jesus getting angry:
‘Jesus bad habit of not being afraid to offend so offends our PC sense of rectitude that He would be liable to be arrested for indecency. Consider the plight of Yvette Bavier, the sixty-year-old New Yorker whi a few years back was arrested for littering. Her offence? She was feeding sparrows on her lunch break in Central Park West. Offensiveness, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. We will not mean to offend. But we will. Nearly eight hundred years ago, Thomas Aquinas, the church’s greatest theologian, lamented that we had no name for the virtue of anger in our religious lexicon. He quoted the words of John Chrysostom to make his point: “Whoever is without anger, when there is cause for anger, sins.” Jesus offended people with multiple anger episodes: when He saw how people were treating children, when He saw how a tree was hoarding its resources for itself and not feeding a hungry world, and when He saw a sacred courtyard turned into a stockyard and stock exchange. This last Temple tantrum gave such offence, it proved the last straw for the religious establishment. To the casual observer, Jesus completely lost it. He went off on the guys working in the Temple. I mean, He put don a beat-down on them that they did not soon forget. He called them robbers and thieves. But from whom did they steal and what did they take that got Jesus so hot under the tunic? I don’t think it was money; rather they stole the grandeur away from God by serving the institution rather than God. They turned a house of prayer into a house of profit. When people today work for the church instead of working for God, love a denomination more than they love God, cherish their traditions more than they cherish their relationship with God, then they steal what is due only God. And I bet Jesus still gets anrgy – not angry at us, but angry over us. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” may be the most famous sermon in US history, but God is not angry at us. As the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich pointed out, “If God were angry with us even for a moment, then we would cease to exist.” But God does get angry at our lack of offense at how we treat each other. ‘
LOVE IS EASILY PROVOKED
The passage continues with this piece that describes a different perspective on a well-known descriptor of Love:
There is only one passage where Jesus is said to get angry directly. But His anger at their “hardened hearts” leads Him to heal. This is not the ale and testosterone raging of today’s road rage, home rage, work rage, political rage, or religious rage. Jesus’ anger is righteous outrage. Weddings have made famous the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. And the reader usually lingers lovingly over the phrase that love “is not easily provoked”. But that is a terrible translation. First, the word “easily” is not in the Greek but added by the translators. Second, the actual Greek word we translate as “provoked” is paroxynetai, the root of which gives us the word “paroxysm” or more popularly “fit”. Love does not issue in “fits” – fits of despair, fits of anger, fits of hopelessness, or fits of selfishness. But love is provoked, and love is provocative. In fact, that’s the very meaning of love, to be provoked by suffering and injustice and humanity. To follow Jesus is to be provoked… and provocative. If we are to live out Christ in the world, we need to get rid of out fear of offending people and get on with Christ’s mission in the world.’
Sho, some really good stuff in there:
# “Whoever is without anger, when there is cause for anger, sins.”
# But love is provoked, and love is provocative. The very meaning of love is to be provoked by suffering and injustice and humanity.
# If we are to live out Christ in the world, we need to get rid of out fear of offending people and get on with Christ’s mission in the world.’
It is a simple and easy to read book but so far pretty challenging and worth taking a look at. Let me know if you’d like to be next in line for my copy.
Like this: Like Loading...The health and safety of pets is our priority. Knowing the dietary needs, exercise restrictions or required medications for our guests helps us provide the best experience.
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For other questions, see my General FAQ.
With Bleach and half of Incesticide, 7 tracks on With The Lights Out (the box set), an extra one added to Sliver – The best of the box,, the whole extra live show added to the Bleach reissue, and 7 bonus tracks on the deluxe reissue of In Utero, I think I have recorded and/or mixed more released Nirvana tracks than anyone else. I actually recorded Nirvana with four different drummers, in fact FIVE if you count Mark Pickerel playing with Kurt and Krist on “Ain’t It A Shame” etc (Box Set). (And I’ve seen ‘em onstage with a sixth one, Dave Foster.) I made this sort-of-a-FAQ because of all the time-sucking Nirvana-related mail I used to get, hoping this would deflect some of it. Ten million fans and only one of me, ya know?
OK, here goes:
The 10-song demo w/Dale Crover on drums was recorded at Reciprocal Recording on 23 Jan 88, recorded AND rough-mixed by me in five hours. (Mixing time: about 6 minutes per song…) Five of these songs went on Incesticide in their original rough mix form. Another, “Spank Thru”, has never been officially released. It was re-recorded that summer after drummer Chad joined the band (“Love Buzz” session) and later appeared on Sub Pop 200. (There’s a low voice on backing vocals on Spank Thru. On the original version it was Dale; on the later, released version, Kurt had me do it.) Two more from the “Dale” demo, “Floyd the Barber” and “Paper Cuts”, were later remixed and added to Bleach, with some harmony backing vocals added to “Paper Cuts”. Of the remaining two
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licensing fee.
Taxi drivers protesting Uber in Toronto, Dec. 9, 2015. (Getty Images)
The taxi industry argued the new rules favoured Uber. For instance, taxis would have to be inspected twice a year at city garages, while Uber cars would only have to be inspected once.
Taxi drivers say their earnings have been seriously reduced by Uber's presence. Some cab drivers say they have lost half their income since Uber set up shop in Toronto.
At last count, more than 68,000 people had signed Uber’s petition urging Toronto’s City Council not to go forward with the new regulations.
Uber says it employs 15,000 “driver-partners” in the city, and its presence has given “the accessibility community … a new affordable and reliable transportation option.”
The company says other services it has launched in the city — such as UberEATS, which delivers restaurant meals — will also shut down if city council votes in favour of the new rules.
Like Us On FacebookBillionaire technology and music industry disruptor Sean Parker upended another sector this afternoon, with the release of a new initiative to legalize marijuana in California in 2016.
Parker’s proposal — called the Control, Regulate, and Tax Adult Use of Marijuana Act — calls for ending cannabis prohibition in California, and allowing folks to possess up to one ounce of bud and grow up to six plants. Cities would have wide latitude on cannabis commerce, but couldn’t ban small, secure personal indoor gardens.
The proposal upends the 2016 playing field for California reformers. Parker’s wealth is the first substantial amount of funds to be moved into play in the 2016 race. Drug Policy Alliance and Marijuana Policy Project are reportedly backing the Parker proposal. That leaves other camps far out of the running for lack of funds — including the post-Prop 19 coalition ReformCA, as well as group behind the MCLR.
The full measure also received enthusiastic support from respected social-justice and industry organizations.
“This initiative provides a model for the country,” stated Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “It breaks new ground not just with its pragmatic regulatory provisions but also in directing tax revenue to prevention and treatment for young people, environmental protections and job creation in underserved communities.”
“California voters are ready to end marijuana prohibition in 2016 and replace it with a more sensible system,” stated Rob Kampia, Executive Director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “That is exactly what this initiative will do, and that is why MPP is proud to support it. We look forward to working with the proponents and doing whatever we can to help pass this measure and make history in California next year.”
About a half-dozen groups have filed ballot language, which costs $200 and signifies little. Millions of dollars must be spent to gather several hundred thousand valid signatures by a state deadline, then run a potentially polarizing campaign against a united conservative right, and a fractured, bickering far left. About 53 percent of Californians support legalization in theory. The details could drag those numbers down.
Over in Ohio, another set of profit-minded liberals are set to forfeit their legalization funds this week. Ohio’s Issue 3 to legalize pot is polling at 46-46, and has been dragged down by similar forces as could emerge in California.
California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who chaired a Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy, of the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, supported the measure, which was filed today by official proponents, Dr. Donald O. Lyman, MD, and Michael Sutton — a doctor and an environmentalist:
“I am pleased that this thoughtful measure is aligned with the Blue Ribbon Commission’s recommendations, and presents California its best opportunity to improve the status quo by making marijuana difficult for kids to access. It is backed by the broadest coalition of supporters to date and I believe that Californians will rally behind this consensus measure, which also serves to strengthen law enforcement, respect local preferences, protect public health and public safety, and restore the environment.”
Official filer Sutton is a longtime conservationist and environmental attorney, and former President of the California Fish and Game Commission, and former Vice President of the National Audubon Society.
“The physician community and the people of California in general have increasingly voiced support for ending marijuana prohibition and bringing greater control, oversight and consumer protections to our marijuana policies,” stated Dr. Lyman, author of the California Medical Association’s 2011 Background Paper on Marijuana. “This is the most comprehensive and carefully-crafted measure ever introduced to control, regulate and tax responsible adult-use of marijuana anywhere in America – and it will make California healthier, make our streets and communities safer and better protect our children.”
“A regulated and reliable framework of marijuana policy will bring illicit cultivation out of the shadows and allow us to protect and restore California’s precious land, water and wildlife,” stated Sutton, who also founded the Marine Stewardship Council while at World Wildlife Fund. “It’s good for the environment, good for our water supply and good for natural resources.”
Paul Warshaw, CEO of GreenRush, a patient-centered cannabis delivery platform celebrated the news.
“California is home to dozens of world-class industries, now including a cannabis sector that is growing exponentially more professional, varied, and profitable. The state’s cannabis industry is certainly complimented by it’s other leading technology and investment sectors – we’re seeing leaders like Sean Parker and others stepping forward to advocate for rational cannabis regulation and reform.”
[Sponsored link: Join 1,000 tech CEOs, venture capitalists, journalists, and cannabis entrepreneurs. Downtown San Francisco. Two days. The time is now. www.NewWestSummit.com]
The California Cannabis Industry Association also supports the Parker proposal.
“CCIA is pleased to join a diverse group of stakeholders in support of this initiative, which will bring sensible adult-use laws and regulations to California’s cannabis industry,” said CCIA president Sean Luse, in a statement. “This initiative represents the collective voice of California’s lawful medical cannabis industry.”
The Adult Use of Marijuana Act will lay atop California’s new statewide medical cannabis regulations, while streamlining some of them, stated CCIA general counsel Khurshid Khoja. “No legislation is perfect, but we believe the initiative will benefit patients, taxpayers and the legal marijuana industry.”
California is positioning itself as a national and global leader in legal cannabis, after decades of it as a major part of the underground economy.
“Our hope is this initiative will pave the way for California to take
its rightful place as the center of the cannabis economy,” stated CCIA executive director Nate Bradley. “California has long been the leader in technology, the environment and entertainment. This initiative lays the foundation for marijuana to become California’s next great industry — with all the jobs, tax revenue and economic growth that come with a productive new industry.”
A number of groups are either supporting the whole initiative or at minimum, the environmental component, with letters of support, including: The Nature Conservancy, Audubon California, California Council of Land Trusts, California Native Plant Society, California State Parks Foundation, California Trout, California Urban Stream Partnership, Defenders of Wildlife, Endangered Habitats League, Pacific Forest Trust, Trout Unlimited and Trust for Public Land.
“The environmental provisions of the Adult Use Act will represent a major step forward in protecting California’s rich natural resources in the future,” stated the Nature Conservancy in an October 29, 2015 letter.Now the U.S. Conference of Mayors is begging Obama to leave them alone. At their annual meeting taking place now in Las Vegas, the mayors – among them Republicans and Democrats – unanimously adopted a resolution arguing that "states and localities should be able to set whatever marijuana policies work best to improve the public safety and health of their communities." The mayors also came out for amending federal law to explicitly allow states to craft their own marijuana policy. And they're asking Obama in the meantime not to waste federal law enforcement resources trying to undermine the will of their voters.
Cities in Colorado and Washington have been in a particularly awkward spot since last fall, when voters in those two states elected to legalize recreational marijuana. Local officials and city councils have been scurrying to figure out how to implement the new regulations (our favorite idea: Aurora, Colorado, actually considered becoming its own marijuana grower and dispensary ). But all the while, the Obama Administration has remained coy about how far it will let local governments go in flouting federal law.
The Conference of Mayors has been inching up to this position for several years. Two years ago, the group adopted a separate resolution declaring the war on drugs a failure. And the mayors had previously come out in support of medical marijuana. Today's resolution was co-sponsored by the top elected officials of a number of big U.S. cities: San Diego's Bob Filner, Seattle's Mike McGinn, Las Vegas' Carolyn Goodman, and Oakland's Jean Quan, along with a dozen others.
Their argument is pretty convincing: The money everyone is wasting policing marijuana could be better spent on things cities really need (and problems they actually have). They cite the rise of drug cartels that make a majority of their profit off marijuana, by some estimates. And the resolution points out that while sales and use of marijuana are similar across racial and ethnic groups, minorities are "arrested, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated at higher rates and for longer periods of time."
The mayors are applying pressure just as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been hinting, yet again, that he'll come out with a policy "relatively soon." The mayors are up against some serious competition for Holder's ear. On the other side of the argument: eight former heads of the Drug Enforcement Agency... and the United Nations.
Top image of the state capitol in downtown Denver on April 20th of this year: Rick Wilking/ReutersAccording to ongoing discussions with Obama aides and associates, if the president wins a second term, he plans to tackle another American war that has so far been successful only in perpetuating more misery: the four decades of The Drug War.
Don’t expect miracles. There is very little the president can do by himself. And pot-smokers shouldn’t expect the president to come out in favor of legalizing marijuana. But from his days as a state senator in Illinois, Obama has considered the Drug War to be a failure, a conflict that has exacerbated the problem of drug abuse, devastated entire communities, changed policing practices for the worse, and has led to a generation of young children, disproportionately black and minority, to grow up in dislocated homes, or in none at all.
It is hard to write about the Drug War without getting preachy, in part because it remains so polarizing. This ought not be so. As a new documentary, The House I Live In, from filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, makes clear, a consensus is emerging among academics, police officers, lawyers, and even some politicians about what not to do.
The film debuted in Los Angeles the last night of the festival, right next to the theatre were the male striptease tentpole Magic Mike was premiering, and so it won’t get the attention from the press that it deserves. It did, however, win the Grand Jury citation at Sundance.
The House I Live In doesn’t break new ground. But it puts together 40 years of history, politics and sociology in a concise and compelling way. If you’re prepared to believe that the cycle of drug abuse that plagued the black community in the 1980s and is currently sweeping across poor white America now is the fault of the low-level dealers and the users themselves, then you won’t like Jarecki’s point of view. For him, the decision to sell drugs is a starting point.
He wants to know why it has become so common, so uncontroversial, so startlingly consequence-free. His answer is that everyone profits from it. The Drug War is ongoing because it has been successful for everyone but those most affected by it. Politicians have a useful and cyclic scapegoat to prove their crime bona fides. ("If you are a causal drug user, you are an accomplice to murder," Ronald Reagan once said.)
The corrections industry has become a billion dollar business. Through asset forfeiture laws, police departments large and small can buy expensive new toys and keep cops on the street. And Americans have a vehicle to control their exposure to those elements of society that seem to threaten their economic interests the most.
The historian Richard Miller, who usually writes about Abraham Lincoln, describes for viewers how drug laws in American history were created almost nakedly to marginalize disfavored groups. When Chinese immigrants began to crowd out jobs for white people in California, opium consumption suddenly became a crime. Hemp was legal and consumed in a variety of forms until it became a way to reduce economic competition from Mexicans. Cocaine, notoriously, was consumed in polite society throughout the century, but was not the subject of police attention until blacks migrated North to escape the Jim Crowified South. The 100-to-1 disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine was the most obvious manifestation of how different blacks and whites were treated.
When President Obama recently signed a law reducing the disparity to 18 to 1, it was considered a reform, even though the two forms of cocaine are still pretty much the same goddamned thing.
Jarecki wanted to know why black people have had the roughest go of it, and how drugs and the drug war seem to feed off each other in a sort of deadly symbiosis. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, is happy to provide his answer. There’s nothing else there. The prejudicial paternalism of the New Deal ensured that blacks migrating North moved into ghettos that were subsequently redlined, making home ownership a near impossibility. Businesses moved out; the American industrial base collapsed. From door to door, from the stoop of his home to the threshold of his school, a young black man sees only the dealer, who offers him a job. Some kids can escape this reality, and a majority don’t become drug dealers, but virtually everyone who lives in an urban black neighborhood is affected by it.
Simon, who speaks in paragraphs in the film, notes that the sentencing guidelines passed by Congress and the pressure on local police departments to get rid of the scourge of drugs created an incentive for officers to make as many arrests as possible. The officers who get promoted quickly are those who make arrests. And it’s easy to make a drug arrest—just go to a drug infested neighborhood and "jack someone up," as he puts it. The result was a plethora of amped up police officers in constant confrontation with the black community—and "makes a police department where nobody can solve a fucking crime."
Homicide detectives don’t get the stats that narcotics cops do. Pull a father from his daughter and put him in jail for life, and you all but guarantee that she won’t make it out the ghetto. Break apart a family over a few ounces of cocaine, and the victims multiply. And everyone admits (from the beat cop to the prosecutor) that nothing really is getting better. Ground zero for violence in the drug war is now Mexico. Gangs there fight with each other and with the Mexican and American governments with such fervor precisely because the demand from Middle America for drugs is so high. (This is something that Hillary Clinton admitted recently, to her credit. The U.S. is a functional cause of Mexico’s drug violence.)
Race, however is not the primary soldering force of the Drug War. Class is. Poor whites are now (if you can believe the rhetoric) being devastated by the meth epidemic, breaking up previously intact families throughout Appalachia and the Midwest. The same language was used to describe the dangers of the marijuana culture during the 40s and the cocaine culture during the ’80s is now used to cast meth users as social deviants, and slowly, the incarnation rate of white people is inching up.
So what to do: Jarecki has no answers, other than to stop doing what we’re doing now.
But here are some points of departure. Watch out for returning veterans. They are uniquely vulnerable to drug abuse of all types, and narcotics traffickers have set up camp around military bases, particularly those housing infantry and special operations forces, for a reason. That generation cannot be lost to drugs.
Second, recognize what Mike Carpenter, a jowly Oklahoman who runs a prison there, is comfortable telling Jarecki: Non-violent drug offenders really don’t belong in prisons. Where they go is a political question, because drug abuse is something that does require a governmental response. But prison just basically ends their lives.
They can’t vote when they’re released; thanks to President Clinton, most can’t move back into public housing; they’re stigmatized, in many ways, like child molesters. Reintegrating drug users back into society is as important (if not more important) than punishing them in the first place.
And the next time a celebrity makes it seem like legalizing marijuana is the be all and end all of drug law reform, slap him in the face. (Metaphorically, unless you want to get your time on TMZ). Legalizing pot is the least of it. Getting politicians to understand how their actions contributed to the problem is a lot harder and requires more effort, but will ultimately pay off. If mandatory minimum sentences are reduced, for example, judges will be in a much better position to consider family structure when pronouncing a sentence. This local discretion could mean the difference between an intact family and a broken one.
Beyond that, since the United States isn’t about to legalize or regulate the illegal narcotics markets, the best thing a president can do may be what Obama winds up doing if he gets re-elected: using the bully pulpit to draw attention to the issue.
But he won’t do so before November.
_Marc Ambinder is a contributing editor at GQ. _
Read more on Death Race 2012Steam now allows game developers to ban users from their games
http://techraptor.net/content/steam-now-allows-game-developers-to-ban-users-from-their-games
If you have ever put a foot in the online gaming community since Ultima Online, you’ll know that cheating is a thing, and it’s a huge problem. Many games implement their own system to face the problem. Valve, for example, has VAC. When someone is caught cheating, usually the way to go is a ban. Not all the developers, especially the small ones, have the means to implement or buy an anti cheating system or to enforce a ban. Valve wants to try to offer a solution for the latter problem by giving all the developers the option to have Steam prevent misbehaving users to launch their game.
So, you’re saying that a paying customer that takes advantage of problems with how you created your game, are gonna get banned? Kind of bullshit, in my opinion.
Did NASA Just Accidentally Produce A Warp Bubble? EmDrive Could Lead To Warp Drive
http://www.inquisitr.com/2040259/did-nasa-just-accidentally-produce-a-warp-bubble-emdrive-could-lead-to-warp-drive/
NASA scientists working on a project called EmDrive have accidentally stumbled upon something that will send science fiction junkies into a frenzy. The possibility of a real-life warp drive has been placed on the table thanks to readings that indicate the EmDrive’s resonance chamber sent beams traveling faster than the speed of light, which would be considered warp speed. Researchers have considered the possibility of traveling faster than the speed of light, but until the recent NASA study, the feat had never been achieved. But by the way, Popular Mechanics is saying “hang on a minute.” http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a15323/temdrive-controversy/
The New ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Lets You Have Realistic Sex With Prostitutes
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/grand-theft-auto-features-first-person-sex-with-prostitutes-2014-11
I really can’t believe this. I know the article is a bit old, but it was just so damn stupid, it bears berating, again. We have previously covered this topic, but it’s gaining steam again, and we need to point out the obvious: It isn’t rape, if there is no actual sexual congress.
“The Days of the WoW-Style MMO are Over,” H1Z1 Boss Says
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-days-of-the-wow-style-mmo-are-over-h1z1-boss-s/1100-6426943/
The days of MMOs in the vein of World of Warcraft “are over.” That’s according to John Smedley, the president of Daybreak Games, previously known as Sony Online Entertainment before it split off from the PlayStation company back in February. He tells Games Industry International in a wide-ranging interview that the way people play games has changed–and games like WoW aren’t long for this world.
However, looking at Smedley’s track record of successes with games, I would say that he’s gonna be quite surprised when he realizes his company tanks.
Miss Piggy, Extraordinary Puppet, to Receive Award for Feminism
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/04/pioneering-puppet-awarded-for-her-feminism.html
Oh gods. This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Are they trolling us with this article? Let’s put aside the fact that Miss Piggy is not even human. Let’s put aside the fact that Miss Piggy is voiced by Frank Oz, a man. Let’s even put aside the fact that Miss Piggy is puppetted by several different people, most of who are men. Miss Piggy is a violent sociopath, and a complete narcissist. And this is the ideal of a feminist, in their minds?
Arthur Chu is ending gamergate… Tonight!
https://twitter.com/RSG_VILLENA/status/594302245627424768
Literally Chu has gone #BeyondMcIntosh. First he starts by making what could be considered a veiled threat to #gamergate members who were meeting up in DC, then he decideds to appear to backtrack with a tweet that seems to suggest talking things out with Gamergaters.
When will Literally Chu figure out that the stupid is strong in him?
GamerGate in DC bomb threat:
Speaking of Arthur’s favorite wish, apparently it’s OK to threaten to bomb gamer get-togethers in Washington DC. The story is still developing on #GGinDC. We’ll be discussing it further.
Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Stewart returns for two Doctor Who episodes this season
http://nerdreactor.com/2015/05/01/jemma-redgraves-doctor-who/#qe67YaoGqh71z6rL.99
BBC America released a video announcing Jemma Redgrave’s character U.N.I.T.’s Kate Stewart return for two episodes of the ninth season of Doctor Who. The last time we saw Kate Lethbridge-Stewart was in the season finale of the 8th season of Doctor Who when she was saved by her Cyber-father.
Game of Thrones season 5 synopses for episode 4 to 8
http://nerdreactor.com/2015/05/01/game-of-thrones-s5-synopses-ep-4-to-8/#GmAHJPIS1tAlGe5t.99
HBO has let loose with some ideas of what is to come in the next few episodes of Game of Thrones. While none of the information is all that revealing, it leads the mind to guessing what is coming for the hit series.
All this, and more, on this week’s Tales from the Infrared.4:59pm: The Angels are sending $1MM to the Royals, Mike DiGiovanna of the LA Times reports (on Twitter).
4:15pm: The Angels weren't sure about Ervin Santana, but the Royals want to see if he can re-establish himself as an above-average MLB starter. The Royals acquired Santana and cash from the Angels for minor league left-hander Brandon Sisk, the teams announced. The Angels exercised Santana's 2013 option before completing the trade, Bill Shaikin of the LA Times reports (on Twitter).
“We’ve stated all along that starting pitching was a priority this offseason and acquiring someone with the resume of Ervin Santana immediately upgrades our rotation,” Royals GM Dayton Moore said in a statement released by the team.
The Angels had limited interest in exercising Santana's $13MM option option, but the Royals appear to consider it reasonable. The Royals quietly checked in on Santana's medicals yesterday before completing the deal today, Bob Nightengale of USA Today reports (on Twitter).
The 29-year-old posted a 5.16 ERA with 6.7 K/9, 3.1 BB/9 and a 43.2% ground ball rate in 178 innings this past season. Santana's average fastball velocity declined to 91.7 mph, but his swinging strike rate remained constant at 8.4%. He had completed at least 220 innings with ERAs below 4.00 in 2010 and 2011. Rosenthal reported late last night that the Angels were trying to move Santana and Dan Haren.
Sisk, 27, made 50 relief appearances at Triple-A this past season. He posted a 2.54 ERA with 9.8 K/9 and 4.3 BB/9 in 67 1/3 innings — numbers that match up with his career averages through five minor league seasons.
The Royals began the offseason with a clear need for starting pitching. So far they have traded for Santana and claimed Chris Volstad. Volstad remains a non-tender candidate, but Santana will join Bruce Chen, Luis Mendoza, Felipe Paulino and Danny Duffy in the team's projected 2013 rotation. It won't be surprising if GM Dayton Moore continues pursuing starting pitching.
The Royals surely hope this acquisition works out better than the one they made early last offseason. A year ago Kansas City traded Melky Cabrera to San Francisco for Jonathan Sanchez in a deal that didn't work out for the Royals. To their credit, they did flip Sanchez for Jeremy Guthrie, who pitched well down the stretch.
Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports first reported the trade (on Twitter) and Jon Paul Morosi of FOX Sports first reported Sisk's inclusion in the deal (also on Twitter). Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com reported two days ago that the Angels were exploring trades involving Santana and Haren. Photo courtesy of US Presswire.A new platformer from Banjo-Kazooie creators Rare "would be great", Head of Microsoft Studios Phil Spencer has said, possibly teasing an unannounced title in development at the studio.
Discussing the possibility of Rare returning to platform games with followers on Twitter, Spencer gave a nod towards Press Play's upcoming side-scroller Max: The Curse of Brotherhood before saying: "A new Rare plat would also be great."
Of course, Spencer's comment doesn't necessarily mean that a new platformer is in the works at Rare, although comments from the studio back in August (via CVG) suggested that it was keen to revisit its Banjo, Conker and Viva Pinata franchises.
"We've got ideas for most older Rare IP, you won't be surprised to hear. There's quite a lot of desire to do that, and Viva Pinata, Conker... Banjo's very popular internally, a lot of people want to do stuff with Banjo," he said.
Rare was acquired by Microsoft in 2002 and went on to develop Xbox 360 launch titles Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero. It later developed 360 platformer Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.
However, in recent years the studio has been focussed on the Kinect Sports series. Its next title, Kinect Sports Rivals, is expected to launch on Xbox One in early 2014.
Source: @XboxP3Photo: Daniil Turovsky / Meduza
Over the past several months, law enforcement units in Dagestan have shut down Salafi mosques wherever worshipers profess ultraconservative Islam. Even the largest communities, found in Makhachkala, have been defenseless against the police, who believe the Salafi mosques are recruiting for the Islamic State. Congregants have been put on “watch lists” en masse that limit their movements in the republic and Salafis are regularly detained. Meduza’s special correspondent Daniil Turovsky went to Dagestan to talk with the security police and the people they label "potential terrorists."
The ‘East’ mosque
Imam Muhammad Nabi Sildinskii hasn’t left his East mosque located on the outskirts of Khasavyurt since January 31, 2016. He feels relatively safe there, as the building is constantly guarded by twenty men.
To reach his office, you must pass quickly through a spacious courtyard with a sink for washing, a cafe, three flights of prayer rooms, and a corridor with rooms for religious lessons. In Muhammad Nabi's office, a snow white monitor sits on a table (when the computer goes to sleep, a background with a rainbow appears on the screen). On the wall near the front door, there’s a frame depicting a white-on-black shahada (the main Islamic prayers) in Arabic: "I testify there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is Allah’s Messenger."
"The authorities want to make me out to be a terrorist,” Nabi explains. “They’ll frame me. They surround my house all the time. I'll be here as long as necessary.”
Muhammad Nabi is one of the most respected Salafi preachers in Dagestan. Around the East mosque, he’s gathered Khasavyurt adherents of "pure Islam," which denies religious innovations that emerged after the Prophet Muhammad’s death.
Security officials believe the imam is one of the local Salafist leaders, and they see Salafis as potential terrorists, Wahhabis, or local "forest" militants of the Caucasus Emirate terrorist organization, or the soldiers for the Islamic State.
On January 31, OMON agents, operatives from the Interior Ministry's anti-extremism unit, and the FSB came to the small Salafi “North” mosque in Khasavyurt. They welded the front door shut and declared the mosque closed. About 20 masked men in camouflage holding Kalashnikovs stayed behind to keep watch. One congregant was indignant: "It’s time for the evening prayer! Commander, what’s going on? Let us perform namaz!”
The security forces explained that they closed the mosque because it didn’t have an imam—the last one was jailed for possessing a grenade launcher, and the new one hadn’t been appointed. "They can find anything, if a person meddles,” Murad Dibirov, the deputy imam of the East mosque, explains to me. “They often find grenades and ammunition on us. Do not be surprised if they start to find tanks and airplanes in homes." “They can’t hold him for very long, but we’ve managed to soften the case,” says Muhammad Nabi, the imam of the East mosque. “They gave him eight months in jail." According to Nabi, the imam police accused of carrying a grenade will be released soon.
Security officials told congregants that the closing of the North mosque is connected to the fact that supporters of the Islamic State were meeting in the mosque. Murad Dibirov denies this, saying, "Friday sermons aren’t even held there. It’s more a prayer room than a mosque."
The next morning, after the closing of the North mosque, thousands of congregants gathered near the East mosque. Nabi Muhammad spoke to the crowd: "We are not terrorists who lawlessly kill people like they accuse us! We don’t violate other people’s rights and we don’t seize someone else's mosque!" After this, three East mosque employees set out to negotiate with the city administration. They came back with nothing—they weren’t even granted an audience. Then Nabi Muhammad called all his supporters to go to the mayor's office. Five thousand protesters (about 130,000 people live in Khasavyurt) marched to the city administration chanting "Allahu Akbar!" and "Give us back our mosque!"
One congregant told Meduza that “Dagestani ISIL militants” reached out to people over instant messaging apps and supposedly called on Salafis to abandon peaceful protest tactics and instead take up arms and "declare jihad on the authorities."
"We marched so the people responsible for closing down mosques understand that the crowd and young people need to go somewhere. And if they close all the mosques, then other people will open their doors to the youth and lead them astray. There are a lot of calls to arms from various groups on the Internet,” Dibirov explains. “The [Khasavyurt] administration is afraid of us going out into the streets. But we can still easily gather 50,000 people in two days. We can take them and block the railway. It’s not far from here. We have nothing to lose. But at any moment they could frame or shoot us."
After the march, Muhammad Nabi and Murad Dibirov were let into the administration building. The officials and security forces agreed to reopen the North mosque.
The watch list
"They gave laid down conditions specifying that we find an imam [for the North mosque] who wasn’t on a police list,” says Dibirov. “We found one. But just ten minutes before our meeting, he called to say that he was summoned to the police station. Now he’s on the list. "
Security officials are suspicious of all the local Salafis: most of the congregants of Salafi mosques are on preventative watch lists people have nicknamed "Wahhab-lists" ("Wahhabi list"). Interior Ministry officials began filling these lists up in mid-2013, just before the Sochi Olympic Games. Not only do congregants of mosques find themselves on a watch list, but so do any Dagestanis resembling a Salafi. (This includes following the Quran, wearing pants tucked in at the ankles, and having a long beard). According to the Caucasian Knot, police in Dagestan have registered about 100,000 cases (in a population numbering more than 3 million people).
And Russian law enforcement agencies don’t consider just Salafis to be potential terrorists. There are many supporters of jihad among the adherents of "pure Islam" (also known as the Wahhabis or "fundamentalists"). They’ve accepted the idea of Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s radical ideologue, that mankind is divided into the "Islamic world" and the “World of Ignorance" (you need to conquer and correct the world of the ignorant). The same idea undergirds the Caucasian Emirate, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State.
Throughout the 2000s, the jihad of Dagestani "forest militants" has been primarily directed against the police, who to them symbolize state power (they currently attack the police several times a month).
"We were persecuted for following the Quran, that is, for our faith," a congregant from one of the mosques tells me. “They only put those genuinely suspected of involvement in the criminal underground on the watch list,” objects my interlocutor from the Khasavyurt Interior Ministry office.
The authors of the report "War Without War: Human Rights Violations in the Russian Authorities Fight Against Underground Militants in Dagestan,” released by Human Rights Watch in June 2015, believe the authorities apply a "broad approach" in their fight against terrorists that actually turns all followers of Salafi Islam into suspects.
"Anyone placed on a list goes through the same process: their fingerprints, saliva, and blood are taken, their gait is photographed, voice recorded, and they're asked to write an essay and read on camera," says Hasan Hajiyev, the head of the Makhachkala movement "For Muslim Rights." The data is collected so that individuals will be easier to identify, if they become active militants.
Those who refuse to participate in the registration process encounter various problems. The Human Rights Watch report tells the story of Shamsutdin Magomedov from Shamkhal, a suburb of Makhachkala. In January 2014, he refused to give a DNA sample. A month later, a group of police appeared at his home and accused him of collaborating with the armed underground. According to the official report, the police found explosives during the search. He was arrested and tortured—beaten and made into a "swallow" (his wrists and ankles were tied behind his back). During the torture the police told him that all of this was because he refused to "participate in the collection of Wahhabis’ DNA samples." A few months later, the court sentenced Magomedov to six months for weapons possession, which he had already spent in pretrial detention. He immediately forked over the DNA samples upon his release.
Falling on the "Wahabb-list" means you are under constant surveillance, says Muhammad Abu Hamza Magomedov, a representative of the Makhachkala Salafi Mosque. "Three people call you several times a week,” he says. “First, a district police officer asks where you are. Then the precinct inspector calls to ask whether the policeman called. And then there’s another inspector on top of the first inspector. He checks to make sure the other two called."
"All of this is ‘food’ for them [the police],” says Imam Muhammad Nabi. “You have to pay 8,000 to 10,000 rubles [$112-$140] to get off the list."
Muhammed Nabi in his office. Photo: Daniil Turovsky / Meduza
My interlocutors from the Salafi mosque leadership believe that the "watch list" turns moderate believers into radicals. "Imagine the life of young man on the list,” says Murad Dibirov, deputy imam of the East mosque in Khasavyurt. “He can be stopped at a road checkpoint, hauled to the police station for two or three hours, and sometimes it can be half the day. They come and search his house. They’re constantly calling him. If he goes to another town, he has to report it to the district police. Do you consider the Caucasian mindset or imagine how all this causes a man trouble in front of his wife. And then we can understand how a young man feels when he sees on the Internet a fellow villager who’s gone to Syria sitting in a big truck with a big gun and tells how he’s completely free and unhumilitated."
Police simply kill some of the men they suspect of aiding insurgents. "They declare a KTO [a counter-terrorist operation], surround the house, blow it up, and get themselves a star," said one the representatives of the Salafi mosques. Such special operations occur in Dagestan every three or four days.
"There are ideological guys who talk about wanting to blow up the government,” fumes Muhammad Abu Hamza Magomedov, the deputy imam at a mosque on Hungarian Fighters Street in Makhachkala. “They have little brains and are total idiots. But now what? Kill every idiot? How could you? He
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3 Player 4 GP TOI CF/60 SF/60 On-Ice SH% Morgan Rielly Nazem Kadri James van Riemsdyk Tyler Bozak 16 31.92 146.63 88.36 14.89 Morgan Rielly Auston Matthews William Nylander 16 2.13 112.5 112.5 25
At 5v5, using this tool, we can isolate the impact of Auston Matthews with and without the pairing on the ice. The type of goaltending the pairing has been receiving when Matthews isn’t on the ice is in stark contrast to the type of goaltending they’re getting with Matthews on the ice. An.840 on-ice save percentage while controlling 54% of the shot attempts may be a reflection of the pairing and some of Frederik Andersen’s play.
Player 1 Player 2 Player 3 GP TOI CF% GF% On-Ice SH% On-Ice SV% PDO Morgan Rielly Ron Hainsey Auston Matthews 16 54.18 52 66.67 15 92 1.073 Morgan Rielly Ron Hainsey w/o Auston Matthews 17 168.07 54 45.45 11 84 0.954
The disparity fits the narrative of the Leafs this season: Fantastic while Matthews is on the ice and less than stellar without. The Rielly – Hainsey pairing has spent 24% of their 5v5 play with the Leafs‘ best player, and they share one lone assist with Rielly this season.
Puck Rushing Defencemen
One element in need of further study is the impact of the puck rusher’s skillset among NHL blueliners. I’ve touched on this theory before, and I don’t want to bog you down in minutiae here. In summary, defencemen that can make solid outlet and stretch passes may hold more value in the future by eliminating the need for rushers to do the heavy lifting of lugging pucks to centre. Instead, the focus is on supporting the rush, with the freedom to jump in from the defensive zone and even lead if the situation arises.
When the importance of the neutral zone was identified — underlining the importance of working the line to limit controlled zone entries — it reduced a staple play of the old guard: the dump and chase. Defencemen at even strength often skated the puck up to the red line and fired it in, looking for the recovery from the forwards and strategizing around that.
Rielly is a natural puck rusher. He’s often the first to carry out it of the zone and skates the penalty killing forecheckers back to the blueline before the drop pass on the powerplay.
This rushing play to centre and dump-in is less common with teams using speed through the neutral zone to force controlled entries, with exceptions such as line changes or getting behind a stacked blueline to try to limit controlled entries.
Defensive Zone Dump Outs
The aerial flip out of the defensive zone is the new outlet pass. — Gus Katsaros? (@KatsHockey) October 10, 2017
The Pittsburgh Penguins have made an art out of dumping pucks to centre ice and using their speedy forwards to force the play out there.
As far as the Leafs‘ affinity for dumping pucks out of the defensive zone, Anthony Petrielli pointed this out last season and is apparent once again in 2017-18. I think this is also a functional effect of how teams were approaching icing — pucks are placed in the offensive zone but not across the goal line. Slightly altering this strategy, teams don’t dump it all the way down the ice; they dump it to centre, force battles in neutral territory and create races with speedy skilled forwards against pivoting defencemen. The Leafs use the long stretch plays on occasion.
“Rovers” are now more commonplace. Defencemen who can contribute play as hybrid forwards are replacing puck rushers, and rightly so. The fluidity to manoeuvre within system structure and take up temporary positions is paramount in the future game. Traditional rushing skills are replaced by mobility to support the rush and the ability to jump into the play to hit the opposition blueline four players strong (or as a close trailer). All are strong Rielly traits – especially if there’s defensive support, which Hainsey seems to be offering.
The ability to play within the first two or three feet inside the opposition blueline is an important skill and another Rielly quality – once again supported by Hainsey as the defensive conscious. Different individual skills are needed here such as reading emerging plays and being proactive under immediate pressure, keeping the play onside, and pinching from the line to force plays deeper into the zone with proper support. Only elite defenders really take advantage of the rushing skills, and not everyone can be Erik Karlsson.
Rielly has a unique ability to be able to skate the puck up ice, gain the zone, and make a play. In junior with the Moose Jaw Warriors, Rielly wasn’t playing among the most gifted forward group and often had to do it all himself. In the WHL, he was able to move it, gain the zone, and create.
In the NHL, often that play degenerated into a lone-ranger rush. Attempting to do it on his own would fizzle, unlike in developmental leagues. The optics have been mixed for me. Plays that seemed to be good enough for a scoring chance made the case for continued rushes up ice, but most of the time the lone-ranger rushes ended with a thud.
In 2017-18, however, he’s been able to strike a balance between involvement and individualism. He has also been stellar at the top of the offensive zone.
While the defensive game is still a work in progress, Rielly emerging as another offensive threat alongside Jake Gardiner makes the Leafs blueline more dangerous.
I’m glad that some of the fears I harboured about Rielly have been allayed with a great first quarter. The hope is that he can build off of this structure and continue to perform at such a high level should the Leafs coaching staff try some different tactics to alleviate the defensive leaks – and the rash of inconsistent goaltending of late.I will grant that Ron Paul is both intelligent and wise. And yes, it is true, that he is the most effective champion of human liberty in public life and seems to know more about the U.S. Constitution than any other elected official. He does seem to be personally kind and is even patient with the most obnoxious media figures. And it’s clear from his voting record that he is a man of principle and integrity.
Still, I wouldn’t hire Ron Paul…
…to fix my car. He could be a backyard automotive tinkerer for all I know. But there is no public evidence to that effect.
And I sure wouldn’t hire Ron Paul…
…to do eye surgery. He’s not that kind of doctor.
Nor would I hire Ron Paul…
…to structure a leveraged buyout or manage a hostile corporate takeover. He’s not experienced in those things.
But Mitt Romney is.
In fact, for something like that, or to run a private equity firm that does corporate turnarounds, I actually might hire Romney. It seems he has both experience and demonstrable success in that area.
However, that doesn’t mean Romney is qualified to be president.
It is unfortunate that people tend to confuse some of these financial and economic matters, imagining skills in one to be interchangeable with knowledge about the other. But they are not the same thing.
I certainly wouldn’t hire Romney to be president.
Especially now.
With the global debt clock ticking down toward doomsday, the dollar’s world reserve currency status unwinding, and the American dream clearly beginning to fade, we desperately need someone knowledgeable about the economic principles and monetary policies that have gotten us into this mess.
We also need someone who knows how to get us out.
And that wouldn’t include Mitt Romney. With all the demands of amassing his substantial personal fortune, he has clearly been too busy to spend any time learning about the Federal Reserve and its role in our perpetual sequence of bubbles and busts, or studying Hayek to find out why state central economic planning must fail, or learning about money and credit from Mises.
Because if Mitt Romney understood the key economic issues of our time, he wouldn’t have voted for TARP, Bush’s $700 billion bailout bill in 2008.
Did it do anything for the real estate market as promised? No.
Did it do anything to boost employment? No.
Did it do anything to solve our debt crisis? No.
It struck out on all three counts, and years later, we still have depression-era unemployment levels and 45 million Americans on food stamps. Not to mention a national debt that has exploded from $9 trillion when the recession began to $15 trillion today.
Romney asserts the tired and the unverifiable: If the Keynesians’ “pump-more-money-into-the-popped-bubble” crowd hadn’t done what it did, well, then things would really be bad.
That’s a good self-exonerating line that his crowd plays over and over. But I find it amusing that it’s actually they themselves who have done exactly that, and for generations. They’ve blown up one bubble after another. Or, stated differently, they sold us the map that marched us into the swamp to begin with. And then they sold us another bogus $700 billion map that was supposed to lead us out.
Only it didn’t.
One could charitably say that Romney understands none of this. Or cynically, that while TARP did nothing for homeowners in places like Kansas City, or for the unemployed in Modesto, it sure did something for Wall Street.
If Romney understood the Federal Reserve, he might not support its chairmen and its mission. But because Romney hasn’t devoted time to understanding central banking, perhaps it needs to be described to him in a way that a corporate turnaround professional can understand.
For example, what would Romney say about a 100-year-old family-owned company whose outside management had destroyed 96% of the value of the company’s product? Because that’s exactly what the Fed has done to the value of the dollar.
Would any self-respecting equity manager say, as Romney has said of the Fed, that such malfeasance doesn’t deserve his effort or focus? What if a closer look revealed just how much the company’s directors had prospered by their destruction of the family wealth? Would that be worth Romney’s attention?
It might be said that Romney is altogether pleased that the nation’s monetary affairs are arranged to benefit investment bankers at the expense of the people. But if that is too cynical, it could be more charitably said that he just hasn’t had time to master the arcane world of central banking.
That’s fine. But if that’s the case, then Romney simply does not belong in the White House.
The Right Man for the Job
Ron Paul hasn’t spent his time structuring debt/equity ratios, thinking about mezzanine financing, or doing venture capital deals. He has studied central banking and the insights of great economists like Mises. He has described both in advance and in detail the cycle of bubbles and busts the Federal Reserve has plagued us with.
His 2003 description in Congress of the way the housing bubble would develop and the long-term damage it would do the U.S. economy was stunningly exact, a precise step-by-step preview of the calamity just as it unfolded.
The Federal Reserve may not merit Mitt Romney’s attention, but if the Fed had not been worthy of Ron Paul’s attention, we would not have learned the shocking truth about how the Fed had been acting as central bank to the world, secretly loaning trillions of dollars to the most politically powerful banks and companies. Not to mention foreign banks including Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse and even one owned in substantial part by the Central Bank of Libya.
At this point, it is not reasonable to expect that Mitt Romney has any idea what the economic consequences of these Federal Reserve policies will be. Since the mortgage meltdown, the Federal Reserve has blown up its balance sheet, the adjusted monetary base, from $800 billion to more than $2.6 trillion. The cost of this policy is yet to be seen, but for one who understands money and credit like Ron Paul, that cost is entirely foreseeable. The consequences will be severe. It is America’s next big economic calamity.
But Mitt Romney isn’t capable of anticipating the consequences of this policy. He hasn’t applied himself to understanding central banking and monetary theory. He hasn’t studied Mises and Hayek and Rothbard. He’s an equity raiser and corporate turnaround guy.
It’s a different skill set.
Mitt Romney is a capable venture capitalist, but it would really be a serious mistake to hire him to be president. And that’s putting it charitably.
So after a succession of shallow Romneys, following generations of failed Keynesian “spend-our way-to-prosperity” economics, and facing now the bankruptcy of the welfare/warfare state, Ron Paul is the doctor for what ails this country.
And I would definitely hire Ron Paul for president. So let’s elect the right man this time."Autostrada" redirects here. For other uses, see Autostrada (disambiguation)
For the company previously known as Autostrade, see Atlantia (company)
Map of the autostrade of Italy
The Autostrade ( Italian: [awtoˈstraːde]; singular Autostrada [awtoˈstraːda]) are roads forming the Italian national system of motorways. The total length of the system is about 6,758 kilometres (4,199 mi).[1] In North and Central Italy, the Autostrade mainly consists of tollways, with the biggest portion in concession to the Atlantia group (via Autostrade per l'Italia [it]) which operates some 3,408 km. Other operators include ASTM, ATP, and Autostrade Lombarde in the north-west; Autostrada del Brennero, A4 Holding, Concessioni Autostradali Venete, and Autovie Venete in the north-east; Strada dei Parchi, SALT, SAT, and Autocisa in the center; and CAS in the south all under the supervision of the state-owned ANAS.[citation needed]
History [ edit ]
Italy became the first country to inaugurate motorways reserved for motor vehicles with A1.[citation needed] The Milano-Laghi motorway (connecting Milan to Varese) was devised by Piero Puricelli, a civil engineer and entrepreneur. He received the first authorization to build a public-utility fast road in 1921, and completed the construction (one lane each direction) between 1924 and 1926. By the end of the 1930s, over 400 kilometers of multi- and dual-single-lane motorways were constructed throughout Italy, linking cities and rural towns.
Speed [ edit ]
Autostrada sign
Italy's autostrade have a standard speed limit of 130 km/h (81 mph) for cars. Limits for other vehicles (or during foul weather and/or low visibility) are lower. Legal provisions allow operators to set the limit to 150 km/h (93 mph) on their concessions on a voluntary basis if the following conditions are met: three lanes in each direction and a working SICVE, or Safety Tutor, speed-camera system that measure the average speed. In 2016, no road was utilizing this possibility.
The first speed limit, to 120 km/h (75 mph), was enacted in November 1973 as a result of the 1973 oil crisis.[2] In October 1977, a graduated system was introduced: cars of above 1,300 cc (79 cu in) had a 140 km/h (87 mph) speed limit, cars of 900-1299 cc had a limit of 130 km/h (81 mph), those of 600-899 cc could drive at 110 km/h (68 mph), and those of 599 cc (36.6 cu in) or less had a maximum speed of 90 km/h (56 mph).[2] In July 1988 a blanket speed limit of 110 km/h (68 mph) was imposed on all cars above 600 cc (the lower limit was kept for smaller cars) by the short lived PSDI government. In September 1989 this was increased to 130 km/h (81 mph) for cars above 1,100 cc (67 cu in) and 110 km/h (68 mph) for smaller ones.[3]
List of current Autostrade [ edit ]
A4 Turin - Trieste
Until 1990, the designation A1 referred only to the Milan-Rome section of the current A1; the Rome-Naples section was known as A2. After a link was built bypassing Rome, the designation A2 was withdrawn and now the A1 designation refers to the whole route. The residual connections to the "Grande Raccordo Anulare" (Great Ring Road, around Rome) were designated as raccordi (see later). Until 1973, the designation A17 referred to the current A16, and the section Canosa-Bari of the current A14.
List of tangenziali (bypass roads around big cities) [ edit ]
This is a list of tangenziali classified as autostrada.
A50 Tangenziale Ovest di Milano (west bypass road, Milan)
Tangenziale Ovest di Milano (west bypass road, Milan) A51 Tangenziale Est di Milano (east bypass road, Milan)
Tangenziale Est di Milano (east bypass road, Milan) A52 Tangenziale Nord di Milano (north bypass road, Milan)
Tangenziale Nord di Milano (north bypass road, Milan) A54 Tangenziale di Pavia
Tangenziale di Pavia A55 Tangenziale Nord di Torino e Tangenziale Sud di Torino (north and south bypass roads, Turin)
Tangenziale Nord di Torino e Tangenziale Sud di Torino (north and south bypass roads, Turin) A56 Tangenziale di Napoli
Tangenziale di Napoli A57 Tangenziale di Venezia
Tangenziale di Venezia A58 Tangenziale Est Esterna di Milano (outer east bypass road, Milan)
Tangenziale Est Esterna di Milano (outer east bypass road, Milan) A59 Tangenziale di Como
Tangenziale di Como A60 Tangenziale di Varese
Tangenziale di Varese A90 Grande Raccordo Anulare di Roma (Great Ring Road of Rome)
Grande Raccordo Anulare di Roma (Great Ring Road of Rome) RA1 Tangenziale di Bologna
Tangenziale di Bologna RA15 Tangenziale di Catania (Catania's Ring Road West)
List of bretelle and raccordi autostradali [ edit ]
Some autostrade are called bretelle, diramazioni or raccordi because they are short and have few exits.
Bretelle, diramazioni or raccordi are generally connections between two motorways, or connections between motorways and important cities without a motorway.
They have the same number (sometimes with the suffix dir) as one of the two autostrade linked, a combination of the numbers of the two autostrade linked, or the number of the main autostrada.
Trafori (T) [ edit ]
Important alpine tunnels ((in Italian) trafori) are identified by the capital letter "T" followed by a single digit number. Currently there are only three T-classified tunnels: Mont Blanc Tunnel (T1), Great St Bernard Tunnel (T2) and Frejus Road Tunnel (T4). Tunnels that cross the border between Italy and France (T1, T4) or Switzerland (T2), are treated as motorways (green signage, access control, and so on), although they are not proper motorways. The code T3 was once assigned to the Bargagli-Ferriere Tunnel in Ligurian Appennines before it was reclassified as SP 226.
Raccordi autostradali (RA) [ edit ]
RA stands for Raccordo autostradale (translated as "motorway connection"), a relatively short spur route that connects an autostrada to a nearby city or tourist resort not directly served by the motorway. These spurs are owned and managed by ANAS (with some exceptions, such as the RA7 that became A53 when assigned to a private company for maintenance). Some spurs are toll-free motorways (type-A), but most are type-B or type-C roads. All RA have separate carriageways with two lanes in each direction. Generally, they do not have an emergency lane.
Strade extraurbane principali [ edit ]
Strada extraurbana principale sign sign
Type B highway (or strada extraurbana principale), commonly but unofficially known as superstrada (Italian equivalent for expressway), is a divided highway with at least two lanes in each direction, paved shoulder on the right, no cross-traffic and no at-grade intersections. Access restrictions on such highways are exactly the same as autostrade. Signage at the beginning and the end of the highways is the same, except the background color is blue instead of green. The general speed limit on strade extraurbane principali is 110 km/h. Strade extraurbane principali are not tolled. All strade extraurbane principali are owned and managed by ANAS, and directly controlled by the Italian government or by the regions.
See also [ edit ]Canvas launches today for 4,000 or so lucky souls.
Seven year old 4chan, created by now-23 year old Christopher Poole, continues to delight and enrage the Internet. Major Internet memes were either created or spread on 4chan, as were more denial of service attacks than we can count. Twelve million or so people a month visit the site, and at any given moment there are 60,000 – 70,000 people on 4chan.
4chan’s success, says Poole, is based on three things. Real time collaboration as visitors riff back and forth about posted items, often pictures. A true shared experience as an item pops up on 4chan and then eventually falls off the board (there are no archives). And fluid identity – to add content on 4Chan all you have to do is write something, upload a file and complete a captcha. There are no user accounts.
But 4chan isn’t Poole’s ultimate goal. He’s taken what works there, changed other things, and created something wholly new – Canvas.
We’ve known about the startup since early last year when news leaked out about a small funding round with top tier investors. but until now very few people have been able to actually see the site. The team of four – including Poole – have been hard at work and keeping quiet.
Today, though, a few thousand people who requested beta invitations over the last several months will get access to the site. More people will be added in batches over time, and everyone who originally requested an account will eventually be given an invite to bring in a friend.
So what’s Canvas? Like 4chan it’s a place for people to post content and start a discussion. It has distinct similarities to 4chan – although content is archived, and people create accounts. But users stay totally anonymous. Their profile page is nothing more than a gathering of the various content they’ve added to the site.
Canvas is starting just with images. Like Dailybooth users upload a picture and a discussion starts. Dailybooth, though is mostly about people uploading pictures of themselves. Lots and lots and lots of pictures of themselves. On Canvas, there’s a lot of photoshopping going on, and some of it is highly entertaining.
Take the most popular discussion right now, showing a picture of a very chubby baby. Lots and lots of photoshopped variations have been added.
More casual viewers can add their two cents by dragging and dropping visual icons – smiley faces, LOL, WTF, etc, to the content. This creates an easy way to gather a lot of metadata about an image, and help push it up or down on the popular list.
Poole says they’ll soon add other types of content as well – video, audio, rich text. “This is just the kernel of the long term vision, Canvas is all about collaboration” he says. “Canvas is all about discovery, sharing and play.”
Canvas is a separate entity from 4chan, with no connection other than Poole. But my guess is more than a few of the 4chan crowd may head over to Canvas to take a gander.Not to be confused with X Videos (film)
XVideos is a pornographic video sharing and viewing website. Since December 2018, it is the most visited pornographic website according to the Alexa analytics tool.[4] The website is registered to the Czech company, WGCZ Holding.[1][5] As of 24 October 2018, it was the 29th most visited website in the world.[3]
In 2012, it was estimated that the site streams over a terabyte per second, which was the equivalent of one-fifteenth of the network bandwidth available from London to New York.[6]
WGCZ Holding also run the Bang Bros network of websites and are the current owners of the Penthouse magazine and its related assets.[7][8]
History
XVideos serves as a pornographic media aggregator, a type of website which gives access to adult content in a similar manner as YouTube does for general content.[9][10] Video clips from professional videos are mixed with amateur and other types of content.[9][10] By 2012, XVideos was the largest Porn website in the world, with over 100 billion page views per month.[11] Fabian Thylmann, the owner of MindGeek, attempted to purchase XVideos in 2012 in order to create a monopoly of pornographic tube sites. The French owner of XVideos turned down a reported offer of more than $120 million by saying, "Sorry, I have to go and play Diablo II."[10] In 2014, XVideos controversially attempted to force content providers to either pledge to renounce the right to delete videos from their accounts or to shut down their accounts immediately.[12]
Web traffic and ranking
As of December 2018, XVideos has been counted as the 10th most popular website in the world by SimilarWeb in overall category and 1st in the adult category.[13][14]
Censorship
India
In 2015, the company was targeted by the Indian government on a list of 857 'pornographic' websites, which also included non-pornographic websites such as CollegeHumor.[15][16] In 2018, major internet service providers blocked access to XVideos and other porn sites.[17]
Malaysia
In 2015, the Malaysian government banned XVideos for violating the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, which bans "obscene content" from being digitally distributed.[18]
Philippines
On January 14, 2017, President Rodrigo Duterte blocked XVideos as a part of Republic Act 9775 or the Anti-Child Pornography Law. [19]
Venezuela
On June 14, 2018, the telecommunications and internet services company CANTV blocked access to the website without giving any statement in this regard.[20]
See alsoThe misery index, a crude economic measure created by Arthur Orkum, sums a country's unemployment and inflation rates to assess conditions on the ground (the higher the number, the more miserable a country is). The reasoning: most citizens understand the pain of a high jobless rate and the soaring price of goods.
Business Insider totaled the figures for 197 countries and territories — from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe — to compile the 2013 Misery Index.
Note: Results are based on CIA World Factbook data, which estimates figures for countries and territories that do not have reliable local reporting agencies. The CIA World Factbook was last updated on February 11, 2013.
25. Mali
Misery index score: 36.5
CPI inflation: 6.5%
Unemployment: 30%
One of the poorest countries in the world, Mali depends on gold mining and agricultural exports for revenue, which is why the country's fiscal status depends on gold and food prices. About 10% of the population is nomadic and about 80 percent of the working labor force is engaged in farming and fishing.
24. Mauritania
Misery index score: 37
CPI inflation: 7%
Unemployment: 30%
Half the population is still dependent on agriculture and livestock to earn a living, and poverty is rampant. The local economy depends heavily on commodities exports, mostly of iron ore. These exports are pretty much the only reason why Mauritianian economy grew 5 percent last year.
23. Iran
Misery index score: 39.1
CPI inflation: 23.6%
Unemployment: 15.5%
Price controls, subsidies, and other rigidities under mine private sector growth, and are proving to be a real drag on the economy, as is a rapidly depreciating currency. Which is why corruption is rampant, and illegal business activities abound. The economy is also heavily dependent on oil, and has suffered from international sanctions. Unemployment persists at double digit levels.
22. Maldives
Misery index score: 40.8
CPI inflation: 12.8%
Unemployment: 28%
It's a lovely place to vacation at, and a good thing too—tourism accounts for 30% of Maldives' GDP and more than 60 percent of foreign exchange receipts. But falling tourist arrivals and heavy government spending have taken a toll on the local economy, cause high inflation and an unemployment rate that's nearly double since 2010.
21. Gaza Strip
Misery index score: 43.5
CPI inflation: 3.5%
Unemployment: 40%
Ever since Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007, Israeli-imposed border closures have led to a deterioration of an already weak economy—more unemployment, elevated poverty rates and a sharp contraction of the private sector which relied primarily on exports.
20. Bosnia and Herzegovina
Misery index score: 45.5
CPI inflation: 2.2%
Unemployment: 43.3%
Inter-ethnic warfare between 1992 and 1995 caused unemployment to soar and production to plummet by 80 percent, and the country hasn't quite recovered ever since. The local currency is pegged to the euro, which keeps inflation in check. In 2011, a parliamentary deadlock left Bosnia without a state-level government for over a year, which caused the IMF to stop disbursing aid.
19. Yemen
Misery index score: 46.4
CPI inflation: 11.4%
Unemployment: 35%
Heavily dependent of declining oil resources, 25 percent of the country's GDP comes from petroleum. Yemeni GDP fell by more than 10 percent in 2011, but this decline slowed to 1.9 percent in 2012. The government is trying to diversify the economy, but has to deal with declining water resources, high unemployment, and a high population growth rate.
18. Haiti
Misery index score: 46.5
CPI inflation: 5.9%
Unemployment: 40.6%
Even before the earthquake in 2010, 80 percent of the Haitian population lived under the poverty line, and 54 percent in abject poverty, and large section of the population has poor access to education. The country is still recovering from the affects of the earthquake, and has to deal with rampant corruption.
17. Swaziland
Misery index score: 48.4
CPI inflation: 8.4%
Unemployment: 40%
Swaziland is heavily dependent on South Africa—that were 60 percent of its exports go, and 90 percent of its imports come from. The global economic crisis hit Swaziland exports hard, and declining revenue has pushed the country into fiscal crisis. The local currency is pegged to the South African rand, so inflation isn't too bad, but the country suffers from high unemployment.
16. Afghanistan
Misery index score: 48.8
CPI inflation: 13.8%
Unemployment: 35%
Afghanistan is still recovering from decade of conflict and still has to deal with high levels of corruption, weak government capacity, and poor public infrastructure. Foreign aid, agriculture and a growing service sector industry are helping the country recover, but it still suffers from high inflation and unemployment.
15. Marshall Islands
Misery index score: 48.9
CPI inflation: 12.9%
Unemployment: 36%
The best thing the local economy has going for is assistance from the U.S. government. Tourism is its best hope for economic growth, but currently employs only 10 percent of the labor force. Government downsizing, drought, a drop in construction, the decline in tourism, and less income from the renewal of fishing vessel licenses have been a drag on the economy.
14. Senegal
Misery index score: 49.5
CPI inflation: 1.5%
Unemployment: 48%
Despite receiving a lot of foreign aid, Senegal suffers from unreliable power supply, which has led to public protests and is partly the cause of high unemployment.
13. Kenya
Misery index score: 50.1
CPI inflation: 10.1%
Unemployment: 40%
Corruption and reliance on a few specific primary goods whose prices have remained low have been holding Kenya's economy back. Unemployment has historically been very high, and remains so. However, oil was discovered in Kenya in March 2012, which might help revive its sagging economy.
12. Lesotho
Misery index score: 51.1
CPI inflation: 6.1%
Unemployment: 45%
Lesotho has the third highest GINI coefficient in the world, which means that income inequality is particularly high here. Growth is expected to increase due to major infrastructure projects, but weak manufacturing and agriculture sectors are a drag on the economy. Rampant unemployment is also a big problem.
11. Sudan
Misery index score: 51.5
CPI inflation: 31.5%
Unemployment: 20%
The secession of South Sudan in July 2011, the region of the country that had been responsible for about three-fourths of the former-Sudan's oil production, was a huge blow to Sudan's economy. The country is currently trying to find new ways to generate revenue, not very successfully. Sudan introduced a new currency, called the Sudanese pound, but the value of the currency has been falling since its introduction. Rising inflation, which hit 47 percent in November on an annualized basis, is a huge problem.
Story continuesPeople who are lonely tend to feel increasingly lonelier. Marcelo Del Pozo/Reuters
Social isolation kills, and in the process it makes it harder to reach out to others. A psychologist explains how to stop the feedback loop.
“I’m clearly a textbook case of the silent majority of middle-aged men who won’t admit they’re starved for friendship, even if all signs point to the contrary,” wrote Billy Baker in his recent exploration of male loneliness in The Boston Globe. Perhaps one reason the piece made so many internet rounds is just how many people could relate: Last year Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that Americans are “facing an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.” Though “I’m going to die alone” is the common grumble among single people, scientifically, it’s more like, “I’m going to die if I’m alone.” A lack of social connections can spark inflammation and changes in the immune system, so lonely people are far more likely to die prematurely. Loneliness is more dangerous than obesity, and it’s about as deadly as smoking. The threat is considered so serious that England has created an entire “Campaign to End Loneliness.”
But in a cruel twist, the loneliest among us are set up to get lonelier still. People with few social connections experience brain changes that cause them to be more likely to view human faces as threatening, making it harder for them to bond with others. To learn more about this conundrum, and how to resolve it, I recently spoke with John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago who wrote a book on loneliness and has researched the phenomenon extensively. An edited transcript of our conversation follows. Are people getting lonelier, and if so, why? When you look across studies, you get levels anywhere from 25 to 48 percent [of people reporting being lonely]. I’ve seen some out of London that suggest 50 percent of Londoners feel lonely, but that’s not a longitudinal sample, so take that with a grain of salt. The longest subsample is the Health and Retirement Study in the United States. That’s a study the federal government has been running for decades now, and those are the data I base our own estimates on. When we look at that survey, it looks like loneliness is around is around 27, 28 percent. Our best estimates based on that means it’s increased anywhere on the order of 3 to 7 percent over the last 20 years. That’s not huge, but is there an explanation for that uptick? Is that just that people are getting older, and older people tend to live alone? First of all, let me qualify something. Living alone, being alone, and the size of your social network is only weakly related. Think about patients in hospitals: They aren’t alone, they have all the support they could ask for, but they tend to feel very lonely. There’s a difference between being alone and feeling alone. People in marriages tend to feel less lonely than people not in marriages. However people in marriages can feel extraordinarily alone when they feel alienated from their spouse and family. They’re so weakly correlated, we need to take objective isolation and perceived isolation and separate those two.
In animals, it’s not separating a monkey from any companion, it’s separating them from a preferred companion. When we do that, we see the same effects in those monkeys that we see in humans; they feel lonely. So why the slight uptick in loneliness?
We know that there’s a number of cultural factors and environmental factors. For instance, the internet has increased connectivity. But if you ever find yourself [looking at] your texts and emails at an event with your family, you may realize that those digital connections don’t mean that you feel more connected. If you use those [digital] connections as a way station—kids tend to do this; they use Facebook so that they can then meet
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’re in one of the most perilous moments in history right now.” (See Andy Zee Video Below) Refuse Fascism held back on its AntiFa, ISIS, Revolutionary Communist party players. screaming Snowflakes and masked anarchists on the first day of their advertised massive demonstrations if only to make it appear as the Fake News of outlets who had warned the masses of their intentions as stated in the NYT full page ad. “What was billed as a massive demonstration of resistance to fascism and the tyranny of the Trump administration, Antifa managed to gather 300 people in Times Square. In Portland, Oregon, the ‘crowd’ was not numbered in the thousands or even the hundreds, but in the dozens. (Ray DiLorenzo, Nov. 5, 2017) Facebook event for #Nov4itBegins had 1K going, 5K maybe. So far a lot of unclaimed signs, Bob Avakian lit. Spox: "Just the first day" pic.twitter.com/cYK97Flvdh — Michael E. Hayden (@MichaelEHayden) November 4, 2017
As the hours of Saturday dwindled by there were scant MSM stories about what Refuse Fascism was up to coming from a news hold still dominated by the many sexual victims of Horrid Harvey Weinstein. By bedtime, some citizens started to think that Refuse Fascism must have had some kind of pre-arranged agreement with the MSM for a complete blackout. When stories of the protest that never really happened started to break, MSM news was all about about how the rightwing media had hyped the protest from thin air: “Far-right conspiracies had morphed the event into a fantasy world of unrealistic expectations. Antifa was going to start a civil war. Antifa-bred supersoldiers were going to behead white people in town squares across the country. These stories were pushed hard by far-right outlets like Alex Jones’ Info Wars and Gateway Pundit, feeding an engine of clickbait to build a mind-blowing but utterly meaningless news story almost entirely out of thin air.” (News Week, Nov. 4, 2017) Not to be outdone came Britain’s Daily Mail, bringing up the rear by pointing the finger of blame at Fox News: “Doomsday scenarios of mass violence and chaos, which were promoted by right-wing media outlets like Fox News, did not come to pass, according to authorities. “In Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, hundreds of protesters took to the streets to denounce President Donald Trump and his administration.”
Daily News, it would seem, like millions of others, does not bother reading Page 5 NYT ads. But the chief reason why Day One of the Refuse Fascism protest was a big fat fail, not mentioned by the MSM, was because President Donald Trump was not anywhere on American soil hosting one of his rallies to draw thousands. In other words because their protest was planned months ago, by the time the date hit, they no longer had any focus. The President had skipped town for his official Far East official Asian visit. In short, Trump completely and deftly outfoxed screaming, protesting masked anarchists. Anarchists will now have something to really scream about when they stage their upcoming ‘Scream at the Sky’ event.
But hoping that AntiFa et al have finally lost their drawing power and will go quietly into the night holds about as much promise as the Black Plague disappearing in Madagascar where people keep dancing with corpses. As ‘Jack’ may have unwittingly warned us in a Newsweek interview, Refuse Fascism and Antifa are not giving up and will be back: “Jack, a 25-year-old spokesperson for Refuse Fascism, who asked not to use his last name, told Newsweek that he wasn’t concerned by the attendance of the event, and that it was just the beginning of removing Trump from office. “We always want more people,” Jack said. “This is just the first day.” Though you will get no warning from the MSM, count on the masked anarchists in a revved-up protest coming soon to a town near you.
#NoFascistUSA Emergency Meeting, Andy Zee
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Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years’ experience in the print media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared on Rush Limbaugh, Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com.
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Ken Allard Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 12, 2017
Burbank, Calif. — Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Search and Rescue teams were called to the new IKEA store in Burbank, Calif. early Sunday morning in response to a call of a missing married couple.
After an exhausting search lasting over eight hours, Frank Vandenberg and his wife Joanna were found in the far reaches of the 500,000-square-foot store.
“We’re just glad that we were able to locate them in time,” said Capt. Dave Branding, a 24-year-veteran of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, who coordinated the search-and-rescue effort on Sunday. “Many times, in situations like the one we experienced today, we can’t get to them — IKEA is a large facility, and it’s definitely a situation that overwhelms even the most thorough of rescue efforts.”
LA County Search and Rescue members being airlifted on scene Sunday morning.
Frank and Joanna Vandenberg were reported missing early Sunday morning once their daughter Kiara realized that her parents had not yet returned from the grand opening of the massive new IKEA branch — the largest in the nation.
“I was worried,” said Kiara, “it’s not like my parents to be super late like that. Sometimes they spend a few hours at Fry’s [Electronics] or the local dive bar, but for them to leave me home-alone like that for a few days… I assumed something was up.”
The married couple attended the opening of the IKEA facility Wednesday morning, wishing to be one of the first 26 customers to explore the uncharted store grounds in hopes of winning a free Landskrona sofa.
Their plans quickly went south after they became disoriented with the layout of the store.
“I didn’t bring my compass,” stated Frank, “I’m a long-time veteran of large department stores, but this was something else.”
The two-story Burbank IKEA facility spans 500,000 square feet, which includes over 1,700 parking spaces and a massive, open-plan 600 seat restaurant on the second floor.
With the husband Frank refusing to stop and ask for directions, the couple was forced to spend the night in one of the 50 individual room pods, which come fully furnished for browsing customers.
“We had to nestle away in one of the BRUSALI bedroom pods,” said Joanna, “I mean, I’m not one to complain usually, but really? The beige colored nightstand looked completely out of place with the light-blue curtains. I couldn’t even get any sleep that night.”
The duo went without food and water throughout the entire ordeal, as the lines encompassing the food court extended for hundreds of people, sometimes taking up to 45 minutes or more for them to even move within viewing distance of the menu.
Los Angeles County Search and Rescue members finally found the malnourished couple huddled inside one of the UNDREDAL series bedroom pods, near the rear of the store. The couple cited the “really, really comfortable LATRAND latex mattress” as well as the “incredible carpeting” as reasoning for staying put inside the pod.
“Frank and Joanna are safe,” stated Capt. Dave Branding, “they were taken to Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center as a precaution, but they’re OK.”
While addressing reporters on the details of the case, Capt. Branding issued some words of wisdom for future IKEA costumers. “Please, make sure to bring extra water and foods items,” stated Branding, “if you can, please bring a personal locator beacon or some form of GPS tracking system to aid in potential rescue efforts. This store is enormous.”Learn the Perl/Tk module, Part 3
Advanced widgets
Content series: This content is part # of # in the series: Learn the Perl/Tk module, Part 3 Stay tuned for additional content in this series. This content is part of the series: Learn the Perl/Tk module, Part 3 Stay tuned for additional content in this series.
Introduction
The Perl language is commonly used by IBM® AIX® operating system administrators and developers and can be found on nearly every successful Web site and most AIX systems. Although Perl scripts are powerful, they produce a Web interface that lacks a graphical front end and forces the user to type information instead of using the mouse, which can be an unsatisfying experience for the customer. This problem has been resolved with the introduction of the Tk module in Perl. An administrator or developer can quickly breathe new life into their Perl script with the Tk module and satisfy their customer's desire for an X11 product.
Widgets
As discussed in Part 1 of this series of articles, a widget can be defined as a graphical object that performs a specific function. Any graphical object in the Perl/Tk module can be considered a widget. When you think of a GUI application, the buttons, text, frames, and scrollbars are all widgets. This article, the third part of the article series, discusses such widgets as DirTree, LabEntry, LabFrame, and Table.
DirTree
A major visual component to programming is how to handle searching files and directories. One solution to this dilemma is using the DirTree widget.
Creating a directory listing is simple with the Perl/Tk module:
#!/usr/bin/perl –w #create a directory listing with DirTree use Tk; use strict; use Tk::DirTree; use Cwd; my $mw = MainWindow->new; $mw->geometry("300x400"); $mw->title("DirTree Example"); my $CWD = Cwd::cwd(); my $DIR_TREE = $mw->Scrolled('DirTree', -scrollbars => "osoe", -width => 30, -height => 25, -exportselection => 1, -browsecmd => sub {$CWD = shift}, -command => \&show_cwd)->pack(-fill => "both", -expand => 1); $DIR_TREE->chdir($CWD); my $button_frame = $mw->Frame()->pack(-side => "bottom"); $button_frame->Button(-text => "Ok", -command => \&show_cwd)->pack(-side => "left"); $button_frame->Button(-text => "Exit", -command => sub{exit})->pack(-side => "left"); sub show_cwd { $mw->messageBox(-message => "Directory Selected: $CWD", -type => "ok"); } MainLoop;
Executing this script will generate the GUI application shown in Figures 1 and 2:
Figure 1. An example of the DirTree widget
Figure 2. Displaying the selected directory
Let's break down the script.
To review what was discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, the first section of the code will be only discussed once, unless anything has changed in the following examples. The first part (/usr/bin/perl) defines the location where the Perl executable resides on the computer and instructs the computer to use this copy of the Perl executable to execute the file multiple_windows_at_once-demo.pl:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
The second part of this line (-w) is a valuable tool in Perl. It enables warnings when executing the script, informing the end user of any possible errors found.
Comments and text that shouldn't be evaluated at execution are preceded with an octothorp (#):
#create a directory listing with DirTree
In order for a Perl script to use the Tk module, it must be included; hence use Tk. Adding the use strict statement to a Perl script also helps find any possible typos or logic errors:
use Tk; use strict;
To use the DirTree widget, you must include it into the Perl script, because it isn't a general widget in the base Perl modules. The second inclusion is Cwd. Using this, the script can find and store the CWD, or current working directory:
use Tk::DirTree; use Cwd;
To create the primary window of the application, you use MainWindow and assign it to $mw. $mw acts as the parent to all other widgets created (as discussed further in this article):
my $mw = MainWindow->new;
Set the main window size to 300x400, and title the main window DirTree Example:
$mw->geometry("300x400"); $mw->title("DirTree Example");
Find the CWD, and store it in a variable named $CWD :
my $CWD = Cwd::cwd();
Create a scrollable directory tree. The browsecmd option resets $CWD every time the end user selects a directory. If the end user double-clicks or presses Enter on a directory, the command option executes the subroutine show_cmd :
my $DIR_TREE = $mw->Scrolled('DirTree', -scrollbars => "osoe", -width => 30, -height => 25, -exportselection => 1, -browsecmd => sub {$CWD = shift}, -command => \&show_cwd)->pack(-fill => "both", -expand => 1);
Refresh the directory tree showing the user's CWD:
$DIR_TREE->chdir($CWD);
Create a frame, and place two buttons inside it. The first button, labeled "OK," executes the subroutine show_cmd ; the second button exits the script:
my $button_frame = $mw->Frame()->pack(-side => "bottom"); $button_frame->Button(-text => "Ok", -command => \&show_cwd)->pack(-side => "left"); $button_frame->Button(-text => "Exit", -command => sub{exit})->pack(-side => "left");
When the subroutine show_cmd is executed, a messageBox widget is displayed, showing the user his CWD:
sub show_cwd { $mw->messageBox(-message => "Directory Selected: $CWD", -type => "ok"); }
Prior to executing MainLoop, everything in the script is read, defined, and prepared to execute. Then, when MainLoop is called, all functions and data read prior are executed, and the GUI is displayed:
MainLoop;
LabEntry
Many GUI applications require manual input from the end user. One method of displaying instructions and requesting input uses the Label and Entry widgets (discussed in Part 1 of this series). Another method uses the LabEntry widget. LabEntry combines the Label, Entry, and Frame widgets into one easy-to-use widget:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use Tk; use Tk::LabEntry; use strict; my $mw = MainWindow->new; $mw->geometry("300x100"); $mw->title("LabEntry Example"); my $name = ""; $mw->LabEntry(-label => "Enter your name: ", -labelPack => [ -side => "left" ], -textvariable => \$name)->pack(); my $button_frame = $mw->Frame()->pack(-side => "bottom"); $button_frame->Button(-text => "Ok", -command => \&show_greeting)->pack(-side => "left"); $button_frame->Button(-text => "Exit", -command => sub{exit})->pack(-side => "left"); sub show_greeting { my $msg = "Who are you?"; if ($name ne "") { $msg = "Nice to meet you $name!"; } $mw->messageBox(-message => "$msg
", -type => "ok"); } MainLoop;
Executing this script generates the GUI application shown in Figures 3 and 4.
Figure 3. An example of the LabEntry widget
Figure 4. Results of the LabEntry widget
Let's break down the script.
Like the previous example with DirTree, the LabEntry widget needs to be included. If you don't include the widget, the Perl script doesn't know how to interrupt or execute LabEntry widgets:
use Tk::LabEntry;
Define a variable named $name, and set its value to NULL, or nothing. After the variable has been defined, create the LabEntry widget with the label Enter your name:, pack the label left of the entry, and assign the value entered to the variable $name :
my $name = ""; $mw->LabEntry(-label => "Enter your name: ", -labelPack => [ -side => "left" ], -textvariable => \$name)->pack();
Create a frame, and include two Button widgets inside it. The first button, labeled "OK," executes the subroutine show_greeting ; the second exits the script:
my $button_frame = $mw->Frame()->pack(-side => "bottom"); $button_frame->Button(-text => "Ok", -command => \&show_greeting)->pack(-side => "left"); $button_frame->Button(-text => "Exit", -command => sub{exit})->pack(-side => "left");
When the OK button is clicked, the subroutine show_greeting is executed. The variable $msg is defined with the value "Who are you?" The variable is defined with this value in case the end user forgets to enter his name in the LabEntry. If the user forgets, the variable $name is still set to NULL. If the user enters a name, the value "Nice to meet you $name!" will be set to $msg, which can be seen in the next line of code. Finally, a messageBox widget is displayed to the user, either greeting him or letting him know the program has no idea who he is:
sub show_greeting { my $msg = "Who are you?"; if ($name ne "") { $msg = "Nice to meet you $name!"; } $mw->messageBox(-message => "$msg
", -type => "ok"); }
LabFrame
The Frame widget has been used throughout this series of articles. Frames are used to organize other widgets, making the application look cleaner and more structured. A handy widget to accompany a frame is the LabFrame. Using the LabFrame widget, you can place labels on or by the frame with little work:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use Tk; use Tk::LabFrame; use strict; my $mw = MainWindow->new; $mw->geometry("300x200"); $mw->title("LabFrame Example"); my $labeled_frame1 = $mw->LabFrame(-label => "Caption Across Top of Frame", -labelside => "acrosstop")->pack(); my $labeled_frame2 = $mw->LabFrame(-label => "Caption Below Frame", -labelside => "bottom")->pack(-fill => "x"); $labeled_frame1->Label(-text => "Inside Frame #1")->pack(); $labeled_frame2->Label(-text => "Inside Frame #2")->pack(); my $button_frame = $mw->Frame()->pack(-side => "bottom"); $button_frame->Button(-text => "Exit", -command => sub{exit})->pack(); MainLoop;
Executing this script generates the GUI application shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. An example of the LabFrame widget
Let's break down the script.
The LabFrame widget is no different from the previous widget examples in this article and needs to be included:
use Tk::LabFrame;
Create a frame, and label it Caption Across Top of Frame. To place the caption on the top of the frame as the caption suggests, you must configure the LabFrame widget with the value "acrosstop" for the option labelside :
my $labeled_frame1 = $mw->LabFrame(-label => "Caption Across Top of Frame", -labelside => "acrosstop")->pack();
Create a second LabFrame widget, but instead of running the caption along the top of the frame, place the label Caption Below Frame below the frame with the option labelside set to "bottom":
my $labeled_frame2 = $mw->LabFrame(-label => "Caption Below Frame", -labelside => "bottom")->pack(-fill => "x");
To demonstrate widgets inside a LabFrame, create two Label widgets by their parent LabFrame widgets:
$labeled_frame1->Label(-text => "Inside Frame #1")->pack(); $labeled_frame2->Label(-text => "Inside Frame #2")->pack();
Table
The Table widget is a powerful addition to a Perl script. This widget creates a two-dimensional table of widgets. Instead of showing a long listing of data that isn't organized, you can use a table:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use Tk; use Tk::Table; use strict; my $mw = MainWindow->new; $mw->geometry("475x125"); $mw->resizable(0,0); $mw->title("Table Example"); my $table_frame = $mw->Frame()->pack(); my $table = $table_frame->Table(-columns => 8, -rows => 4, -fixedrows => 1, -scrollbars => 'oe', -relief => 'raised'); foreach my $col (1.. 8) { my $tmp_label = $table->Label(-text => "COL ". $col, -width => 8, -relief =>'raised'); $table->put(0, $col, $tmp_label); } foreach my $row (1.. 8) { foreach my $col (1.. 8) { my $tmp_label = $table->Label(-text => $row. ",". $col, -padx => 2, -anchor => 'w', -background => 'white', -relief => "groove"); $table->put($row, $col, $tmp_label); } } $table->pack(); my $button_frame = $mw->Frame( -borderwidth => 4 )->pack(); $button_frame->Button(-text => "Exit", -command => sub {exit})->pack(); MainLoop;
Executing this script generates the GUI application shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. An example of the Table widget
Let's break down the script.
You guessed it! Another new widget must be included, for Perl to know how to handle the Table widget:
use Tk::Table;
In the previous examples, the end user could resize the applications. This script prohibits the user from resizing the window:
$mw->resizable(0,0);
Create a frame to contain the new table. Then, create the Table widget, which displays eight columns and four rows:
my $table_frame = $mw->Frame()->pack(); my $table = $table_frame->Table(-columns => 8, -rows => 4, -fixedrows => 1, -scrollbars => 'oe', -relief => 'raised');
To place data in the table, you use the put operation. Looping through eight times, the text "COL" is added to the number of the column and placed in the first (0th) row of the table:
foreach my $col (1.. 8) { my $tmp_label = $table->Label(-text => "COL ". $col, -width => 8, -relief =>'raised'); $table->put(0, $col, $tmp_label); }
Now that the header has been created, the coordinates are placed in the respective cell. Again, using the put operation, loop through each row and each column and assign the cell's text. Then, pack the finalized table:
foreach my $row (1.. 8) { foreach my $col (1.. 8) { my $tmp_label = $table->Label(-text => $row. ",". $col, -padx => 2, -anchor => 'w', -background => 'white', -relief => "groove"); $table->put($row, $col, $tmp_label); } } $table->pack();
Canvas
The Canvas widget is a useful drawing tool in the Perl/Tk module. Using this widget, a user can draw and manipulate different shapes and objects such as lines, ovals, rectangles, and polygons:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use Tk; use strict; my $mw = MainWindow->new; $mw->geometry("400x400"); $mw->title("Canvas Example"); my $canvas = $mw->Canvas(-relief => "sunken", -background => "blue"); $canvas->createLine(2, 3, 350, 100, -width => 10, -fill => "black"); $canvas->createLine(120, 220, 450, 200, -fill => "red"); $canvas->createOval(30, 80, 100, 150, -fill => "yellow"); $canvas->createRectangle(50, 20, 100, 50, -fill => "cyan"); $canvas->createArc(40, 40, 200, 200, -fill => "green"); $canvas->createPolygon(350, 120, 190, 160, 250, 120, -fill => "white"); $canvas->pack(); $mw->Button(-text => 'Exit', -command => sub {exit})->pack();; MainLoop;
Executing this script generates the GUI application shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7. An example of the Canvas widget
Let's break down the script.
This code creates the Canvas widget:
my $canvas = $mw->Canvas(-relief => "sunken", -background => "blue");
Create a black line that has a width of 10, and draw it from (2, 3) to (350, 100). When you're working with objects and shapes in a Canvas widget, the first group of numeric values are the coordinates. It's easiest to view an object with the formula <object>(x1, y1, x2, y2,....) :
$canvas->createLine(2, 3, 350, 100, -width => 10, -fill => "black"); $canvas->createLine(120, 220, 450, 200, -fill => "red");
Create a yellow oval from (30, 80) to (100, 150) on the Canvas widget:
$canvas->createOval(30, 80, 100, 150, -fill => "yellow");
Create a cyan rectangle from (50, 20) to (100, 50) on the Canvas widget:
$canvas->createRectangle(50, 20, 100, 50, -fill => "cyan");
Create a green arc from (40, 40) to (200, 200) on the Canvas widget:
$canvas->createArc(40, 40, 200, 200, -fill => "green");
Create a white polygon from (350, 120) to (190, 160) and (250, 120) on the Canvas widget:
$canvas->createPolygon(350, 120, 190, 160, 250, 120, -fill => "white");
After all the objects have been created, as always, pack the widget:
$canvas->pack();
Conclusion
Introducing Perl with the Perl/Tk module into an AIX environment can benefit the developer, administrator, and customer or end user. What began as a script that may look dull to the customer can be enhanced into a professional-looking GUI application. It may take you a short time to get the hang of the widgets, but once you've mastered them, the results are worth the effort!
Downloadable resources
Related topics
Read this tutorial covering the Canvas widget.
Here's another tutorial covering the Canvas widget.
Visit the homepage for ActivePerl, a Perl distribution for Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX.Enormity vs. Enormousness : Usage Guide
Enormity, some people insist, is improperly used to denote large size. They insist on enormousness for this meaning, and would limit enormity to the meaning "great wickedness." Those who urge such a limitation may not recognize the subtlety with which enormity is actually used. It regularly denotes a considerable departure from the expected or normal. they awakened; they sat up; and then the enormity of their situation burst upon them. "How did the fire start?" — John Steinbeck When used to denote large size, either literal or figurative, it usually suggests something so large as to seem overwhelming no intermediate zone of study. Either the enormity of the desert or the sight of a tiny flower — Paul Theroux the enormity of the task of teachers in slum schools — J. B. Conant and may even be used to suggest both great size and deviation from morality. the enormity of existing stockpiles of atomic weapons — New Republic It can also emphasize the momentousness of what has happened the sombre enormity of the Russian Revolution — George Steiner or of its consequences. perceived as no one in the family could the enormity of the misfortune — E. L. Doctorow0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
Sarah Palin’s Thanksgiving of Spite
In another sad, desperate attempt to get media attention on a holiday, Ms Palin spent her Thanksgiving licking her North Korean ally wounds on Facebook and creepily stalking the President. I’ll not be linking to the FB post as you can easily find her outrageously petulant post for yourself if you so desire. Just consider that the first paragraph is devoted to all of the Presidential gaffe’s her hack research team could find, leading us to the conclusion that Palin thinks she is on par with the President.
This hopeful false equivocation is nothing but the dreams of the deluded and anyone so ignorant as to not understand that when Palin makes a mistake it’s because she doesn’t grasp the issue at hand, not because she made a gaffe, probably isn’t winning any critical thinking tests. This has become clear over her entire career, not just the last two years. To assume she had a slip of the tongue when every other time she did not know what she was talking about would be illogical and catering to the accusations of bias she takes refuge in.
This is the same woman who preened to her gubernatorial competition that while he had a grasp of the issues and she didn’t the issues, it “didn’t matter”. Two termer Republican member of the Alaska State House of Representatives Andrew Halcro, who ran against Palin in the 2006 Alaskan gubernatorial race as an Independent, wrote:
“On April 18, 2006, Palin and I sat together in a hotel coffee shop comparing campaign trail notes. As we talked about the debates, Palin made a comment that highlights the phenomenon that Biden is up against. “Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, ‘Does any of this really matter?'”
Tell me again that I’m supposed to give her the benefit of the doubt. Tell me how it’s “fair” (is this nursery school?) to cater to intellectual laziness by approaching this gaffe as if it were the first time and not a tell, in a pattern of reckless abandon for important issues of national security. Maybe some are willing to put this country at risk in order to avoid hurting Ms Palin’s feelings, but as of this moment, I’m not so inclined.
Gosh, just how much further do we need to lower the bar in order to accommodate the GOP’s front-runner for highest office in the land? Are there any standards we are allowed to apply to Ms Palin? Apparently, it’s more important to be “fair” to our Lady of Eternal Victimhood than it is to have a person of merit in office or have a debate seasoned by a grasp of the issues.
In the interest of “fairness”, allow me to point out that Ms Palin did not know there was a North and South Korea just two years ago, while running for VP of this country.
She also thought Saddam Hussein attacked the U.S. on 9/11.
While running for V.P. Shudder. But hush, now, we don’t want to hurt her feelings or insult her base by pointing out that there might be qualifications for President. We should all lower our expectations lest we be accused of being lamestream media elites.
John Heilemann, co-author of the book, Game Change, told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes that McCain Campaign manager Steve Schmidt claimed, “She knew nothing. She had to be taken through World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and Palin was not aware there was a difference between North and South Korea. She continued to insist that Iraq was behind 9/11; and when her son was being sent off to Iraq, she couldn’t describe who we were fighting.”
Courtesy of Think Progress, “She Knows Nothing”:
And we’re supposed to chalk this up to a gaffe? Really? Where’s the proof that she has been studying up after quitting as governor, between her reality TV shows, appearances on Fox News, book writing and tabloid media management of her family? Oh, we’re supposed to assume this, contrary to all apparent evidence, in order to be “fair”?
Schmidt did claim that in spite of knowing nothing, she was a quick study. Sadly, this side of Palin was never made evident to us and any chance she might have had of convincing thinking Americans that she was interested in serious things evaporated when she quit her job as Governor of Alaska to pursue money and fame. Maybe if she allowed someone to interview her other than Fox personalities, she could show us just how much studying she’s been doing. We need to know that she understands the complexities and not that she has just managed to barely memorize the talking points.
Palin has never been interested in history or policy. She claims she wants to discuss her record, is given an hour to do just that on Fox News with nothing but subservient host (Greta) who let’s Palin natter on about anything she chooses with no pushback or correction, and not once does Palin choose to discuss her record.
What she chose to discuss was how the media picks on her and never talks about her record. We got to hear all the tabloid insults that have offended our Queen of the Media. Why is this? Because Sarah Palin cannot discuss her real record because her real record belies the myth she’s selling. Sarah is selling feelings, not reality, not policy, not ideas. And that’s why it’s vital that she keep this fight in the tabloid gutter, where she can win.
Sadly, Ms Palin is still clueless about how she may have some responsibility in creating the anger she so routinely feels victimized by. When she returned to Alaska after playing the role of the pit-bull in 2008, Palin was wounded that the legislators were no longer on her side. Did she meet with the legislators to discuss this or take responsibility for the idea they got from her behavior that she was a demagogic hater more interested in her national opportunities than in their state? No.
Instead, Palin scheduled a meeting with the Alaskan legislators (all of whom were Republican, by the way) regarding her claim that she wouldn’t take nearly a third of the stimulus money (another blatantly false pandering to her future status as Tea Party Queen), blew it off, and then told the press they had canceled on her.
Senate President Gary Stevens said the statement Palin sent to the press about what happened was “absolutely false, absolutely false.” “Someone should be brought to task on that,” the Kodiak Republican said.
Our Victim of the North strikes again.
Later, when she quit, Ms Palin claimed political opponents working for President Obama were behind the “attacks” on her, never acknowledging that the majority of attacks came from Republicans because this didn’t fit well with the narrative of victimization by the usurper she was crafting for her Tea Party base.
Instead of discussing “her record” in her Greta Van Sustern interview (FNC), Palin chose to focus on her claim that her daughters only slurred someone on Facebook because they were sick of their little brother being attacked. According to the Facebook pages cached by numerous outlets, this never happened. But it sure makes for a good story, doesn’t it?
And so we come back to the gaffe. Ms Palin’s Thanksgiving Whinestock of Spite infers that there’s no difference between a Summa Cum Laude Harvard Law graduate and a 5 or 6 college communications major who did not know the difference between Iran and Iraq. We’re supposed to believe that lazy ignorance is the equivalent of hard work and willingness to learn, lest we be called elitists, but at the same time, we’re supposed to embrace the notion of American exceptionalism. Hard to keep it all straight.
We’re supposed to give her the benefit of the doubt, when she is so scared of the press that she has refused (for two years) to be interviewed by anyone other than friendly press that is also her employer and her publisher — and when she messes up answering questions she was given in advance, we are biased if we expect a decent performance. I guess we’ll wait for Sarah Palin to tell us when it’s OK to expect something of her. After all, I wouldn’t want to offend her. Perhaps we need to add an amendment to the constitution: “Thou shall not offend Queen Sarah nor ask her anything nor expect her to know anything for to do so will be considered treasonous, sexist, vile and mean.”
How about this: The President does not spend his Thanksgiving attacking people. Only the most petty, immature and emotionally stunted would spend a day of thanks dishing out the petty.
It’s hard not to feel sorry for Ms Palin, but then she goes and does something like this, leading me to believe that were she ever to be President, we would all be in peril if she ever perceived even the slightest criticism from a foreign leader, let alone an American citizen. It’s clear our rights to speak our minds would be limited under Palin. What isn’t clear is exactly how dangerously reactive and emotionally challenged she is. I fear we don’t know the full extend of her limitations due to her clever avoidance of accountability via her Facebook/Fox PAC bunkers of fear.
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Odom spent most of his 14-year NBA career in Los Angeles with the Lakers and Clippers. He married Kardashian, appeared in her family's "Keeping Up with The Kardashians" show and then starred in the "Khloe and Lamar" spinoff.
They split up amid rumors of cheating.
Brothel owner Dennis Hof said Odom spent $75,000 on two women who accompanied him in a VIP suite at Love Ranch brothel in Crystal, Nevada, where he was found unconscious.It’s been over two months since the tragic Las Vegas shooting conducted by Stephen Paddock, who killed a reported 58 people and injured 546.
In this age of a non-stop news cycle, the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States is already ancient news. One interesting tidbit dropped Tuesday that has Las Vegas shooting conspiracy theorists going nuts right now is the stories about the hospitals that tended to the victims in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. One of the most popular conspiracy theories surrounding the Las Vegas shooting centers around how no one supposedly died from injury while at the hospital. The death tally and injury tally were already locked in hours after the shooting and did not rise.
This USA Today story speaks at length about how one of Vegas’ smaller hospitals ended up with hundreds more patients than the one best equipped to deal with such a horrible incident.
“At Sunrise [hospital], the flow of patients seemed never to stop,” the story reads. “Staff, space and resources ran thin. The hospital used up its entire supply of universally compatible O-negative blood, and at least one ER doctor said he worked until his brain couldn’t process charts anymore. Every gurney and wheelchair in the hospital held a patient. Some patients waited on the floor. Others with minor injuries walked out, not wanting to take up time or resources that could be used on more critical patients.
“A few miles away, UMC’s trauma director wondered where the rest of the patients were. Around 1:45 a.m. MT, Fildes counted nine empty trauma bays. Three operating rooms sat open.
“Even two months after the shooting, nobody has determined exactly why patients stopped arriving at UMC. But in the immediate aftermath, rumors spread by word of mouth and on social media that UMC had closed its doors.
“Multiple emergency workers and hospital staffers told The Arizona Republic they heart, at some point during the evening, that UMC had stopped taking patients.
Related Articles Multiple police, civilians shot at manufacturing facility in Illinois
“Representatives of two ambulance companies heard it. Two Sunrise staffers said they heard it. Two medics working at the concert venue received texts about it. None of those people could identify the source of the rumor.”
Nary a peep
Do a Google News search of “Marilou Danley” (the girlfriend of Stephen Paddock, who Las Vegas Sherriff Joseph Lombardo believes is withholding information) and you won’t see any stories updated since early November. Click on “View all” and you get a message from Google: “Sorry, this is no additional coverage at this time. Please try again later.”
As for information regarding Paddock, it’s similarly scarce.
Oddly enough, last week a sharpshooter fired gun shots toward the street from the eighth floor of a Reno, Nevada condominium. The man was killed by the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team. What makes the story highly strange, aside from the fact that it mirrored the Las Vegas shooting and went mostly overlooked by national media outlets, is that a unit in the condo the man was shooting from was owned by Paddock recently. According to the NY Daily News, Paddock sold the unit at the Montage in Reno just a year ago.
The Las Vegas shooting story only continues to get stranger, and it’s becoming ever more apparent that we will never get the full details on Paddock’s motive and what – if any – information Danley has.“Dear all, I want to inform you about my latest decision – retirement from professional tennis”. Those were the words chosen by Anastasija Sevastova four years ago when she announced her retirement from tennis.
She continued, “Because of almost three years of conftinuing illnesses, injuries and the related problems, I don’t see myself carrying on in this complex sport at the highest possible level.”
Fast forward four years from that decision and where can you find the Latvian? Into her first Premier Mandatory semi-final and poised to crack the top twenty in the world of course.
Sevastova’s narrative falls neatly into the “fairytale” category. An early success story was cut agonisingly short by injury and illness but redemption and a second run on the WTA Tour has given the 27-year-old a fresh approach.
The “First Career”
The Latvian largely bypassed the junior circuit, heading straight for the ITF Tour where she began making a splash aged just 17. In 2007 she reached her first professional ITF final in Antalya and just a fortnight later qualified for her first WTA Tour level event in Istanbul where she lost to Alona Bondarenko in three tight sets.
Five ITF finals in 2008 put her within qualifying range of the Grand Slams. In 2009 she delivered, qualifying for her first major at Roland Garros. Later in the year Anastasija Sevastova notched up her first victory at a Grand Slam, defeating Thailand’s Tamarine Tanasugarn at Flushing Meadows.
A career highlight came in the following year when, aged 20, she stormed through the field to collect her first – and only – WTA title on the red clay of Estoril. The title catapulted her to the fringes of the top #50 and in 2011 she peaked at a high of #36 in the world.
“I was not having fun anymore” Anastasija Sevastova
From there though it all began to unravel. A string of injuries to the back and arms saw her ranking plummet and her enjoyment of the game began to waiver. “I was not having fun anymore”, she later told the New York Times.
In February 2013 she lost her third first round in four matches. Three months later she officially hung up her rackets and retired from the sport. That might well have been that for the career of the talented Latvian.
Anastasija Sevastova’s retirement U-turn
Yet, as is common in tennis, retired players can never stay away from the game for long. After spending time recovering and healing both her body and mind, Anastasija Sevastova returned to the court at the start of 2015. An explosive start followed.
In her first six ITF tournaments she reached five finals, winning four and boasting a 25-2 record. She did not have to wait long for her return to the WTA circuit, playing in Bad Gastien in July.
By early 2016 Sevastova had collected enough points to return to the top #100 and she cracked the top #50 after reaching two more WTA fianls in Mallorca and Bucharest.
Flushing Meadows was the venue for her most impressive career run last year as she surprisingly made it through to the quarter-finals of the US Open. The marvellous run included dispatching French Open champion Garbine Muguruza and Britain’s Johanna Konta who was in red-hot form.
Success in Dubai and Madrid
The path through to the quarter-final was rewarding for the Latvian who moved to #30 in the world, a new career high. While she may not have been consistent so far in 2017 she has had a couple of remarkable tournaments.
In Dubai she sailed through to the semi-finals for the loss of just one set before falling to Caroline Wozniacki. Now in Madrid she has reached another semi-final after defeating Kiki Bertens, this time her first at Premier Mandatory level. This will guarantee she becomes the first ever female Latvian to crack the worlds top #20.
She faces a mammoth task to progress further through the competition, welcoming Simona Halep in the semi-final. The defending Madrid champion has looked good on the red dirt and defeated Sevastova just two weeks ago in Stuttgart 6-3 6-1.
Upset complete! ✅ Sevastova stuns Karolina Pliskova 6-3, 6-3 to reach @MutuaMadridOpen Round of 16! pic.twitter.com/Mya4v2mlq0 — WTA (@WTA) May 8, 2017
There is little question that Anastasija Sevastova’s stock is rising at an alarming rate. She is chalking up the big victories and has defeated two top ten players in Karolina Pliskova and Johanna Konta recently. To label her as a dark horse for the French Open would not be unjust given the open nature of the tournament. Do not be surprised if the 27-year-old is still present in the second week in Paris.
As Roger Federer has recently emphasised, prolonged rest can do wonders in modern tennis. With one “retirement” already under her belt, Sevastova has had plenty of rest. Now can she capitalise?
Main Photo:The recently published commentary from Naomi Oreskes, in which she criticises the pro-nuclear position of Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel, James Hansen and Tom Wigley, bears the hallmarks of classic denialist writing. While some on the right deny the reality of climate change, Oreskes has cherry picked an outlier first-world example to obscure the sobering truth of the trajectory of global electricity demand. Rather than acknowledging the urgency of our predicament, the response proposes further delay on action. We need commentators with the courage and the smarts to accommodate the entirety of the truth of our predicament, no matter how overwhelming, and lead us from there to real solutions.
In a response published to the New York Times (We need a new Manhattan Project November 14, 2013), science historian and author Naomi Oreskes dismisses the call from leading climate scientists Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel, James Hansen and Tom Wigley for the environmental movement to support the development and deployment of advanced nuclear energy. Inferring these scientists failed to do their homework in forming this position, the response carries the stylistic hallmarks of blind ideology and structural blueprint of denialist writing. Coming from the author of Merchants of Doubt it’s a deeply disappointing irony.
The author reveals an ideological position by opening the response with a play straight out of the anti-nuclear handbook: take your nation and, on the back of ill-founded generalisations, draw lines all over it to show where nuclear power plants can’t be placed. In little more than a paragraph, most the landmass of the lower 48 states of the US has been ruled ill-suited to nuclear power.
That conclusion is open to question. The United States already has 100 operational reactors running at 90% capacity factor in all the areas Oreskes rules out. By the reasoning given, none of these plants should be there. This would deprive the US of around 800 TWh of clean electricity, 19% of total US consumption. It is unfathomable that this line of argument could originate from someone presuming to speak with sincerity to the notion of climate change as an urgent problem.
Yet Oreskes also dismisses a key foundational truth of the scientists’ letter, being the substantial growth to come in global energy demand. Instead the response informs readers “per capita electricity use in California has been nearly flat since the 1970s, so economic growth does not have to be tied to energy growth”.
Anyone should think twice before applying the per capita electricity use of California as some evidential benchmark against the presumption of broader growth in electricity demand. This demands scrutiny beyond the simplistic.
Among today’s 7.1 billion people electricity consumption averages about 3,000 kWh per person, though over one and a half billion people use none at all. California’s per capita electricity consumption moves around 7,000 kWh per year, less than the USA overall, Australia or Canada. It’s around the level of Western Europe and much higher than the UK. It’s over twice as high as China, 11 times higher than India, and 51 times greater than Nigeria with its 170 million people and 7% per annum economic growth. There can be no serious contention that California’s 7,000 kWh per person, steady or not, is an example of how global electricity use will not grow. The constraint of per capita electricity consumption may provide a useful example to other economies at the very top end of the consumption ladder. Otherwise it provides insight into just how massive we might expect global electricity consumption to one day become.
If everyone somehow met around the middle at 4,000 kWh per person by 2050 (a 30-fold improvement for the average Nigerian), what would we have? Aside from an unprecedented feat of conservation, development, and global equity we would have a doubling in global electricity consumption from 2012 levels. If everyone met at Californian consumption levels, which I expect would please the global poor and Californians alike, we would need three-and-a-half times the electricity being provided today.
Even in California we see growing total consumption, with forecasts of further growth. This growth is not even modest, it’s pronounced. Total consumption will shortly have doubled since 1980.
Then consider that greenhouse gas emissions from Californian electricity recently took a step change for the worse on the back of declining hydroelectric output and most importantly, the early closure the 2,200 MW San Onofre nuclear plant. This is just the type of experience that underpins the argument put forward by the climate scientists when they say “in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power”. It is doubtful Oreskes was intending to argue for growing total consumption and dirtier electricity. Had she dug a little further, that’s what she would have found.
This commentary demonstrates uncritical selection of an outlying regional example, deprived of essential context, being applied to contest the consensus findings of the relevant experts examining a global issue. If that’s all starting to sound eerily familiar, that’s because in climate change circles we call it denial. Oreskes should know. She wrote the book. As Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus recently said:
This is the basic math of the global climate and energy situation, and is the reason that James Hansen and his colleagues, who have long been closely aligned with the environmental movement, felt the need to call out their erstwhile allies for practicing their own peculiar brand of climate denial.
So the suggestion that the scientists are minimising the social aspects of nuclear power acceptance with arguments “built on the presumption that emotions are an illegitimate basis for decision-making” is just galling. The scientists are not ignoring these realities. They are calling for the environmental movement to make the challenge easier through public acknowledgement of the scale of the energy challenge and the essential role of advanced nuclear. To be fighting uphill against complacent, lazy, outdated and out rightly vexatious misinformation from nuclear opponents, in the guise of environmentalism, is unacceptable. Visionary talk from Oreskes of needing a “new Manhattan Project” is little more than a rhetorical salve for those who prefer continued delay until the specific solutions they favour are good and ready. Whether that has any realistic relationship with climate change seems not to matter. That type of thinking is not good enough and will drive us to climate ruin.
Our time is running short. We must challenge this right to deny wherever we find it, be it cherry picking short-term temperature trends to dismiss the IPCC or cherry picking regional per capita electricity trends dismiss the IEA. Both organisations have a sobering reality to impart. We need commentators with the courage and the smarts to accommodate the entirety of the truth of our predicament, no matter how overwhelming, and lead us from there to real solutions. For this, the climate scientist authors of the letter are to be congratulated.
A first step to winning broader trust and consensus for tough action on climate change should be obvious. Be better than the other folks. Don’t impersonate them.
EPILOGUE
After reading this piece, Tom Blees (author of the now seminal Prescription for the Planet and bona fide Californian) sent me the following article. It makes fascinating further reading and illustrates, as an extension to the above article, how simplistic platitudes about local phenomenon make exceedingly poor argument for climate and energy policy. Here is a passage:
A dirty secret about California’s energy economy is that it imports lots of energy from neighboring states to make up for the shortfall caused by having too few power plants. Up to 20 percent of the state’s power comes from coal-burning plants in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Montana, and another significant portion comes from large-scale hydropower in Oregon, Washington State, and the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. “California practices a sort of energy colonialism,” says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.–area investment group. “They rely on western states to supply them with power generation they are unwilling to build for themselves”—and leave those states to deal with the resulting pollution. Another secret: California’s proud claim to have kept per-capita energy consumption flat while growing its economy is less impressive than it seems. The state has some of the highest energy prices in the country—nearly twice the national average, a 2002 Milken Institute study found—largely because of regulations and government mandates to use expensive renewable sources of power. As a result, heavy manufacturing and other energy-intensive industries have been fleeing the Golden State in droves for lower-cost locales. Twenty years ago or so, you could count eight automobile factories in California; today, there’s just one, and it’s the same story with other industries, from chemicals to aerospace. Yet Californians still enjoy the fruits of those manufacturing industries—driving cars built in the Midwest and the South, importing chemicals and resins and paints and plastics produced elsewhere, and flying on jumbo jets manufactured in places like Everett, Washington. California can pretend to have controlled energy consumption, but it has just displaced it.
Like what you see here? Please subscribe to the blog, Like Decarbonise SA on Facebook and follow @BenThinkClimate on Twitter. Read more about the potential for nuclear power in Australia at Zero Carbon Options.
Naomi Oreskes delivers an admirable smackdown of Australian Senator Nick MinchinIan Hawkey looks at the challenges facing Kosovo as the Baltic nation strives to qualify for their first World Cup.
On the road to Russia’s World Cup in 2018, there are few hazy spots on the map. Officially, the Russian government does not recognise Kosovo as a sovereign country, which puts the Kremlin at odds with a majority of the states of the United Nations.
There might be some issues, then, to iron out should the small, young state of Kosovo write a fairytale and reach the tournament’s finals.
It is over eight years since Kosovo, with a population of just under two million, declared its independence from Serbia, the most recent of the many schisms in the long break-up of what, until the 1990s, was known as Yugoslavia.
On Thursday, the Kosovo national team play their first competitive ‘home’ qualifying match, though there are a few issues to be resolved before the supporters and players feel truly at home.
The World Cup qualifying tie against Croatia will be staged in the Albanian city of Shkoder as the facilities in Pristina, the Kosovan capital are not yet deemed up to the standards of Fifa, who accepted the country’s independence in 2012.
More from 2018 World Cup qualifying:
• UAE v Thailand: Time, tickets, and what you need to know
• Nigeria v Zambia: Moses and Success ruled out
• South Korea: Son Heung-min a ‘problematic’ player
Since then, quite a lot of what has happened to Kosovo has come at a rush. Last month, as the national squad prepared for its first ever World Cup qualifier, away in Finland, the eligibility of half a dozen players was only ratified on the afternoon of the game itself. These are the sorts of teething troubles that often afflict a new nation; several of the team have international histories with other countries, many with neighbouring Albania, and several — because they come from the large Kosovan diaspora — with countries further afield.
That this hurried, patchwork assembly of talents managed a 1-1 draw with the Finns was quite an achievement in the circumstances. The scorer of Kosovo’s historic first competitive goal, to equalise from 1-0 down, Valon Berisha was among those whom Fifa had deemed eligible to play just a few hours before kick-off.
Born in Sweden, and with over 40 age-group caps for Norway, where he grew up, Berisha, 23, is excited at the way his new adventure has begun. “For a group of young players who don’t know each other so well, we made a very good first impression,” he said.
In an ideal world, Berisha, of Austrian club Red Bull Salzburg, and the likes of Bersant Celina, a 20-year-old midfielder on the books of Manchester City, would be competing for places with more worldly stars, like Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka, two mainstays of the Switzerland team, who have Kosovan backgrounds and strong loyalties to Kosovo but whose international careers with the Switzerland they grew up in are long established. Both chose to remain Swiss, though they were active in lobbying Fifa to accelerate Kosovo’s acceptance as a new Fifa member.
In the meantime, manager Albert Bunjaki hopes that a solid showing in Group I of European qualifying for Russia will persuade Kosovans that theirs is a country that can achieve a regular place at major tournament finals. In his mind is the reality that many potential Kosovo players have lived most of their lives outside the Balkan nation, because their parents left during the periods of conflict and regional instability that led to independence.
“Our real aim is getting to the European championship finals of 2020,” Bunjaki said, ahead of the two fixtures, against Croatia and then in Ukraine next week, that on paper present a tougher test than Finland. “Croatia will be a really difficult game.”
It will be, even without the pair of Croatian midfielders, Luka Modric and Ivan Rakitic, both out with injury.
Croatia are also a model for Kosovo, the shining example of what a new nation can aspire to. When Croatia emerged out of the fractured Yugoslavia 20 years ago — along with an independent Serbia and Slovenia, and later Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro — they made themselves contenders on international football fields rapidly, finishing with a bronze medal at the first World Cup they contested in 1998. There is never a shortage of talent in the Balkans, however many nations it spreads itself around.
The new boys of the region hope they can challenge the existing hierarchy.
“Maybe Croatia will underestimate us,” Berisha said. “And we can give them a surprise.”
Follow us on Twitter @NatSportUAE
Like us on Facebook at facebook.com/TheNationalSportHazelnut planting is booming in the Willamette Valley. Our volcanic, fertile soil already produces nearly the entire U.S. crop. Still, growers and industry experts aren't worried about having too much supply.
Grids of spindly trees, painted white to reduce sunburn, carpet fields north of Coburg and up the I-5 corridor to Salem. Jeffery Choate is a horticulturist with OSU Extension Service. He says the young hazelnuts tell a story:
Choate: “It's gone from roughly 2012 maybe around 30 thousand acres and in 2016 around 60 or more thousand acres, so it has probably more than doubled in four or five years.”
Choate says Oregon produces almost all the hazelnuts in the U.S., but only three to five percent of the global harvest.
Filberts and hazelnuts are the same thing, by the way. They've always been known as filberts here, but so as not to confuse overseas buyers, Oregon farmers have tried to lose the “f” word.
Dwayne Bush has 480 acres of hazelnuts in several locations.
Bush: “People always ask me if I'm worried about all the planting going on here, and I'm not near as worried here because we're such a small portion of the world market, and the demand has been growing four or five percent a year worldwide.”
He says he is concerned about competition from other countries, like Italy. Bush sells to two distributors. They send many of the whole nuts to China and others to Canada to make Nutella and chocolate-covered sweets.
Increased world demand has bumped up prices, prompting local farms to expand, and coaxing some to re-cultivate land where grass seed grew.
Fifteen years ago, local hazelnuts suffered a major setback from Eastern Filbert Blight. Choate says, at that time, most of the trees were the Barcelona variety:
Choate: “It was highly susceptible. And as a result not only were there no new plantings going in, but some old plantings were being torn out. So acreage was probably as a net being lost.”
Dwayne Bush says trees can live with the blight. This year and last, he had to cut about 200 limbs over 80 acres, which he says isn't bad:
Bush: “I've got friends up farther in the valley that have had the blight a lot longer than I have, and they're cutting maybe half of their trees every year, or a third of their trees and burning. With the price of filberts the way it's been, or, hazelnuts, it's worth keeping them alive.”
OSU developed popular, blight-resistant varieties like Yamhill and Jefferson. Bush says not only are the Jeffersons hearty, they've made money quickly:
Bush: “This past year, we got pretty close to 2,000 pounds to the acre off of five year old trees. Which is phenomenal.”
Adding new orchards is easier for established growers who have equipment and some current income. For newcomers:
Choate: “Production can start as early as year three, but that doesn't mean you're gonna start breaking even on cost any time soon.”
Jeffery Choate sites factors like scale, fickle commodity prices, and weather. The extra rain this year kept Dwayne Bush on his toes:
Bush: “We're just now fertilizing. We've been pruning all winter and scouting for blight. (laughs) We're still not done. This has been a very wet year.”
Bush says it's been tough to work when things are soggy, but the trees are fine. So keep your eyes on the new orchards in the valley. Give them a few seasons, and they'll be producing... like nuts.Legal experts
rape
when consensual relationships turn sour. They point out that in most cases it is
either the live-in partner or a girlfriend of the accused who are complainants
FIR stage
High Court of Karnataka
rape allegations
Justice Anand Byrareddy
IPC
gang-rape case
monetary benefits
godman
physical relationship with a devotee. In
2013, the woman filed a case of rape and
outraging the modesty of a woman against
the godman. His bail pleas were rejected
five times and he spent a year in jail. Earlier
this year, the court acquitted him after it
The man’s advocate argued that
the accused weighed 140 kgs and therefore
could not have had forced sex with
anyone. He was acquitted in the rape
charge, but convicted under Section 354
(outraging modesty of a woman). He was
released after paying the Rs 500 fine for
the conviction. He died three months later.
every small incident and turning
them into cases of rape and outraging
modesty of women. They say the
creeping into complaints so that police
can escape blame for registering a
case of rape. The word 'forced' has become
the world of rape cases. But the police
have a different story.
turned into a television drama,
there is intense pressure on the police,”
an officer said. “There are directions
should be treated with utmost
seriousness. If police do not register a
case, there will be a severe backlash.
there are genuine ones too. We have
to file a FIR first and then investigate.
There are no shortcuts and no one
the laws because of public pressure.
You cannot blame police for doing
their duty.”
where a girl was brutally raped and
murdered in a bus in Delhi, has paved the
way for rampant misuse of the law, says
Dore Raju, former state public prosecutor.
employee who were in a relationship ended
up in court,” Raju said. “She alleged
that he pressed his private parts against
her while they were in a godown. There
was no removal of clothes. He was convicted
in both the trial court and high court
and was sentenced to three years in jail.
The definition of rape has changed. There
is no need of penetration to make it a case
of rape. Along with the Negotiable Instruments
Act, sections of the Dowry Prohibition
Act, Section 498(A) of IPC (harassment
of women), The Karnataka
Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes
(prohibition of transfer of certain land) Act
(PTCL Act), the new rape law is also heading
towards rampant misuse. As a prosecutor
myself, I fought for every case tooth
and nail. But the trend of simple cases ending
up with allegations under Section 354
(outraging modesty of women) and Section
376 (rape) is alarming.”
cases are more a case of revenge.
“Women filing rape complaints in
spite of being in a consensual relationship
can only be because of a feeling
of anger, rejection or depression,
says Karuna Bhaskar, director of
1to1help.net, the firm that offers
counseling services. “The intent is to
hurt the other person.” However,
there are cases of consensual relationship
where one person forces him
or herself on the other. The relationship
continues although the other
person is not really interested in carrying
it forward.”
of Psychiatry at NIMHANS says,
“It is a normal human tendency to react
like this as many would think that
in cases where it is a unilateral
relationship where the bond on one
side is stronger and it does not end up
would not go this extreme if it is a platonic
relationship, but if they get physical
the consequences gets worse.”
say that women are increasingly levelling allegations ofA sessions court in the city was confronted with a strange case on Wednesday. The aged parents and sister of a man had approached the court seeking bail in a case where they have been accused of assault, cheating and strangely, rape. It turned out that a techie, the estranged lover of the man, had filed a case of rape against him. Since the case is still at thewhere all the charges are listed together, all four of the family have been accused of rape. The sessions court adjourned the case.Advocates in the city say statistics of rape can be profoundly misleading. They claim many women in consensual relationships are filing cases of rape when the relationship turns sour. Rape, they say, is going the way of dowry harassment.A 33-year-old woman had approached court for maintenance from her live-in partner. The case took a twist when the woman also alleged rape. The matter came up in therecently and Shankarappa, the advocate of the 27-year-old accused argued that the woman had made similaragainst another man. He argued that she had also sought maintenance for live-in relationships from seven other men and almost all the cases were settled out of court. Shankarappa’s client was granted bail.Last week,suspended the 10-year-sentence on a government health officer convicted of rape in July this year. It turned out that he was in a relationship with a woman outside marriage. He had proposed love to the complainant on New Year's Eve 2009 and the two had got into a physical relationship. The woman filed a case under Section 376 (rape) of thewhen the health officer refused to marry her.Vinitha Thimmaiah, the advocate who had helped the techie file the police complaint, explained how the parents and sister of the man were also accused of rape. “The parents and sister are charged with physically and verbally assaulting the girl,” Thimmaiah said. “In an FIR, all the charges against the accused are listed in sequence. The charges are separated only when police file a charge sheet. Our intention was to settle the issue between the families, but the boy's family did not respond positively. If they had only asked the girl's parents to sit down and talk, things would have been different. But not only did they abuse them physically and verbally, but they also went on the streets talking about the character of the girl.”RLN Murthy, the advocate of the main accused and his family members, said, “I do not say there is a spurt in allegations of rape. Due to the prominence given in the media and the hardening of the law, courts are increasingly taking rape allegations seriously. In more than 90 per cent of the cases, it is consensual sex. When it does not end in marriage, it ends up in courts as rape cases.”Criminal advocate Shankrappa, who handled the cases of the health officer and the man who was asked to pay maintenance by his live-in partner, admitted that convictions in cases of rape had increased. “But the dangerous development is that in 95 per cent of rape cases, it is either consensual sex or adultery. When the relationship does not work for whatever reason, rape allegations are made. This is a very dangerous trend. The health of society is at risk. Legislators amended rape laws because there was public pressure. But the results are turning out to be disastrous.”Advocate Mohan Krishna, who handles matrimonial disputes, says there is an alarming tendency to convert every case into a rape case. “The active media which highlights such cases is also to blame,” Krishna said. “Women who have been cheated out of a monogamous relationship are also retaliating with rape allegations these days. The police are also instigating such acts. There is an instance where a prostitute who did not get her due ended up filing a. Police went ahead with it. Simply put, when sex is not converted into marriage or, it ends up as rape. Even we convert the misfortune of the accused into our gain.”A50-year-old city-basedbegan afound that sex between the two was consensual.Legal experts accuse the police of takingwords ‘forced sex’ is increasinglythe opposite of 'consensual' in“With every allegation of rape beingfrom higher-up that such complaintsThere may be false allegations, butwants to be lax. Parliament changedThe amendments to rape laws after the incident“In a recent case, a merchant and hisPsychiatrists say that these rapeDr BN Gangadhar of the Departmentthis is a weapon to hit back. It is commonin marriage as expected. The situationJulian Assange, the man behind WikiLeaks, is not done yet. The Australian whistleblower has already released thousands of government documents labeled top secret, but he's staying in the media spotlight by giving interviews and making veiled threats about what is yet to come. He gets attention for those interviews with bold statements, the latest of which clearly shows where he stands on the right of Internet users to remain anonymous.
In an "exclusive" interview with RT (formerly Russia Today, a global television news network founded by the Russian government back in 2005), Assange said that the world's most popular social network is dangerous, an "appalling spying machine." Asked about his thoughts on the role that social media has played in shaping the recent revolutions in the Middle East, the WikiLeaks founder went in another direction. "Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented," he said. "Here we have the world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo -- all these major U.S. organizations have built-in interfaces for U.S. intelligence. It's not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for U.S. intelligence to use."Having a pool (with a swing no less) in the living room is one fantasy many of us could only daydream about. But for Evelyn McMurray Van-Zeller, this fantasy has turned into a reality.
In 1995, Ms. McMurray Van-Zeller was living in Europe when she inherited the Manhattan home from her brother. “You feel like you’re on a permanent holiday,” she says. “There’s almost no reason to leave the house [with] the pool, the sauna [and] the gym.”
The 15-by-30-foot pool is eight-feet deep and was installed in 1975 by previous owners. The pool level has a brick wall and is surrounded by granite flooring and living-room furnishings. Ms. McMurray Van-Zeller said the artwork, antiques, medieval weaponry and plantings in the adjoining atrium give the space a “cave-like, medieval, Moroccan look.”
If you’re rolling in dough and absolutely need this 5,000 sq ft house (did we tell you it’s a six bedroom, five bathroom property?) it’s currently on the market for a cool $10.95 million.
via [Core], [WSJ]It's never exciting when the NFL's most compelling storyline for much of the week has to do with fashion, but so it goes. Things can't be perfect all the time, and next week will surely be better.
There isn't a ton to discuss for Friday's mailbag, at least relative to the last few jam-packed editions, but this one starts off with one of the most fun questions I've received this offseason.
In light of opening day, if the Patriots were a baseball team, who would be in their starting lineup?
–Derek (East Bridgewater, Mass.)
Fun question. Here's the batting order:
Wes Welker, second base: The Patriots' equivalent to Dustin Pedroia.
Patrick Chung, shortstop: Seems like he'd be a feisty hitter in the two-hole.
Jerod Mayo, left field: Leadership, pop in middle of order, athleticism in left.
Rob Gronkowski, first base: Easiest decision ever.
Vince Wilfork, designated hitter: Great athlete, if he connects, get out of the way.
Brandon Spikes, third base: Plenty of potential, and he can mash.
Tom Brady, catcher: Expos' draft pick played the position.
Devin McCourty, right field: Range in right, and speed at the bottom of the order.
Julian Edelman, center field: Swiss Army Knife can do it all.
I'd also use Brian
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being attacked by Dr. ████████ and both researchers have been placed on administrative leave for a period of no less than two (2) weeks pending disciplinary action and transfer to another site.If you live or work on the 103rd floor of a building, chances are you ride the elevator up to your pad.
Not Zac Vawter—not, at least, on Sunday. Yesterday, the 31-year-old amputee wore a prototype prosthetic and successfully climbed 103 stories up the Willis Tower in Chicago, scaling 2,109 steps to a height of 1,353 feet.
Vawter’s climb was the first public showing of a new kind of prototype prosthetic that is controlled, in part, by electrical impulses traveling from his brain. Vawter took 45 minutes to finish the climb, the AP reports. His goal had been one hour, the Chicago Tribune reported a few days earlier.
The ten-pound artificial leg is being developed by a team led by Levi Hargrove from at the Center for Bionic medicine at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
Nerves from Vawter’s amputated leg were re-attached to his hamstring in an early operation. It’s those nerves that controlled the mechanical bits on his leg. “Targeted muscle reinnervation,” a technique Hargrove has described as “rewiring the patient,” is what allows the prosthetic to function as it does. Electrodes on Vawter’s thigh translate the neuron signals to electrical instructions that move the leg.
The Skyrise Chicago event at the 110-story Willis Tower is organized by the Rehabilitation Institute. The funds participants raise each year are directed toward research and training at the Institute.
For Vawter, the stairmaster prosthetic is a temporary accessory. He’ll leave it behind in Chicago for further development when he returns home to Yelm, Washington, but the leg’s builders hope for a wider release in the near future.The Irish Examiner newspaper has characterized Jamaica’s sprint champion, Usain Bolt, as “the face of the Rio Olympics,” noting that he is arguably the most famous athlete in the world and has shown himself throughout his life – even to childhood friends and teachers – as a dedicated sportsman and as a winner. Bolt himself remembers the “ragged and bumpy” stretch of grass used as a track on his school’s sports day when he was a young student at Waldensia Primary School in Jamaica. The area had been marked out with four black lines serving as lanes, and when asked if he remembered what he thought as he ran there, Usain Bolt told the newspaper, “I was thinking about winning” adding a little later, “What I always wanted was to be great” and to be remembered as one of the greatest athletes in history. While there are various theories about why Jamaicans are such a great runner,s including mention of a genetic inheritance from the days of slavery, to life-long experience running on hilly terrain, to particular elements in Jamaica’s water, and even to the nutrients contained in a locally grown yam, Bolt epitomizes whatever it is.
Bolt himself remembers the “ragged and bumpy” stretch of grass used as a track on his school’s sports day when he was a young student at Waldensia Primary School in Jamaica. The area had been marked out with four black lines serving as lanes, and when asked if he remembered what he thought as he ran there, Usain Bolt told the newspaper, “I was thinking about winning” adding a little later, “What I always wanted was to be great” and to be remembered as one of the greatest athletes in history. While there are various theories about why Jamaicans are such a great runner,s including mention of a genetic inheritance from the days of slavery, to life-long experience running on hilly terrain, to particular elements in Jamaica’s water, and even to the nutrients contained in a locally grown yam, Bolt epitomizes whatever it is.
At 6 foot, five inches tall, Usain Bolt stood out from his school days in Trelawny. According to the then head of sport at William Knibb Memorial High School Lorna Thorpe, the school recognized the “raw talent” of the young boy, and the principal offered him a scholarship because he didn’t want to lose him. At the time, Bolt wasn’t especially interested in running, but loved playing football and cricket. Thorpe, called “my second mother” by Bolt, told the newspaper that his running coach would often have to send someone to find him for training because he would run off to play cricket or football. Bolt has admitted taking his talent for granted at the beginning of his senior career, and he was criticized by the Jamaican press in 2004 for his lack of discipline. When he began working with coach Glen Mills he got serious, as Mills told him he couldn’t be an Olympic champion without training hard.
According to Dr. Peter Weyand, a physiologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, Usain Bolt shouldn’t be a sprinter at all; he is too tall, and his legs are too long for running short distances; Weyand has described him as “a freak” who defies the laws of biology. Bolt also has a different demeanor than other athletes: he is relaxed at the start of a race, playing to the crowd and throwing kisses to the cameras. He says there is no sense worrying once he’s on the line, so he just relaxes, goes in, and “executes.” Bolt is one of the best-loved athletes in the world, and according to Ricky Simms, his Irish agent, he behaves the same way if two people are watching him or if a million people are watching him; he has a genuine love for people and is always ready to sign autographs for kids he meets on the street. In a sport that has had recent problems arising from doping, Bolt’s character, integrity, loyalty and likability make him a good candidate to be the “savior” of the Olympics.
Photo Source: Usain FacebookDear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Peace cannot be achieved through the crime of Israeli settlement building, Palestinians warned as they condemned the Israeli government’s first approval of a completely new settlement in 25 years.
“Israel continues to destroy the prospects of peace in our region and to severely affect our lives by the theft of land and natural resources, and by the further fragmentation of our country,” PLO Executive Committee Secretary-General Saeb Erekat said on Friday.
Palestinians also took issue with Israel’s decision to publish tenders for close to 2,000 new settler homes in the settlement blocs and to classify as state lands 977 dunams near the isolated settlement of Eli and the Palestinian city of Nablus."With these actions Israel has shown that it aims to reinforce the odious Israeli occupation,” Palestinian Authority government spokesman Yousif Mahmoud told Wafa, the official Palestinian Authority news agency.France and the United Nations also spoke out against the Israeli Security Cabinet’s decision to approve a new settlement on Thursday night, which came right in the midst of a renewed US push to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."France firmly condemns these decisions which threaten peace and may exacerbate tensions on the ground,” the French Foreign Ministry said on Friday.Jordan’s King Abdullah plans to meet with US President Donald Trump in Washington on Wednesday, with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas scheduled for a White House visit later in the month or in early May.Israel’s subsequent statement after the cabinet meeting that it planned to constrain settlement activity in support of that initiative, did not lessen Palestinian and international anger.The security cabinet said it would limit future building – where possible – to the built-up areas within existing settlements. This will be done in an effort to limit the “footprint” of the settlements.Watch the UN debate: Are West Bank settlements a stumbling block to peace?“Israel enjoys a culture of impunity that allows it to strengthen its apartheid regime in Occupied Palestine,” Erekat said.He added that the Palestinians would not accept any Israeli and American formula that would allow for any continued settlement building.For the last seven years the Palestinians have demanded that Israel freeze all settlement activity, including Jewish building in east Jerusalem, as a precondition to diplomatic talks.That demand was set aside during the nine-month US-led peace process that fell apart in April 2014, during which time Israel released Palestinian prisoners in exchange for settlement building.US criticism of settlement construction has long been that their expansion takes over more land of a future Palestinian state, an argument that Jerusalem believes loses much merit if all the construction is taking place within the existing built-up areas of the settlements.The new settlement approved Thursday night, however, will be located in the heart of the West Bank, in the area of the Shiloh settlement which is situated 27 kilometers over the pre-1967 lines.“All Israeli settlements are illegal and we are not going to accept any formula that aims at legitimizing the presence of Israeli colonies on occupied Palestinian land,” Erekat said.“Israel's colonial project violates international law and also previous Israeli commitments both under signed agreements and to the United States,” Erekat said.A senior official from the Trump Administration told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that the US accepts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rationale for approving one exceptional new settlement because it was for the evacuees of Amona, an Israeli outpost in the West Bank that was dismantled in February.Netanyahu's initial promise to the 40 Amona families to build a new settlement for them was made in December, prior to Trump’s inauguration.UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday was not concerned with Netanyahu’s pledge In a brief 75-word statement Guterres’s office said the Secretary General “took notice with disappointment and alarm” of Israel’s decision “to build a new settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory.”“The Secretary-General has consistently stressed that there is no Plan B for Israelis and Palestinians to live together in peace and security. He condemns all unilateral actions that, like the present one, threaten peace and undermine the two-state solution,” the statement read. “Settlement activities are illegal under international law and present an obstacle to peace.”Herb Keinon, Michael Wilner and Adam Rasgon contributed to this report.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>So this is my first RedditGifts exchange, and I'm a PhD student that focuses on myriad topics-- but my current research is on civil war music & disability.
Needless to say, I was unsure what to tell my Santa... but I shared my Amazon Wishlist (which I realized is 89% books anyways), and told them a little about me. The result? Two very thoughtful books, that I do not own.
*- The first, "Far From the Tree," by Andrew Solomon; as an NPR-ophile, I've heard Mr. Solomon give several interviews & I've read his, "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression." I was very happy to get a copy of FFtT, most certainly will be reading it soon.
*- Second, an 1889 printing of Frank Moore's "The Civil War in Song and Story." An unexpected, but very welcome, book. The cover has seen some wear, but the pages are in great condition-- I will most certainly enjoy this book and be able to use it as a source in future research.
I wasn't sure what to expect, but thank you so much kind Santa-- A+ choices.The Jacksonville Jaguars have been one of the most active teams in the 2017 NFL free agency period, which shouldn't come as a surprise as the team had a lot of cap room. Not only did the team have a lot of cap room, but with a new coaching staff and Tom Coughlin on three year contracts, the pressure is on to win and the team needed to add more talent.
Even with the signings the team has made, the Jaguars still have $57 million in cap room, according to the most recent public NFLPA report. Now, that number is only as accurate as the latest contract processed by the NFLPA, but for the Jaguars it should be relatively accurate as of Monday, March 13th.
Fortunately for the Jaguars, they could shell out some big money contracts without concern for their future cap because their cap situation was so healthy. Unfortunately for the Jaguars it was so healthy because the team didn't really have any draft picks worth re-signing, as evidenced by the lack of players left from their 2013 NFL Draft class.
As I've explained over and over about the Jaguars salary cap situation; don't worry about it.Getty Trump to reveal 'personal health regimen' to Dr. Oz
Donald Trump is taking his health records to the doctor — Dr. Oz, that is.
Pressured in recent weeks to release his medical records, Trump will appear on the first week of The Dr. Oz Show’s eighth season, which kicks off next week. Trump will reportedly appear alongside his daughter, Ivanka Trump, in the hour-long interview with Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Story Continued Below
A teaser for the interview says that Trump “addresses why the health of the candidates has become such a serious issue in this campaign” and “reveals his own personal health regimen.” The interview is scheduled to air next Thursday.
Trump this week pledged to release his full medical records, walking back his earlier promise to only release the documents if Hillary Clinton did the same. With regards to his health, the 70-year-old candidate has only released a letter from his doctor, a document which was widely criticized for its adoption of Trump-like language.
"If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual elected to the presidency,” Trump's gastroenterologist wrote, adding that Trump’s blood pressure and lab results were "astonishingly excellent" and "his physical strength and stamina are extraordinary."
Trump’s doctor also admitted last month in an interview with NBC that he had written the letter in just five minutes while a limousine sent by the GOP nominee waited outside of his Manhattan office, but he stood by his assessment.
Trump and Clinton's health have been frequent topics on the campaign trail, with Trump frequently suggesting the 68-year-old former secretary of state is too frail for the job. Trump, meanwhile, has grabbed a lot of attention for his frequent meals of fried chicken and other fried foods, as well as his lack of sleep.
A longer teaser for the one-on-one interview between Trump and Dr. Oz promises, “Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is here to share his vision for America’s health. We’re asking him the questions you want answered regarding your well-being, security, money and more. A no-holds-barred conversation you’ll be talking about.”
The credibility of Oz’s medical advice, however, has been questioned. A study released in 2014 concluded that medical talk shows, including The Dr. Oz Show, “often lack adequate information on specific benefits or the magnitude of the effects of those benefits.”
The talk-show host also previously testified before Congress in June 2014 about controversial statements he made on his program about weight-loss plans and products.SEATTLE, WA - SEPTEMBER 27, 2017: A worker cleans the exterior of one of three glass spheres adjacent to the Day 1 building at the Amazon headquarters in Seattle, Washington on September 27, 2017. Amazon unveiled several new Echo products and Alexa services at an event held at its Seattle headquarters. (David Ryder for The Washington Post)
Amazon.com has driven an economic boom in Seattle, bestowing more than 40,000 jobs upon a city known for Starbucks coffee and Seahawks fandom. Its growth remade a neglected industrial swath north of downtown into a hub of young workers and fixed the region, along with Microsoft before it, as a premier locale for the Internet economy outside Silicon Valley.
Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in the United States, a company town with construction cranes busily erecting new apartments for newly arriving tech workers. Google and Facebook have joined Amazon in putting large offices here.
When Amazon made a surprise announcement last month that it planned to open a second headquarters with even more jobs, it set off an unprecedented race among cities to lure the tech giant their way. Amazon said it will need 8 million square feet in a second region, making it the biggest economic development target in decades, experts say.
But as Seattleites will say, keeping up with the Internet juggernaut has not always been easy, providing a word of caution for officials from other cities willing to pursue the company at great expense.
Over the past decade, Amazon and founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, have added new products and business units at a breakneck speed and expected public partners to keep pace.
In Seattle, that meant rehabbing an area of more than 350 acres at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars in ongoing transportation and infrastructure upgrades expanding public transit, road networks, parks and utilities.
People walk next to the Day 1 building at Amazon headquarters in Seattle. (David Ryder/For The Washington Post)
It also put new strains on housing. Seattle is one of the most expensive places in the United States to live, forcing lower-income residents to move to far-off suburbs. The city and surrounding King County declared a state of emergency in 2015 over homelessness.
Since then, the problem has worsened. Rents in King County have more than doubled in the past 20 years and gone up 65 percent since 2009. Seattle spends more than $60 million annually to address homelessness, up from $39 million four years ago.
"We started seeing apartment listings that would say, 'No deposit needed and priority for Amazon, Microsoft and Google employees,' " said Rachael Myers, executive director of the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, a Seattle-based advocacy group. She said the area is "in the midst of the greatest affordable-housing and homelessness crisis that our state has ever seen."
How much of Seattle's evolution is attributable to Amazon is a matter of debate. In the past decade, millennial workers have poured into other big cities — Washington, San Francisco, Boston — exacerbating housing costs and homelessness there.
But few buildups are so linked to the prospects of one company. Amazon has contributed $30 billion to the local economy and as much as $55 billion more in spinoff benefits. Unemployment in the Seattle area is 3.7 percent, below the national rate of 4.4 percent.
Much of that progress is the result of Amazon's decision to open its first headquarters downtown a decade ago. John Schoettler, who oversees real estate for the online giant, thought it simplest and least expensive to plan a suburban headquarters campus east of Lake Washington in Bellevue, Wash., near Microsoft.
Bezos had a different idea. He wanted to stay in Seattle.
"Jeff said the type of employees we want to hire and retain will want to live in an urban environment. They are going to want to work, live and play in the urban core," Schoettler said.
The decision helped usher in a new era, one in which top employers abandon suburban office parks for lively, urban neighborhoods integrated into the cities around them. Only seven Fortune 500 companies had research or engineering hubs in Seattle in 2010; now 31 do.
[As companies relocate to big cities, suburban towns are left scrambling]
"Their growth has just been so positive to lots of other companies, big and small and medium and in between," said Jon Scholes, president and chief executive of the Downtown Seattle Association, where Schoettler is a board member.
It's a boom that has shown little sign of slowing. Seattle added 57 people a day for a year through the summer of 2016, according to census data. How best to accommodate that growth provokes regular debate in Seattle and could well shape whatever city Amazon comes to next.
Such details spark little discussion as mayors and governors from coast to coast have embarked upon a sweepstakes fit for a reality show, touting their cities in online videos and dangling taxpayer-funded subsidies of as much as $7 billion, even if their jurisdictions don't have the workforce or transportation network Amazon said it requires.
The company set Thursday as the deadline to receive proposals.
The view from the 29th floor at Amazon headquarters in Seattle. (David Ryder/For The Washington Post)
Tucson officials, with an airport one-tenth as busy as Seattle's, mailed the company a 21-foot cactus to get its attention. Stonecrest, Ga., with a population barely larger than Amazon's Seattle workforce, offered to de-annex 345 acres of its land and rename it the "City of Amazon." Kansas City, Mo., Mayor Sly James purchased 1,000 items on Amazon and rated them all five stars.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to light up several landmarks and venues in orange to show support for his city's bid.
"So will all the mayors go to compete on 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show,' Kelly Ripa or Anderson Cooper?" asked Greg LeRoy, president of the policy group Good Jobs First, which regularly warns that public incentives rarely pay off. "That's the spectrum of the debate right now."
Before Amazon, 'a wasteland'
Seattle won its economic beauty contest in 1962, when it hosted the World's Fair. To serve the crowds, the city built acres of parking and low-slung motels in an area known as South Lake Union.
The bet paid few dividends. Three decades later, the area was probably best known for a printing plant, struggling motels and a Hooters restaurant. Only 677 people lived there in 1990.
Then Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, launched a real estate firm called Vulcan and bought 60 acres in the area. Vulcan executive Ada Healey recalls the early skeptics. During a 2002 pitch meeting, she said, a representative from a prospective company turned to her and asked: "Why would I want to move to South Lake Union? It is a wasteland."
Bezos, though, saw promise in the urban locale. He had started Amazon in his garage in nearby Bellevue, then opened an early office in a former military hospital now called Pacific Tower. Before long, he was searching for more space to accommodate his fast-growing company.
[For Amazon, D.C. pitches four of its trendiest neighborhoods]
Schoettler initially secured about 1.7 million square feet in 10 buildings. It was enough, he thought, to contain the company through 2016, when it was projected to have 9,300 employees.
Instead, Amazon grew five times as fast. It now has more than 40,000 employees in 33 Seattle buildings totaling 8.1 million square feet. It occupies 19 percent of the high-end office space in the city, according to an analysis by the Seattle Times, as many square feet as the city's next 40 biggest employers combined.
Next year, Amazon will complete its most prominent addition — three glass biospheres featuring about 40,000 plants, "a unique environment for employees to come and collaborate and innovate," Schoettler said.
A drawing of the Space Needle on a window at Amazon headquarters in Seattle. (David Ryder/For The Washington Post)
Seattle officials have raced to keep up, approving $480.5 million in improvements over more than a decade for South Lake Union. Amazon and Vulcan, in need of approval to take over city alleys for its development, chipped in funding.
A $190.5 million road-realignment program included $31.4 million from property owners led by Vulcan. A new, 1.3-mile streetcar line cost $56.4 million and benefited from $5.5 million from Amazon, including the donation of a fourth car. Now the city has embarked on a $201.5 million electrical substation, work that includes burying electrical wires.
On weekdays, South Lake Union teems with young workers sporting Amazon name tags and eating bananas that the company offers free to passersby. Many are walking their dogs — 4,000 employee-owned pups are registered with headquarters access, helping Seattle earn notoriety recently for having more dogs than children.
The campus has produced spillover benefits for the city. Amazon's buildings are home to 34 restaurants, including a culinary job-training program called FareStart. More than 20 percent of employees walk to work, and fewer than half drive.
The company's longtime support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights — including a $2.5 million donation that Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, made in support of same-sex marriage — dovetail with the city's progressive politics. In June, the company flew a rainbow flag above its headquarters for LGBT Pride Month. It has more than 40 "GLAmazon" chapters for LGBT affinity around the world.
"We could have gone to the suburbs, and we could have built a campus, and we would have had an entry gate where everybody would come and go so you would be very inward-looking and very exclusive," Schoettler said, "as opposed to being in a very urban environment where you have to look outward, so you're very inclusive, and everyone is your neighbor — and everyone is welcome."
The housing struggle
Maybe no city could have built housing fast enough to keep prices from spiraling upward during Amazon's growth, but Seattle — despite nearly leading the nation in new apartment construction — hasn't come close.
On the sidewalks, alongside rentable neon bikes, people subsist in tents and sleeping bags in places locals say they did not congregate at 10 years ago — a warning sign for cities nationwide trying to capture a version of Seattle's glory.
"We don't have enough housing for low-income people especially, but we also just don't have enough housing," said Myers, a longtime Seattle housing advocate. "And Amazon obviously impacts both of those things."
Officials at Bellwether Housing, the city's largest nonprofit manager of affordable housing, at 2,000 units, report a vacancy rate of 1 percent. "It's very rare that someone moves out, because they have nowhere else to go," said chief executive Susan Boyd.
A state analysis of evictions found they were driven not by social problems but by economics. As Amazon's boom has continued, the city approved a rule this year requiring landlords to accept the first viable renter who applies — rather than cherry-picking a tech worker. The government also adopted an inclusionary zoning policy requiring developers to set aside some new units at below-market rates or pay into a fund to develop other affordable units.
Myers suggested other jurisdictions pay heed: "If you're going to get an Amazon that's going to create a ton of high-paying jobs and a ton of pressure on the housing market, what are the things you can do before rents really skyrocket?"
[Tell us where Amazon’s second headquarters should go]
Ask 10 experts where the company will put its next headquarters, and you may get 10 different answers. The company prides itself on zigging when others zag, making it more difficult to read the tea leaves. Still, many in Seattle say the company probably has a good idea of its options. "I suspect they have a shortlist," said Healey, the Vulcan executive.
Landing the second headquarters would be a legacy-defining achievement for nearly any governor or mayor, but lessons from Seattle's Amazon experience have bidders scrambling to show how they can meet Amazon's insistence on speed, low costs, transportation and inclusion — particularly if they didn't focus on them ahead of time.
East Coast cities such as Boston, New York and Washington may need to answer for their own runaway real estate and housing prices. Governors, including Republicans Chris Christie of New Jersey, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Larry Hogan of Maryland, may have to explain why they canceled major transit projects. Charlotte and Indianapolis are bidding, but Amazon may want to know the effect of state laws there affecting the rights of gay or transgender employees.
Amy Liu of the Brookings Institution said the Amazon competition will hopefully serve as a chance for elected leaders to take the temperature of how prepared their neighborhoods and infrastructure are to drive growth, whether from Amazon or elsewhere.
"These are things every city should be doing anyway," she said.The Astrakhan region can boast of an ancient settlement Sarai Batu – the former capital of the Golden Horde and a major ancient trading center.
From about 1710 to 1765 there was a nitrate factory in these places. The part of the ancient settlement was surrounded by a stone wall. Bricks from the settlement were also used in its construction.
Closer to the end of the 18th century the National academy organized several scientific expeditions to describe unknown parts of the Russian empire.
Some members of those expeditions compiled information about the settlement.
In 1770 such remaining buildings were mentioned: a mosque, mausoleums and underground crypts.
Two years later the grand rich building with crypts (probably mausoleum) was described.
Some time later some remains of the walls and floors were excavated as well as architectural decorations, ceramics and coins.
In 1875 this tower was mentioned as the last remains of the ancient city.Download a pdf of this Backgrounder
Steven A. Camarota is the Director of Research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies
Eight U.S. senators, collectively known as the Gang of Eight (Gof8), have outlined an immigration plan that allows illegal immigrants to remain in the country and increases legal immigration in the future.1 One of their chief justifications for allowing illegal immigrants to remain in their jobs, and for increasing immigration, is that the country has a shortage of workers. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of the Go8's leaders, has made it clear that he believes there is "a shortage of labor" in the country.2 Moreover, as part the gang's efforts, labor and business leaders are negotiating the details of a new program to bring in more immigrant workers to fill "lesser-skilled" jobs.3
However, both nationally and in the states represented by the Gof8, unemployment and non-work is very high among American citizens, especially less-educated citizens (those with no more than a high school education). The less-educated are the most likely to compete with illegal immigrants.4
In the seven states represented by the Gang of Eight, the unemployment rate for U.S. citizens with no more than a high school education averaged 12.6 percent in 2012. This compares to an average of 10.2 percent across the other 43 states.
The broader measure of unemployment (referred to as U-6), which includes those who want to work but have not looked recently, shows unemployment averaged 21.7 percent for less-educated citizens in the Gof8 states for 2012. This is even higher than the 18.3 percent average in the other 43 states.
In the Gof8 states, U-6 unemployment was among the highest in the country for less-educated citizens in 2012: 24.4 percent in Arizona, fourth-highest in the country 22.1 percent in South Carolina, eighth-highest in the country 22.0 percent in Illinois, ninth-highest in the country 21.9 percent in New Jersey, 11th-highest in the country 20.6 percent in Florida, 15th-highest in the country 20.5 percent in New York, 18th-highest in the country 20.1 percent in Colorado, 19th-highest in the country
Looking at all less-educated citizens (ages 18 to 65) shows 41.8 percent did not have a job in 2012 in the Gof8 states compared to an average of 37.9 percent in the other 43 states. This includes the unemployed and those entirely out of the labor market.
In total there were 6.5 million less-educated citizens (age 18 to 65) not working in 2012 in the Gof8 states. Nationally 27.7 million less-educated citizens were not working.
Introduction
Eight U.S. Senators from seven states: Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have together proposed an immigration plan allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the country and increasing legal immigration in the future. A number of these senators, collectively known as the Gang 8 (Gof8), seem to believe that there are few Americans available to fill jobs that require relatively little education.5 Moreover, labor and business leaders working with the gang are negotiating a new program to bring in more immigrants to fill "lesser-skilled" jobs.6 The idea that there is a general labor shortage in the United States or a shortage of workers to fill lower-wage jobs that require modest levels of education is not supported by the data. Ironically, unemployment and non-work are somewhat more pronounced in the states represented by the Gof8.
Findings
Tables 1 through 4 report employment figures in 2000, 2007, and 2012 for less-educated American citizens (U.S.-born and naturalized). The tables show that unemployment and non-work are high throughout the country. Perhaps even more striking, the employment situations in the states represented by the Gof8 are among the worse in the country. All figures are from the monthly public-use files of the Current Population Survey. These three years are chosen because 2000 and 2007 are the peak years of two economic expansions and 2012 is the most recent year for which data are available. Figures in the tables represent 12-month averages (January to December) of employment in each state. The employment figures do not support the idea that there is a shortage of workers in the United States generally, nor do they support the idea that there is a shortage of less-skilled workers.
Unemployment Rate (U-3 & U-6). Table 1 shows the 2012 unemployment rate for U.S. citizens using the standard U-3 unemployment rate and the broader U-6 measure of unemployment for U.S. citizens. The table also shows the percentage of citizens not working (ages 18 to 65). Table 2 shows the same information for only less-educated American citizens — those with no more than a high school education. Prior research indicates that the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants have no more than high school education.7 As we will see, the employment situation for U.S. citizens with this level of education can only be described as bleak, both nationally and in the Gof8 states.
The U-3, or standard unemployment measure, reported in Table 1 shows that unemployment remained high throughout most of the country in 2012. It was particularly high in the states represented by the Gof8. All seven of the Gof8 states ranked among the 20 worst in terms of U-3 unemployment among citizens. To be unemployed using the U-3 measure one has to have looked for job in the last four weeks at the time of the survey. The unemployment picture looks even worse if we use the broader measure of unemployment referred to as U-6 unemployment by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The U-6 measure includes the U-3 unemployed, plus those working involuntarily part-time and those who say they are available for work, but have not looked recently.8 The U-6 unemployment rate for all U.S. citizens averaged 15.1 percent in the seven Gof8 states compared to an average of 13 percent across the other 43 states.9
Table 2 reports the same figures as Table 1 except that it reports them for citizens who have no more than a high school education. These less-educated Americans are having a very difficult time in the labor market throughout the country. This is especially true in the Gof8 states. The U-3 unemployment rate for less-educated citizens averages 12.6 percent in these states, compared to a an average of 10.2 percent across the other 43 states.10 The broader U-6 measure of unemployment shows that unemployment averages 21.7 percent for less-educated citizens in the Gof8 states. This is even higher than the 18.3 percent average in the other 43 states.11 Unemployment is always higher among the less-educated. However, it must be remembered that U-6 unemployment averaged 11.1 percent in 2007 in the Gof8 states and was 9 percent in 2000. The current U-6 unemployment for those with no more than high school education is extremely high relative to the recent past.
Share Not Working. The last three columns in Tables 1 and 2 show the percentage of adult citizens of working age (18 to 65) who are not working. That is, they are either unemployed or entirely out of the job market. Looking first at all workers (Table 1), on average almost a third (31.5 percent) of working-age U.S. citizens in these states did not have jobs in 2012. Of course, many who are not working cannot work or do not wish to work. But this is not always the case. It must be remembered that as recently as 2000, the share of 18 to 65-year-olds not working averaged 24.5 percent in the Gof8 states compared to 31.5 percent in 2012 in those same states.
The share of less-educated citizens not working is extraordinarily high throughout the country. Moreover, the situation in the Gof8 states can only be described as bleak. The average across the Gof8 states was 41.8 percent of U.S. citizens with no more than a high school education. The 41.8 percent not working in the states represented by the Gof8 was even worse than the 37.9 percent average in the other 43 states.12 Again, many people who are not working cannot work or do not wish to work, but in 2007, on average 33.7 percent of less-educated citizens were not working in the Gof8 states. And in 2000 31.4 percent were not working. Clearly, many of these same people who were not working in 2012 were working not so long ago.
Number Unemployed and Not in the Labor Force. Tables 3 and 4 report the number of citizens (in thousands) unemployed or not in the labor force. The tables show that throughout the country there is an enormous pool of potential workers. Table 3, which reports figures for all citizens, shows that in the Gof8 states there were 2.9 million U-3 unemployed citizens in 2012. The nearly three million unemployed in these states accounted for more than one-fourth of the nation's unemployed. That number grows to 5.2 million in these same seven states using the U-6 measure. Turning to those not working (ages 18 to 65) in the Gof8 states, we find that 13.6 million were not working
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decks even run the neutral spell Angelic Snipe because it is a one point spell. The Evolution requirement is a little restrictive but it is balanced by Runecraft’s ability to draw into the few followers that the Spellboost archetype runs, and the combos it can pull off. Evolving a Timeworn Mage Levi on turn four allows for an immediate follow up with Crimson Sorcery and Piercing Rune, spellboosting the entire hand twice and dealing seven damage distributed between board and opposing leader. Playing and Evolving Merlin on turn five allows for this card to be played immediately afterwards, perhaps helping clear the board and forcing the opponent to use an Evolve simply to remove Merlin.
Though this card does offer these scary possibilities, its value is drastically diminished without the Evolution buff. Nevertheless, it can still be used in a last ditch resort for burn damage and board control, so even at a four mana cost it is not useless, just inefficient. Piercing Rune requires a specific situation to be very good but given Runecraft’s draw power and few followers, it will no doubt be easy for Spellboost archetypes to take full advantage of this card’s benefits.
Cards that solely provide buffs, no matter how cheap, are often tossed by the wayside. The few cards that escape this verdict are not only cheap, but also provide significant repeated buffs continuing throughout the game, such as Elana’s Prayer. Compared to such an effect, Executioner’s Axe falls short. Giving a follower Rush might be worth one point if the follower is cheap and has Bane, but the only card for Bloodcraft that satisfies those roles sometimes is the rather useless Venomous Cobra, though the newly released Alpha Wolfman may have some potential. The added Rush combined with a drain follower can offer some quick healing, but even then the effect is underwhelming as the only non-situational drain followers that Bloodcraft has is Sweetfang Vampire. Perhaps rushing a big late game follower can provide a player with a little more initiative on the board, but that seems like a very situational and desperate play.
It may be tempting to evaluate Executioner’s Axe on the +2/+2 it offers when Enhanced, but even then it falls short. Assuming the Rush is worth the base cost of one point, Executioner’s Axe provides +2/+2 for an expensive three points, which is hardly efficient. Using this on a follower already in play can provide a two extra damage output, but that wastes the additional Rush effect and is challenged by Demonic Strike, which deals three less situational damage for the same cost. Bloodcraft is also neither short of one point nor four point plays, with one point options being Precious Bloodfangs, Ambling Wraith and Cursebrand Vampire,
Executioner’s Axe will probably be like many other stat boosters, almost completely unplayed. Rush is an underwhelming effect on most of Bloodcraft’s followers and the Enhance effect on this card is overpriced.
At first glance, this card seems underwhelming. Three points for two temporary 1/1s is rather weak, considering Shadowcraft has many other options. Rabbit Necromancer provides two damage to the opposing leader, albeit delayed, and a 3/2 for the same cost, Foul Tempest is more effective if the opponent has more than two followers and Soul Hunt provides more single follower damage. However, since Phantom Howl is often found in Shadowcraft decks, especially aggressive ones, and because Voices of Resentment provides a very interesting Enhance effect, perhaps this card is still worth considering.
This card is both cheaper than Phantom Howl and does not drain Shadows. Nevertheless, on an empty board, it may be worthwhile to pay the extra one point and Necromancy costs for up to three more damage, but that is highly dependent on the situation. In both cases, the Ghosts can be comboed with Cerberus‘s Coco for a little more damage output. Despite this, Voices of Resentment seems a little lackluster, at least until turn eight. Giving the Ghosts Bane is the equivalent of making them into hard follower removal, stopped by Wards but getting past targeting immunities such as that of Aurelia, Regal Saber. At an eight point cost for two follower removal, this card still provides a slight edge over the typical five point cost for removal cards.
Like some of the other revealed Enhance cards, Voices of Resentment offers versatility. It can help with both board control or aggressive tactics, much like Phantom Howl. The Ghosts can be comboed with Soul Conversion for extra draw. Early game, Voices of Resentment may seem slightly inferior to other plays, but the Ghosts provide many new options, and late game this card can function as very good follower removal.
2/2 stats are on the low side for a three point card, but Alpha Wolfman attempts to make up for it with Bane and an additional Vengeance effect. As a three point play, Alpha Wolfman faces competition from Mini Soul Devil, Killer Devil and Dire Bond. While not under Vengeance, the first two provide better stats, while Dire Bond is simply a good all around card. While an early-game Bane card may seem like a good way to maintain board control, there are too many ways to deal with two defense followers.
Under Vengeance, this card provides the equivalent of 4/4 in stats, split into two 2/2s with Bane. This seems like incredible value as, not only is this card cheap, it can also help with hard removal. Unfortunately, this suffers from the same issues with many other early game Vengeance cards. Not only is it difficult to enter Vengeance range so early in the game, many cards are very low value outside of it, with the exception of Cursebrand Vampire. Additionally, once under Vengeance, plays that have delayed benefits like this one are not favorable, as many decks can burst a weakened leader down to the point of no return.
In the late game, this card suffers from the same issues. Putting two Bane followers on the board might threaten large opposing followers, but being in Vengeance range often means they can simply ignore Alpha Werewolf and attack directly. This card can be comboed with Executioner’s Axe to provide the very valuable Bane and Rush/Storm combination, but that is the equivalent of four points and two cards for one hard removal, a difficult to justify cost. Alpha Werewolf, like many other Vengeance followers, will probably never see play in a metagame where being in Vengeance range requires high, instant-value plays.
Four points for a 3/4 is not a bad stat distribution. Even when put up against other four point Swordcraft followers, such as Floral Fencer, Cursed General and White General, Amelia, Silver Paladin holds its own. All these are incomparable to the valuable Royal Banner on turn four, but they all have their pros and cons. Where the other four point followers strive to maintain board advantage, Amelia helps to regenerate the hand, similar to the previously revealed Thief. Gelt, Vice Captain is a previously revealed two point follower with 2/2 in stats, that gains +1/+0 and Ward if a Commander is in play.
She provides less direct, unsituational value compared to the other plays, but aggressive Swordcraft decks do enjoy being able to maintain a steady stream of low cost followers in the hand. More importantly, even in Control Swordcraft decks, this card might find a place in holding out against board flooding aggressive decks. With three or more followers on the opposing board, the Gelt, Vice Captain cost becomes zero, making this card the equivalent of a 6/6 with partial Ward, since Gelt will get the buffs as Amelia is a Commander. Between the Ward and significant stats, this card on turn four can be a hard stop to aggressive decks, without even needing to use an Evolution as Floral Fencer might require.
Even without three opposing followers, Amelia provides solid value. Regenerating the hand is something that Swordcraft truly appreciates, and Gelt is, as previously evaluated, a solid enough follower to play on its own. While Amelia is slightly more situational than the rest of Swordcraft’s turn four plays, the value offered by this card is too much to ignore.
Five points for a 4/5 is surprisingly good value for a Havencraft specific follower, matched only by Pinion Prince. Indeed, Havencraft’s five point plays are surprisingly lacking, consisting mainly of Radiance Angel, the neutral Wind God and the neutral removals Execution or Dance of Death. None of these plays do particularly well versus a strong minion-swarming aggressive board, as they do not remove much damage. Ancient Lion Spirit, on the other hand, seems built to do that.
Perhaps because of its significant Evolve effect, Ancient Lion Spirit does not gain any stats upon Evolution. However, dealing two damage to every opposing follower is powerful, allowing for significant board clears of common aggressive followers. Even if there is a slightly larger follower remaining, such as the above mentioned White General in an aggressive Swordcraft deck, the Rush provided by Evolving can allow Ancient Lion Spirit to beat it. The combination of two damage to all opposing followers combined with a four attack rush nearly ensures this card can clear most turn four boards, swinging the game in the Havencraft player’s favor.
Outside of its Evolution effect, Ancient Lion Spirit still offers solid stats. It feels oddly similar to Priest of the Cudgel in that it is a powerful Evolution play that can clear or almost clear every single opposing play made beforehand. Ancient Lion Spirit helps fill a hole in Havencraft’s five point plays and offers an amazing tool for board control, especially versus aggressive decks.
Summaries:
Blitz Lancer: An unusual stat distribution and a bad effect make this three point follower inferior to most of Swordcraft’s many other choices.
Damus, Oracle of Inquity: A powerful and difficult to avoid control option for Havencraft that can become especially dangerous when paired with some of Havencraft’s other cards.
Feathered Patroller: Despite Ward and a cheap Necromancy damage dealing effect, this card is not good at dealing with aggressive decks and is generally inefficient.
Forest Gigas: Despite potentially gargantuan stats, this card’s high point cost and mundane effect make it difficult to imagine using in the usually quick, combo based Forestcraft decks.
Goblinbreaker Teena: Generally inferior to class-specific turn four and Evolve plays, especially given the lack of mid-game neutral followers in the metagame.
Moriana the Bejeweled: Offers a very unique Vengeance effect but one that still might be too slow, though it is better than other options.
Owl Guardian: A viable alternative to Dragonguard as an aggression stopper in Dragoncraft despite inferior stats, especially given its Evolution ability.
Piercing Rune: An interesting spell that can be comboed easily with the few followers that Spellboost Runecraft runs for massive value.
Executioner’s Axe: Despite its cheap cost, it’s hard to imagine this in Bloodcraft decks as the value it offers is very low.
Voices of Resentment: A versatile alternative or companion to Phantom Howl, potentially, as it offers both aggressive and defensive capabilities, especially given its Enhance effect.
Alpha Wolfman: Yet another unfortunate, slow Vengeance play, too dangerous to risk, despite two 2/2s with Bane being very good.
Amelia, Silver Paladin: A great turn four play that also offers hand regeneration for Swordcraft; the value grows ridiculous if the opponent has three or more followers in play.
Ancient Lion Spirit: A powerful Havencraft five point follower with a great Evolution board clearing effect.
As yet another Shadowverse Rise of Bahamut card reveal and review goes by, the future metagame grows even more interesting. While some playstyles such as Vengeance Bloodcraft still seem unfortunately underpowered, others have gained new powerful tools to strengthen their decks. The Shadowverse Twitter continues to reveal new cards and we here at TechRaptor will continue to review them, up until December 29th when Rise of Bahamut is finally released.
Share Have a tip for us? Awesome! Shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll take a look!Asia's growing appetite for oil and gas is shifting the global energy balance and raising complicated new questions about the United States' role in the Middle East, a new study finds.
The report by the National Bureau of Asian Research deals only glancingly with the explosive emissions linked to Asia's rising oil demand. But clean energy experts yesterday said the issue is very much in the forefront of internal energy discussions.
Meanwhile, Robert Hormats, undersecretary of State for economic growth, energy and the environment, vowed that Asia's rising consumption -- the continent is expected to account for 85 percent of the entire global increase in demand over the next 20 years -- and the United States' rapidly declining oil dependence will not shift U.S. commitment to stability in the Person Gulf.
"The bottom line is that Asia will drive most of the world's import demands and energy needs for the foreseeable future," Hormats said. But he added, "Our decreasing reliance on oil and gas imports does not mean the U.S. has an incentive to disengage from the Middle East or any other part of the world.
"We expect other countries who have an interest in stable energy markets to play a role in this area," he said. "This is particularly true of Asia."
The report, "Oil and Gas for Asia: Geopolitical Implications of Asia's Rising Demand," calls Asia "ground zero" for growth in global energy and commodity markets. The bulk of the demand currently is in China but is dramatically rising across the continent. More than 66 percent of the global oil demand over the past two decades came from Asia.
China is now dependent on imports for half its oil needs, and others in the region are close behind. Its natural gas consumption also is rising, accounting now for about 70 percent of the liquefied natural gas market and growing about 10 percent annually.
Ed Chow, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Asia will want and need to play a larger role in protecting political stability and open sea lanes -- no matter what U.S. leaders say.
Energy's 'center of gravity' shifts away from U.S.
"The center of gravity in the global oil market shifted about five years ago when non-[Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] demand exceeded OECD demand. Yet political leaders in the West continue to act as if they can dominate the rules of the game when it comes to oil and gas, and are somehow offended when others with a larger stake in the game want to try their hand at it," Chow said.
China, he noted, is often described as a "free-rider," consuming oil imports but doing little to help protect sea lanes. Yet when it moves in that direction, he said, it is accused of pivoting to the Middle East. The message from the United States, Chow said, is "don't create your own capacity for guarding what is vital to your own national interest."
The report notes that the United States is expected to be "roughly self-sufficient" in natural gas through 2035, but oil imports will continue to supply 36 percent of consumption of liquid fuels through 2035. That scenario, though, "does not include the probably reduction in demand due to the stronger carbon-emissions policies that emerged in the United States and other countries in 2011," the report notes. Yet it says nothing about the climate challenges that rising imports will mean for Asia.
Seethapathy Chander, director general of regional and sustainable development at the Asian Development Bank, pointed to shale development on the continent as a potential emissions game-changer.
"Just as it shifted the entire demand supply in North America, it has the potential to do the same in Asia as well," he said. Chander also argued that with an eye to both energy security and diversification, Asian nations are far ahead of many others in both energy efficiency and the development of renewable pathways.
"The attitude here is, you find and you burn. In Asia, even if you find, you don't burn," he said. Despite the Fukishima disaster in Japan, investment in nuclear energy is up in Asia, and last year more than half of global investment in renewables came from the continent. In the medium term, he said, fossil fuel consumption in Asia will continue to rise. But governments are still preparing for an ultimate shift away from fossil fuels.
"This is at the highest level of Asian decisionmaking consciousness," Chander said. While the U.N. climate negotiations have disappointed many and left a string of broken emissions promises in their wake, he noted that clean energy investments in Asia continue.
"The reason for this is they are playing for the future," he said.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500Frankfurt/London, September 8, 2017. FinLab AG (ISIN: DE0001218063; Ticker: A7A.GR) is set to make a seven-figure investment in London-based Fintech Vaultoro Limited, the leading real-time trading-platform for Gold and Bitcoin in the world. Vaultoro will invest these new financial resources in further expanding its Bitcoin/Gold platform into a multi-asset platform, which will include the addition of a Euro/Gold pair and several additional cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. Vaultoro will invest in additional people and increase the marketing budget to facilitate continued strong growth.
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Vaultoro is the fastest and most cost-effective way in the world to open a Swiss vaulting contract and buy physical allocations of gold against Bitcoins. This enables anyone to secure their savings outside of the banking system without losing liquidity. The goal is to allow anyone to hedge their savings in gold and bitcoin but spend it in any currency down to the cent using an internet vaulting app, and a gold backed Debit Card. Vaultoro enables anyone to trade into allocated gold instantly and secure that gold in a professional top-tier audited & insured vaulting facility based in Zurich, Switzerland.
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The innovative asset platform pushes banking possibilities to the next level, enabling everyone from the unbanked in developing countries, to high net-worth individuals in the western world, the opportunity to trade and own investment grade allocated gold, anytime, anywhere.
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In spring 2017, Vaultoro graduated from Techstar’s 2017 Berlin program, an accelerator program, which empowers entrepreneurs to bring new technologies to the market. Thus, Vaultoro was given the opportunity to connect with community leaders, founders, mentors, investors and corporate partners to facilitate innovation.
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“With investment from a serious, fintech focused VC like FinLab, we can materialize our vision and mission a lot faster by rolling out technology over the coming months; technology that we have been building behind the scenes since our foundation. This includes the world’s first real-time gold based debit card, so that anyone can save in allocated bullion and spend it anywhere credit cards are accepted”, says Vaultoro co-founder, Joshua Scigala. "We are excited about Vaultoro’s innovative real-time trading platform, that allows people from all over the world to trade and invest instantly into physical allocated gold, currently via their bitcoin savings and with other currencies like the Euro and Ethereum in the near future”, says Stefan Schütze of Finlab. “We are looking forward to supporting the ambitious Vaultoro team with our know-how, network and financial resources in order to develop Vaultoro into a leading multi-asset exchange platform.”
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About Vaultoro Ltd.: Vaultoro is a rapidly growing enterprise offering a secure alternative to traditional banking, merging gold’s long track record as a globally recognized store of value with the speed, transparency and divisibility of the Bitcoin blockchain. Vaultoro currently has over 7,500 clients from 94 countries that hold more than 12 million Euro worth of bitcoin and gold through the platform. In 2017, Vaultoro joined Techstars, one of the largest and most prestigious global investors in startups.
Press contact Vaultoro Limited:
[email protected]
http://www.vaultoro.com
Phone: +44 20 3389 9643
About FinLab AG: Stock market listed company FinLab AG (WKN 121806 / ISIN DE0001218063 / ticker symbol: A7A.GR) is one of the first and largest company builders and investors focused on the Financial Services Technologies (“FinTech”) sector. FinLab focuses on developing German FinTech startups and providing venture capital for their financial needs, whereby in each case the aim is a long-term participation and ongoing support of the investment. FinLab also invests globally, as part of venture rounds, in FinTech companies, primarily in the USA and Asia.
Press contact FinLab AG
[email protected]
http://www.finlab.de
Phone: +49 69 719 12 80 0Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak said the province "can't afford" to commit $1 billion for the next phase of Ottawa's light rail transit during a campaign stop in the capital on Thursday.
"No. We can't afford it. Look, we'll continue with the funding that's been discussed and is budgeted for the first phase," he said.
Hours later, Hudak clarified his position on Twitter.
"Some have tried to misrepresent my consistent position on Phase 2 of the Ottawa LRT. First priority is balancing the budget," he tweeted. "Only after the budget is balanced can we afford infrastructure investment like the Ottawa LRT. I look forward to a detailed proposal."
All the parties have agreed to fund the first phase of Ottawa's LRT project. The next phase — expansion east to Orleans, west to Bayshore and south to Riverside South — would require $1 billion from the province between 2018 to 2023.
Mayor Jim Watson said he was "disappointed" in Hudak's position on the LRT project.
"I don't know what the outcome of the election will be but I'm obviously disappointed that Mr. Hudak has shut the door on funding for LRT," he said.
Ottawa PC candidates seem to contradict leader
Shortly after Hudak said the province "can't afford" to fund Ottawa's LRT project, PC candidate for Nepean-Carleton Lisa MacLeod posted her own message about transit on Twitter.
"We know LRT in Ottawa is a priority, which is why balancing our budget is so important. Phase 2 funding is possible with a balanced budget," she tweeted. Hours later, Hudak tweeted a similar message.
PC candidate for Ottawa West-Nepean Randall Denley also affirmed his support for transit Thursday, on the same day as an all-candidates debate in his hotly-contested riding.
"I've been very clear, our party has been very clear: we support transit. I support our LRT extension. And nothing Tim Hudak said today [Thursday] is changing that," he said.
Your VoteAn Alberta mother says it's "unbelievable" that strangers have donated thousands of dollars to help pay the estimated $55,000 bill her family faces to head back to the province after the premature birth of her daughter in Ontario.
"I can't believe how much money's come in already in such a short time," Amy Savill told CTV Toronto.
The mother of two is trying to get back to Alberta, while struggling to pay a hefty air-ambulance bill. She was vacationing with her family in northern Ontario last month when she suddenly went into labour, two months before her expected due date.
Savill and her family rushed to a nearby hospital, but she was told that staff were not equipped to oversee a birth that premature. Instead, an air ambulance was arranged to take Savill from the hospital in Timmins to another facility in Sudbury, four hours away. Baby Amelia was delivered by C-section in Sudbury, weighing only three pounds.
The transport came at a cost of approximately $30,000. A representative of Ornge, the air ambulance service for the province of Ontario, told CTV Toronto that the cost of the helicopter, two pilots and two advanced care paramedics costs between $8,000 and $10,000 per hour.
"We recognize that each patient's financial circumstances are different, and on a case-by-case basis, we work with patients on mutually acceptable repayment terms," Ornge spokesperson James MacDonald told CTV Toronto's Paul Bliss.
Though Savill has yet to receive the invoice, she has been told that neither the Ontario nor Alberta governments will pick up the tab.
She said it never occurred to her that she would need medical travel insurance within Canada, and assumed that she would be covered under Alberta Health Services.
In addition to the hefty air-ambulance bill, Savill's young daughter is not strong enough to be released from hospital, so she and her son have been forced to stay in a hotel in Sudbury so they can be at the baby's side.
"You have to go day-by-day and get through it," Savill said.
Savill said she'd like to go back to Alberta, where she can be with the rest of her family, but a medical transport would cost approximately $55,000.
An Ontario charity group called Global Angel, is trying to raise $55,000 to cover the cost of further medical transportation to allow the family to return home to Alberta.
Savill said approximately $5,000 had been raised so far. She said strangers from Ontario and Alberta had made donations, while other money came from businesses in the family's home town of High Prairie, Alta.
With a report from CTV Toronto's Paul BlissArthur T. Demoulas has maintained and built the Market Basket family supermarket chain and has been replaced.. He was the CEO and his community of employers as well as customers are going to be highly affected by this loss.
he has maintained and dedicated himself to keeping prices affordable and now employees and customers are standing by to see his replacements threaten their jobs.
He is an example to one who gives much back to the community in these hard times, has accommodated the elderly, disabled, lower income shoppers, jobs for youth, and they want him back. Many fear soaring prices and loss of jobs as we fight to have them reinstate him.
Please sign the petition to reinstate Arthur T. Demoulas as Market Basket CEO!Wherever new housing developments are proposed - Camden, The Hills, Liverpool, Penrith, Blacktown, Wollongong and Campbelltown - councils are refusing to approve subdivisions. All up, about a dozen councils have united in a development strike aimed squarely at the state government. One western Sydney developer, who did not want to be named for fear of damaging his relationship with councils, said the eight-week stand-off was approaching a critical point. ''There could be a giant black hole in the first half of next year with no land supply,'' he said. ''Our lead-in times are such that, with design approvals and funding, you have to plan 12 months in advance.'' Like most strikes, this one is about money, and how much a new house should cost.
As the biggest state, you would expect NSW would produce a lot of the nation's new homes. Yet the National Housing Supply Council's report for 2010 shows NSW produced just 3373 houses per quarter in 2008-09, less than every other state except South Australia, which is less than a quarter the size of NSW but still produced an average of 2224 houses. The report calculated that the cost of government charges and infrastructure for greenfields housing development in 2007 was $100,000 on a median house in Sydney, $43,000 in Brisbane and just $30,000 in Melbourne. These dramatic differences, mounting pressure from developers, along with Reserve Bank concern about the paltry number of housing starts in Sydney, convinced the NSW government it had to try something radical to cut the cost of new homes. Eight weeks ago the Premier, Kristina Keneally, announced ''sweeping reforms'' to local council charges. She was not exaggerating. Not only were the changes dramatic, they took immediate effect.
What infuriated councils was the sudden imposition of a $20,000 cap on the amount of money they can take from developers for each housing lot in new estates. Further, the $20,000 cap on what is known in planning jargon as ''section 94 contributions'' can be levied only if the money is for ''essential infrastructure''. Just what that means is not clear, although the government says it includes ''open space and community facilities, roadworks and stormwater management''. With many councils used to squeezing developers for $50,000 to $60,000 per lot, the dramatic cut in revenue prompted a furious, united response. All the growth councils have stopped processing land with levies of more $20,000. Liverpool Council has called public meetings to condemn the changes, warning that the cap means, ''no open space and playing fields, no playgrounds and no public buildings or community facilities in new areas''.
The Hills Council has sent a flier to every ratepayer headed ''Charges usually paid by developers will soon be paid by you'' and with a warning that unless the government backs down, rates will leap from $1280 a year to $3116 to pay for facilities developers have funded until now. Camden Council has written to residents telling them it will be forced to build ''second-class communities'' in their semi-rural settings. A front-page story in the Camden Advertiser was headlined ''Slum fears'', reflecting the views of one councillor, David Funnell. The mayor of Camden, Chris Patterson, shied away from the word ''slum'', but only just. ''By taking out parks, football fields, walking tracks, bike tracks, senior citizens' facilities, we are condemning these estates to being second class,'' he said. Now, after eight weeks of largely unproductive talks with the government, the dispute was coming to a head, he said. ''Our staff are working around the clock processing every application and are at the point of release. But we will not release any of these blocks until we get clarity on the section 94 cap. When we took this stance there was land available; land is now running out.''
When Keneally and the Planning Minister, Tony Kelly, announced the cap, they did so without consulting the councils, calculating it was best to try to crash through with a policy they knew was highly contentious. As a sweetener, they offered councils a chance to lift rates beyond the tight limits that have been in place for decades thanks to the government's rate-pegging regime. From June, councils have been free to approach the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal to apply for special rate increases to pay for the infrastructure that developers can no longer be required to fund. Spring Farm, in Camden, is typical of the new suburbs where section 94 contributions of $55,000 per lot are seen by developers as way too high. Patterson defended the size of the levies, which he said were the result of a state government requirement more than five years ago to provide large areas of open space.
To get the space, the council has to borrow money to buy the land, then pay off the loan as developers make their section 94 contributions. Patterson said about $23,000 of the $55,000 went on buying land and kerbing and guttering, while the remainder was for football fields, parks and community facilities. But developers say councils are squeezing too much money to pay for bells and whistles such as community centres that might improve the quality of the estate but that drive up the cost for homebuyers. ''Many 94 contributions are excessive,'' said the western Sydney developer. ''Councils have used it to get perfect-world development, not necessarily affordable development.'' At the heart of the issue is the push by developers for the cost of community facilities to be paid by the whole community, not just homebuyers in a new suburb.
''The funding balance for infrastructure had clearly swung too far against new homebuyers and crippled the new housing market,'' said Stephen Albin, the chief executive of the NSW branch of the Urban Development Institute of Australia, a group which lobbies on behalf of developers. ''It's unrealistic to expect new homebuyers to pay for infrastructure upfront that will benefit the whole community and won't need replacing for 30 or 40 years.'' Councils take the opposing view. They say it would be unfair to levy existing ratepayers to pay for infrastructure in new subdivisions, especially when ratepayers have already paid their section 94 levies in homes they bought from developers years earlier. ''We will not burden existing ratepayers to make up shortfalls in new communities,'' Patterson said. The Mayor of The Hills, Peter Dimbrowsky, agreed, and said his council would not borrow extra to fund the infrastructure. ''We will not expose our community to hundreds of millions of dollars of liability without a fight,'' he said.
With such diametrically opposing views, it is hard to see a resolution. In an attempt to move beyond this stalemate, the Urban Development Institute commissioned financial modelling to try to persuade councils they would be better off accepting the $20,000 cap and finding other sources of funding to make up the shortfall. One of their models is of a Hills development called Balmoral Road, which has $53,000 levies per lot. Despite these big levies, the institute report says the council will be left with debts of $118 million unless it increases future contributions because it borrowed money to buy land and build infrastructure but sales of lots were much slower than expected and it did not receive the section 94 contributions it expected. Less financially risky, the modelling says, would be for The Hills Council to spread the pain across more ratepayers.
It says the council should impose a $700 annual levy on new Balmoral Road residents on top of their rates and all other ratepayers should pay a 5 per cent levy to help fund the Balmoral Road infrastructure. While the council agrees the old arrangement is risky, and diversifying funding sources would be safer, it says imposing permanent rate increases on all ratepayers and special levies on those in new developments would be too difficult politically. ''Any shift from the developer to the ratepayer is very difficult to achieve politically,'' said Cr Dimbrowsky. ''Rates could be two or three times higher than in a neighbouring suburb … Rates would need to rise to around $3000 to deliver the required basic services to the new community.'' But Albin said it was meaningless to argue whether the developer or council should pay. ''At the end of the day, it is the homebuyer who pays,'' he said.''Whether it's through upfront contributions, or through rates, the homebuyer is picking up the tab, not the council, not the state government.''
''I think most people would agree that, when you consider that to buy a one-year-old $600,000 apartment in Double Bay you pay no taxes or charges, but if you buy a new block of land in western Sydney you're paying up to $100,000 in taxes and charges to the council, to the state government, and to the federal government, something is fundamentally wrong with the system.'' With contributions on Balmoral Road now capped at $20,000, The Hills mayor said he had no idea how the council could recover the money it has already spent. Loading But Dimbrowsky is adamant it will not be by slugging ratepayers - not when he is convinced a $30,000 cut in levies will not lead to a similar fall in the price of land developers take to market. ''The cap will not translate to cheaper land,'' he said. there's no way you can guarantee that saving will be passed on to the new landowner.''It feels pretty great when you’ve got a game and instead of having to reach out for press, people are contacting you in hopes to cover your game. Your indie game marketing efforts are yielding results. While some of these requests may be genuine, there are frequent cases where indie developers get tricked into giving away game keys only for those keys to be sold elsewhere online. One developer found that about 70% of the keys he sent out were to scammers.
The main way to avoid fake YouTubers, Streamers, and other media outlets is to do research on the people contacting you. We at Mana Marketing double confirm our media list, to make sure we’ve got honest and real content creators. Where do you start? And what are some telltale signs that you likely won’t be getting a video/article in exchange for your keys? Let us delve into some pointers!
Does the e-mail address check out?
Does this person claim they write for Generic Big Media Company? Most company emails have a structure to them (i.e. [email protected] or [email protected]). Check to see if the contact email on the media site follows the email address you received a message from.
At times, we have worked with freelancers who use their own email addresses, so getting messages from an address that isn’t aligned with the media channel’s structure doesn’t 100% mean they don’t write for them. It can also be that they mistakenly sent out a request from their personal email.
Do look out for people who tries to use an email that looks like a real one though. They’re hoping you wouldn’t notice the subtle difference in your excitement for indie game marketing coverage (i.e. [email protected] or [email protected]). How do you figure out if they’re legit? On to the next point…
Has this person created content before on that media outlet?
If a writer is claiming they’re part of a publication, it is unlikely you’re their first gig there. Check to see if their first name and last name pulls up any hits on Google. A simple “John Smith Generic Big Media Company” should return you something.
If you can’t find anything, you can kindly let the emailer know you’ll reach out to the editors of the site and that you’ll refer the news piece back to them within the email—a lot of media outlets help forward your email to their staff writers if you have a valid reason to “Attention” them. If you end up being put back in touch with your emailer, they should be understanding as to why you took extra precautions, but apologize for the inconvenience nonetheless.
Contact an editor
Media sites usually have an editor that deals with different aspects of news (i.e. reviews, previews, hardware news), or there’s an editor-in-chief. Try reaching out to confirm if the person contacting you indeed writes for them. While a lot of messages to the general editor accounts often go unanswered (they have a lot of emails to go through), having a straightforward title in your email can prompt them to give you a quick reply to confirm or deny the existence of that supposed writer.
Is the media outlet real?
Okay, so let’s say the person reaching out owns the channel and they have lots of subscribers. The mind boggling thing is that the whole thing can be a front. Check out this YouTuber that has a channel with 60k subscribers:
Look pretty good and his email checks out. Reddit user ice_nelis reveals that all of Kamikaze’s subscribers are bought fakes (all bots), and has been selling the Steam keys he has received on Steam Gifts. Seeing the list definitely makes our blood boil, and it’s sad to see how many developers have been scammed out
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be fine-tuned like an instrument.
Got bigger or smaller hands than the average gamer? Avenger lets you customize your controller to perfectly fit your digits. After you've created the perfect fit, run around in your favorite FPS and take some practice shots. Be warned, though! It's a bit like hopping into a race car when you're used to driving a beater. Take a bit of time to get used to the advanced rapid fire capabilities. Then challenge your friends to a "casual game." Mwah ha ha.
Product SpecificationsA week after the death of state Sen. Jenny Oropeza (D-Long Beach), Democrats have sent mailers to residents urging them to vote to reelect her. That would trigger a special election and give the party a chance to put up a new candidate.
The mailers featuring Secretary of State Debra Bowen and Democratic Party general counsel Martha Escutia do not say explicitly that Oropeza has died or that a vote for her will allow another Democrat to be considered.
"Senator Jenny Oropeza’s illness has been a tragedy," Escutia wrote in one. "Her strength through her struggle inspired us all."
"The Republicans are trying to take unfair advantage of Jenny’s tragedy," the mailer adds. "They suggest that voting for Jenny will only result in a costly Special Election. I am asking you to vote for Jenny Oropeza. If a Special Election is called in a few months, you’ll have the chance to thoughtfully elect your Senator for a new four-year term."
Bowen’s mailer, paid for by the California Democratic Party, is much the same, but adds, "You have a right to vote for her."
Oropeza died after a long illness Oct. 20, which was past the deadline to replace her on the ballot for the 28th Senate District. The predominantly Democratic district includes parts of Los Angeles, Long Beach and the South Bay.
Republican candidate John S. Stammreich said Friday that he understands why Democrats are asking for people to vote for Oropeza, even though "it’s kind of creepy voting for someone who is dead."
What he objects to is the claim in the mailer that he is trying to take unfair advantage of the situation. "It’s misleading in a sense that I haven’t changed my strategy one bit," the aerospace contracts manager said. Also on the ballot is Libertarian David Ruskin, a physician.
Jason Kinney, a spokesman for Senate Democrats, defended the mailers, which he said cost about $90,000. "Given the tragic and highly unusual circumstances of this race, Senate Democrats felt an obligation to directly communicate to voters in Senator Oropeza’s district that voting for Senator Oropeza on Tuesday was the best way to ensure they ultimately have a real, meaningful choice about who will serve them in the Senate for the next four years," Kinney said.
Stammreich said he thinks Oropeza’s death was not mentioned in the mailers because voters are not likely to cast ballots for someone who they know has passed away. Asked why the mailers do not say explicitly that Oropeza has died, Kinney said "the careful wording was an effort to be both delicate and sensitive to the circumstances."
-- Patrick McGreevy in Sacramento19 Oct 2016
USA: A balloon release marked the official start of construction on the Gilbert Road Extension of the Valley Metro network in the city of Mesa, Arizona on October 15.
A 5 km extension from Phoenix to central Mesa opened in August 2015. The latest project will extend this route 3 km along Main Street from Mesa Drive to Gilbert Road by early 2019.
Construction is being undertaken by Stacy & Witbeck and Sundt. The cost of the $152·7m project is being met from federal and local funds.
‘By breaking ground on the Gilbert Road Extension, we continue to build our NextMesa’, said Mesa Mayor John Giles. ‘We have seen how light rail has revitalised our downtown and now we’re extending the benefits of light rail to new neighbourhoods and the greater East Valley.’
‘This extension is the East Valley’s gateway to countless connections in Mesa, Phoenix and Tempe’, said Valley Metro Interim CEO Scott Smith. ‘Expanding regional travel options is important for future riders and has proven itself as a catalyst for strong economic activity.’The mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.
Chart and Table of Bald Eagle Breeding Pairs in Lower 48 States
Between the early 1980's and 2000, most States conducted annual bald eagle surveys. Since then, many states recognized that annual surveys were no longer necessary. That is why you will not see annual data after 2000.
1963 to 2006
Bald Eagle Breeding Pairs - 1963 to 2006
Data Table
Year Number of Pairs 2006 9789 2005 7066 2000 6471 1999 6404 1998 5748 1997 5295 1996 5094 1995 4712 1994 4449 1993 4015 1992 3749 1991 3399 1990 3035 1989 2680 1988 2475 1987 2238 1986 1875 1984 1757 1981 1188 1974 791 1963 487
Back to Bald Eagle Population SizeHonda Tadakatsu
"The Shogun's bureaucrats are like wineskins – they should both have ropes around their necks."
Honda Tadakatsu was a face-obliterating samurai asskicker who spent over two decades racking up a hellaciously-obscene body count that makes even the most vicious Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer server look like a couple of grade-school girls slapfighting over ownership of a Twilight DVD. A grizzled veteran of over one hundred battles – most of which put this dude in the middle of close-quarters hand-to-hand fighting against seriously cheesed off motherfuckers armed with razor-sharp swords – this guy never sustained a single physical wound to any part of his body. Not one. Not a fucking papercut, not a friendly-fire arrow to the back, not a goddamned blister on his index finger incurred while clubbing a dude so hard that the guy's head popped off and rolled into the corner pocket of the nearest pool table. Surviving a triple-digit number of medieval battles without so much as spraining an ankle was tough enough if you were one of those ninety-five pound nerdy longbowmen whose job was to park his ass in the back of the battlefield and run like a punk bitch at the first sign of trouble. For a front-line, balls-to-the-wall fighting general who was more at home charging down his foes on horseback than looking at confusing topographical maps, this is insane. But Honda Tadakatsu was a dude who was born for war, this dude wanted nothing better than to be face-stabbing douchebags while completely surrounded by assholes trying to kill him with spears. Yet he somehow managed to avoid injury to such a point where his contemporaries referred to him as "The Warrior Who Surpasses Death Itself," and respected commanders from every corner of Japan regarded him one of the most badass samurai of all time. This, obviously, is no small feat. Honda Tadakatsu was born in Mikawa Province in1548. A member of the Honda Clan, a prestigious Japanese family known for their reliable, fuel-efficient hatchbacks and lawnmowers, as a young man Honda served as a page in the army of the mighty warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu – a dude who would one day become pretty fucking famous on account of the fact that he was going to unify Japan through warfare an conquest, reinstate the Shogunate, and install a political regime that would rule Japan peacefully for more than two and a half centuries. Serving this up-and-coming commander, Honda's insane ferocity would propel him through the ranks from Random Jobber, Second Class, all the way up to a place of honor as one of the Four Heavenly Kings of the Tokugawa Shogunate. That's a hell of a promotion if you ask me, but I guess it's what happens when you spend thirty years cleaving your way through feudal Japan leaving a three-foot-deep river of blood in your wake everywhere you go.
He's also like the Samurai Warriors version of Lu Bu.
Now, before I get going on the blow-by-blow account of this dude's life, some mention needs to be made of Honda Tadakatsu's equipment, mostly because part of his badass epic legend is intertwined with the over-the-top shit he brought with him on his kill-frenzy expeditions to fuck up the lives of everyone in Japan. Honda was best known for his bad-as-shit samurai helmet, which, aside from generally looking totally fucking awesome, was adorned with gigantic stag's antlers that stuck up out the top of the helm and looked pretty much as badass as deer antlers can possibly look (which, evidently, is more badass than you might think). This of course served two purposes – first, it was like Feudal Japan's answer to a fucking Viking helmet, which kicks ass. Second, it made him visible from anywhere on the battlefield, so when you were fighting for your life in the thick of a crazy sword-swinging samurai mosh pit and you saw those horns bouncing through the melee towards you, you knew to run the fuck away at top speed because Honda Tadakatsu was coming to Buck your Ass Up (sorry, I couldn't resist). This audacious piece of uniform flair does, however, make the "hundred battles without a scar to show for it" thing even more noteworthy, because this guy wasn't exactly running incognito in that wacky Deer Antler helmet and you have to assume that pretty much any numbnuts trying to make a name for himself wanted to be the dude who finally beat Honda's Armor Class. But sure, carving your way through a horde of terrified peasant warriors by putting your head down, running top speed dead-ahead, and goring those assholes with deer antlers is fucking awesome, but it isn't really all that practical. Honda needed a melee weapon worthy of his reputation, so he carried a gigantic bladed polearm known as the Dragonfly Cutter... which, admittedly, doesn't sound all that exciting until you hear the story behind it. Apparently the legend goes that this guy was totally OCD about keeping his weapon sharp, and one time some dumbshit fucking dragonfly landed on the tip of the blade and immediately split in half. The idea of a cranky-as-fuck spear that disembowels insects out of sheer vengeance might be a little hard to believe, but you get the point – this was a weapon that cut through shit like a Chef Tony Ginsu knife Fruit Ninja-ing its way through a watermelon, and Honda Tadakatsu's weapon quickly became so damn famous that it is to this day known as one of the "Three Great Spears" of Japanese History.
Because, naturally, this is Japan we're talking about, here's a pic of Honda as a giant fucking robot.
Not surprisingly, I also found a pic of him as a sexy lady, in case that sort of thing is more your speed.
After proving himself as a rank-and-file warrior capable of going dick-to-dick with anyone who fucked with him (I'm not sure that analogy works, but you know what I'm trying to say), Honda Tadakatsu became a trusted battlefield captain, serving under Tokugawa during the entirety of the Warring States period. At the Battle of Anegawa he is said to have led a force that held off over 10,000 of the Takeda Clan's much-feared horsemen, withstanding repeated attacks by ultra-heavy cavalry long enough for Tokugawa's army to regroup, and even going so far as to launch a balls-out counter-attack on the enemy that caught them completely off-guard and very nearly trapped their commander. Shortly after that, at the battle of Mikatagahara in 1572, Honda's corps once again fought bravely against more of the Takeda Clan's most face-crushingly insane warriors, fighting on even though he was outnumbered roughly three-to-one. When those pesky afore-mentioned Takeda horsemen broke the main force of the Tokugawa at Mikatagahara, Honda – already exhausted from a full day of fighting – personally volunteered to lead the rear guard defense that held the line and bought the Tokugawa forces time to withdraw to safety. After watching Honda freak the fuck out during the battle, the Takeda Clan leader (a mega-badass named Takeda Shingen) remarked that there were only two things greater than Tokugawa Ieyasu – Honda Tadakatsu, and Tokugawa's totally pimp helmet (which, to Takeda's great, was actually a pretty stylish piece of headgear). Honda Tadakatsu would soon exact his vengeance on the Takeda, however, whipping the fucking balls off them at the Battle of Nagashino a few months later. With most of his footsoldiers in heaping piles on the battlefield at Mikatagahara, Honda was appointed to command a unit of 3,000 footmen armed with new, ultramodern matchlock rifles, and from the safety of a chest-high barricade at the top of a hill Honda and his men mowed down their enemies with gunfire as they charged up a hill on horseback like dipshits, plowing through them in a scene that probably resembled something like a Feudal Japanese version of the Nazi Zombie mode in Call of Duty. Incidentally, Honda Tadakatsu is also credited with being the first Japanese battlefield commander to fight with riflemen in two ranks – he had the gunner in the front shoot while the guy in the back reloaded, and then they'd switch, allowing the firing line to keep up a steady stream of fire that cut through armored samurai like a buzzsaw through a Thanksgiving turkey (though it should be mentioned however that Nobunaga is actually the guy who developed that strategy and told Honda to use it). Honda's 3,000 gunslingers repelled every Takeda charge, massacring their force and killing eight generals in the process.
Even his mortal enemy, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, referred to him as "The Greatest Samurai in the East."
The usually-dour Nobunaga called Honda "The Samurai of Samurai."
While this was a pretty righteous demolition of superior enemy forces, it wasn't really Honda's style to hang back like a "spawn campxing fag lol" when he could get up-close-and-personal with his badass Dragonfly Cleaver, and Honda Tadakatsu's most badass moment of gigantic brass ballsitude actually came during the Komaki Campaign of 1584. Tokugawa had heard about a large Toyotomi army approaching nearby, so he took the bulk of his force and marched out to meet them, leaving Honda to defend Komaki Castle with only about 200 men. But of course no sooner did Tokugawa leave than Honda Tadakatsu looked out the castle window and saw the entire fucking Toyotomi army marching right up towards his front door. Now, for most of us, we'd say "fuck it" and abandon the utterly indefensible position to the enemy (or at the very least, board it up and prepare to withstand a full-scale attack from the confines of our reinforced fortress). Not Honda Tadakatsu. This guy did something even more fucking nuts – he took all 200 of his soldiers, strapped on his armor, grabbed his Dragonfly-Splitting Spear, and rode out of his fucking castle to face them man-to-man. When he was on the other side of the river from Toyotomi's force – a fucking gigantic army that outnumbered him 50 or 60 to 1 – Honda boldly announced himself and challenged the entire enemy force to come out and meet him in battle. Toyotomi was so impressed by this act of bravery that he ordered that no man should harm Honda or his men. He immediately marched off, took the long way around Komaki Castle, and went off in search of Tokugawa. We'll call it a Flawless Moral Victory.
Honda Tadakatsu would fight through the rest of the Warring States period, and he remained one of Tokugawa's most trusted and reliable captains throughout his career. He fought at the Siege of Odawara, took part in the invasion of Korea, and commanded 500 men at the Battle of Sekigahara – the most famous battle in Japanese history, and the conflict that resulted in a crushing victory and the reunification of Japan by Tokugawa Ieyasu. For his incredibly loyalty, the strongest general and greatest warrior of the Warring States period was awarded a semi-ridiculous amount of land and titles by his grateful lord. But Honda wasn't a dude who was really cut out for peacetime. He tried to stay a faithful retainer to Tokugawa, but quickly became frustrated by bureaucracy and political bullshit, so Honda Tadakatsu retired from public life, had some kids, and lived a quiet life in a luxurious castle until he died of natural causes in 1610.
He had to sit like this because it was the only way to
avoid crushing his gigantic balls between his legs.
Links:
Samurai Archives
Sengoku Database
History of Honda Tadakatsu
Wikipedia
Sources:
Sansom, Sir George Bailey. A History of Japan. Stanford University Press, 1963.
Sato, Kanzan. The Japanese Sword. Kodansha International, 1983.
Turnbull, Stephen R. Nagashino 1575. Osprey, 2000.
Turnbull, Stephen R. The Samurai. Psychology Press, 1996.
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RSS“The Blessed One said, “Mindfulness of death, when developed & pursued, is of great fruit & great benefit. It gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its final end. Therefore you should develop mindfulness of death.”
This next series will be smaller than the previous metta series although no less important. That topic is of course death. Have you run away yet? Ready to face your own mortality? Good, let’s get started.
I want to start this off with a quick run through of the story of the Buddha’s renunciation, when he saw “the four divine messengers”. The story goes that the Buddha was a prince named Siddhartha who was given everything he could ever need and his father the king did his best to hide anything bad about life away so his son would follow him as a king instead of becoming a Buddha. So we have a 29 year old man who supposedly never experienced old age, sickness, and death.
Whether you believe that is realistic or not, it’s a great analogy for how we put our heads in the ground like ostriches thinking we will avoid these three things. We spend all kinds of money to buy things and have procedures that “hide” old age, sickness, and death. People will say “ yeah yeah I know all about death, I understand it, so let’s now change the topic!”.
We do a decent job of fooling ourselves, until the time comes where we have to face these divine messengers and we are totally incapable of handling these experiences with mindfulness and calm composure because we ran away our whole life. Instead of confidently embracing impermanence and facing reality head on, we fall apart.
The story continues when he is out in the city and sees a very old decrepit person and wondered who this creature was. He was told this is an old man and all of us grow old, kings and regular people. This was a shock to the Siddhartha and the start of bursting the bubble he was placed in. Later he had another similar experience with seeing a sick/diseased person and then a dead person. He finally saw a shaved headed samana, a recluse/truth seeker/wanderer. This was the final divine messenger and hinted at the possible escape.
He realized that all of us are subject to old age, sickness, and death. All of us experience the suffering of being separated from everyone and everything we hold dear. This lead to him having great disenchantment for the world, especially considering that everyone has to keep repeating this cycle over and over again.
So what did Siddhartha do, did he bury his head in the sand? No, he decided to renounce a kingdom and go out in search of a way out of the samsaric cycle, and thanks to him we now have the path to follow in his footsteps. A part of that path is facing reality head on, seeing things as they truly are, not hiding from them, so in this series let us begin an examination of the variety of ways we can work towards that goal.
As before what I present here will be a mix of the suttas, what I’ve learned at Bhavana, and my own additions/personalization. I will present each part individually and then in the final part I will put them all together to present a single cohesive practice, one I do twice daily in front of “Jack” Bhavana’s meditation hall skeleton.
Facing our mortality is not easy, but we can do it! It’s time to stop running. All it takes is baby steps and slowly but surely you will see the peace and freedom that comes from embracing your mortality. Mindfulness of death is an integral part of the practice taught by the Buddha and as we shall see is even part of the core teaching of vipassana, the Buddha’s premiere teaching in the development of insight.
Next week we begin with a discussion on one of my favorite suttas in which the Buddha discusses five things we should contemplate on always. This contemplation was one of the first things I learned in Buddhism and as someone who is no stranger to death, it rings true with my experience and has stayed with me almost a decade later.
This is the First in a five part series. Here are the links to all parts:Double: Kerem Bulut celebrates with Wanderers' fans after his second goal. Credit:Getty Images The atmosphere in the stadium was typically tense, with a sell-out crowd riding each dramatic goal in one the most thrilling games of the season. However, the fan in question appeared to let his emotions get the better of him, apprehending Calver as the 19-year old – who was dropped from the squad for this match – was making his way from the players' corporate box to the dressing room to celebrate with his teammates. Witnesses told Fairfax Media that Calver was asked by the offender whether he was friends with Sydney FC goalkeeper Vedran Janjetovic, at which point the fan said he wanted to "break his [Janjetovic's] legs" and then struck Calver with an open palm. The corporate area of Pirtek Stadium was well-staffed and it is believed the man was swiftly apprehended by security. NSW Police and Football Federation Australia are looking into the incident. It is not known whether the young defender will move to press charges but it is likely the FFA will act to ban the unruly fan. The governing body has handed out numerous five-year bans to several fans across Australia who have been involved in anti-social behaviour.
"It goes without saying that we think that all members of our playing squad should be able to come to any match, watch the game and not be in danger," Sydney FC chief executive Tony Pignata said. "It's quite distressing for Aaron, a young player, who only just turned 19, to be confronted like that. Thankfully security were on the spot quickly and the guy has been apprehended. "Aaron was visibly shaken by the event, as you would be. He wasn't hurt and he will be fine, but you certainly don't expect that – a slap across the face – to happen." When asked if there was more that could be done to protect players, Pignata said they had the right to expect they would have been safe in that particular area. "They were in the coaches' box, which you'd assume to be a fairly safe area [at the back of the grandstand]," he said. "I'll speak to John Tsatsimas [Wanderers chief executive] about it, he's obviously quite upset at seeing this happen as well. Next time we play here we might need to have player security at all times.
"That said, we're fairly sure it will be a one-off event. It's just a shame that it put such a dampener on what was otherwise a great night for Sydney FC and a wonderful showcase for the A-League. We'll just make sure next time that there's proper measures in place." Tsatsimas said he was waiting to get further details before the club decides on what action to take on the rogue fan. "We're certainly aware of the incident and I made sure to speak with Tony and the player involved as soon as I found out about the incident on Saturday night," he said. "We'll just wait for the police reports to come in with all the facts before we can take any further action." Football Federation Australia issued a statement to Fairfax Media indicating it expected an outcome on the matter in the coming days. "FFA is aware of an incident in which a Sydney FC player was involved in an altercation with a patron in a corporate area at Pirtek Stadium," an FFA spokesperson said. "FFA's security team are liaising with the home club Western Sydney Wanderers, Sydney FC and NSW Police. A report on the matter is expected to be finalised in the next few days."Image via @5thYear/Twitter
The drunken Miami Hurricanes fan seen getting knocked out by a punch from a Miami-Dade police officer while being carried out of yesterday’s Virginia Tech-Miami game is now being charged with felony battery on a police officer, according to an Associated Press report.
Police have charged a 30-year-old nurse with felony battery on a police officer for her part in a videotaped altercation with a detective at a University of Miami football game. Police said Bridget Freitas slapped an officer while being carried out during Miami’s win Saturday over Virginia Tech at Hard Rock Stadium. The officer then punched her in the face. His full name has not been released.
So, this woman is having a pretty terrible weekend: drank too much at a football game; got kicked out of said football game; ate a devastating right hand; was charged with a felony. At least her Hurricanes won! Never go to football games.Lack of funds and quality weaponry may cause the opposition’s Free Syrian Army to lose control over Syria’s southern province of Daraa to the Islamist Al-Nusra Front, a group classified as a terror organization by the US and other Western countries, an FSA spokesman told The Times of Israel on Sunday.
The spokesman, who identified himself as Abu Omar Al-Hourani, said in a phone interview from Daraa that Al-Nusra’s higher salaries and high-quality weapons have spurred many local FSA soldiers to break ranks and join the Islamist group. He estimated that 80 percent of Al-Nusra’s fighting force in Daraa is currently comprised of Syrians, and the other 20 percent of foreign fighters.
“Daraa is partially controlled by Al-Nusra Front and affiliated groups, but it could fall entirely to their hands,” he said. “They receive huge external support, but we haven’t managed to figure out from where.”
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Hourani said that Free Syrian Army fighters are “moderate Muslims” who believe in “a free democratic Syria open to all,” whereas Al-Nusra envisions a Syria where “the Islamic religion will control everyone.”
“They have no notion of pluralism,” he said, but emphasized that Al-Nusra does not share Al-Qaeda’s extreme views, represented in Syria by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Villages immediately to the east of Daraa such as Taiybeh, Al-Jeeza and Al-Musayfrah are entirely controlled by Al-Nusra, which currently holds some 30 positions in and around the city. Meanwhile, the city itself and its western suburbs are still held by the Free Syrian Army.
Al-Nusra has managed to obtain superior weapons from international black markets, including 23 millimeter anti-aircraft guns, Soviet Grad missiles, and SA-7 surface to air missiles. It has also managed to capture tanks from the Assad regime, he noted.
“Today you can even buy weapons from Syrian Assad officers and get whatever you want,” he said. “They don’t care who buys, all they care about is making money.”
Syria’s porous border with Iraq also allows for the flow of weapons into Islamist hands.
In addition to its military power, Al-Nusra is engaged in civilian projects such as sanitation, road paving, and medical rescue.
“They do this to win support among the population,” he said.
Hourani said that during meetings held in Jordan with Western and Arab states supporting the rebels, his forces have repeatedly requested anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons. But fearing these weapons may fall to the hands of extremist fighters, donor states refuse to supply them. The FSA suggested that the West track the weapons using GPS systems; or even send Western teams into Syria to fire advanced American Stinger anti-aircraft missiles at regime airplanes under FSA guard, but to no avail.
“The [regime’s] explosive barrels are ravaging us,” he pleaded.
About a month ago, a shipment of 600 advanced anti-tank TOW missiles was sent to the FSA’s Syria Revolutionaries Front fighting in the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, but none of these weapons reached his forces in Daraa, he said. FSA fighters in Daraa have only received machine gun ammunition and the occasional machine gun or sniper rifle, as well as a number of HJ-8 Chinese anti-tank missile systems. But these weapons too have also stopped reaching the rebels over the past six months.
The clash between the FSA and Al-Nusra came to a head on May 3, when the Islamist group abducted Colonel Ahmad Al-Ni’meh, the FSA commander of Daraa province, along with five other FSA commanders. According to Hourani, Al-Nusra accused him of collaborating with American and British intelligence, as well as supporting peace with Israel.
In a statement issued on Sunday, the Free Syrian Army in Daraa announced that it was halting all military cooperation with Al-Nusra pending Al-Ni’meh’s release.
A senior Israeli intelligence source told the Associated Press in January that Israel was reassessing its neutrality toward the civil war in Syria for fear of a possible spillover of jihadist fighters from Syria into Israel.
Israeli aid and public opinion
Hourani said that two men from his unit, badly injured in fighting, were treated in Israel. The health care provided by Israel has caused the people of Daraa to regard Israel as a “friendly country,” irrespective of past wars between Israel and Syria.
“Israel’s treatment is different from that of other countries,” he said. “Even Arab countries prevent the entry of Syrians. Inside Syria people are dying of hunger, and outside they’re dying of humiliation.”WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. senators will introduce legislation to impose new sanctions on Iran as soon as this week, Senate aides said on Wednesday, despite the Obama administration’s insistence that such a measure would violate terms of an interim agreement to curb Tehran’s nuclear program.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew (R) arrives to brief members of the U.S. Senate on talks with Iran during a closed-door meeting at the Capitol in Washington, December 11, 2013. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Iran’s foreign minister has also said a new sanctions law would kill the agreement. In the interim agreement, Tehran agreed to limit uranium enrichment in return for an easing of international sanctions.
Robert Menendez, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Republican Senator Mark Kirk are finishing legislation that would target Iran’s remaining oil exports and foreign exchange and seek to limit President Barack Obama’s ability to waive sanctions.
However, the measure would impose the new sanctions only if the interim deal has gone nowhere in six months or Iran violates terms of the agreement. Supporters said that would comply with the administration’s request to allow negotiators to pursue a comprehensive diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear crisis.
But the measure faces an uphill battle to become law.
Administration officials have been pushing Congress hard not to go ahead, including a classified briefing for the entire 100-member Senate on Wednesday by Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
The session seemed to have done little to change lawmakers’ minds.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a supporter of the Menendez-Kirk plan, said after the meeting that the sanctions bill should go ahead.
“Giving the administration a six-month period to negotiate a successful deal makes sense to me. But having sanctions hanging over the head of the Iranians if the deal is not acceptable also makes sense to me,” Graham told reporters after the meeting with Kerry and Lew.
Graham said he anticipated a vote on the plan in January. He insisted it would win enough support not only to pass, but also the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto.
But other senators expressed skepticism.
Democrat Dianne Feinstein said Kerry and Lew “made a very compelling presentation” and she was convinced Congress should hold off on any sanctions to allow negotiators to pursue a final agreement.
“The key is the comprehensive agreement,” she told Reuters after the briefing.
Obama has said he can envision a final agreement that would ensure Iran does not have the capacity to build a nuclear bomb. Tehran says its nuclear program is entirely peaceful.As police work to clear the scene of a foiled terrorism attack in Strathroy, Ont., residents are questioning law-enforcement's handling of the case and asking why they were not informed that an Islamic State sympathizer was living in their community.
Forensic officers and police dogs continued to comb the property where 24-year-old Aaron Driver had been living under a peace bond until he died Wednesday, in a confrontation with the RCMP that culminated in a bomb blast and gunfire. Canadian officials had acted on a tip from the FBI, which had somehow become aware of a video showing a man pledging allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Within hours, the RCMP determined that man to be Mr. Driver. A tactical team descended on the home and intercepted the bomb-carrying man as he was about to leave in a taxi, bound for a mall in downtown London, Ont. Although Mr. Driver was the subject of a peace bond, he was not under physical surveillance – a reality that underscores the challenges police face in keeping tabs on people they fear may carry out terrorist activities but who have not yet committed an offence.
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Analysis: The limits of peace bonds as an anti-terror tool
Fighting terrorism in Canada: Five questions from the Driver case
Related: Who is Aaron Driver? What we know so far
At a news conference Friday, alongside the mayor and the local police chief, RCMP Superintendent Jamie Jagoe called Wednesday's police effort an "incredible example" of how international partners collaborate to fight terrorism. Asked about why the FBI, and not the RCMP, found the video, he said information flows both ways and that this time, it flowed to Canada. The FBI would not say how it became aware of the video, telling The Globe and Mail in an e-mail that it must protect its "methods and techniques."
Supt. Jagoe and Strathroy-Caradoc police Chief Laurie Hayman urged Canadians to be vigilant and report any suspicious or unusual behaviour to their local law-enforcement agency. But at least one of Mr. Driver's neighbours did just that, only to be left wondering what, exactly, the police had done to ensure there was no threat to public safety.
Neighbour Maria Pereira said she called the local police on July 31 after she heard what sounded like firecrackers coming from the backyard. The police drove by, she said, but she does not remember them going to speak with the resident. Asked about the police response to that call, Chief Hayman said she could not comment because of the ongoing investigation.
Residents on the quiet residential street where Mr. Driver had been living with his sister were horrified to learn that a known IS sympathizer had been living in their midst. Several said that had they known, they would have kept a closer eye. "The police knew about him," neighbour Colin Meade said. "They should have made it known that this guy was a [potential] terrorist … It will be a long time before this is forgotten."
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Strathroy-Caradoc Mayor Joanne Vanderheyden told The Globe she had known for several months that a "person of interest" might end up in the town, but she did not know whether the individual was male or female, let alone his name.
RELATED: Munich, Nice, Turkey, Brexit, Trump: It's all connected
Mr. Driver, whom authorities now believe was planning to detonate a bomb in a Canadian urban centre, had been arrested in June of 2015 because of his online activities. Even though he had been in contact with British IS jihadis and a gunman who was later killed during a terror attack in Garland, Tex., there was not enough evidence to warrant criminal charges, so the Crown sought a peace bond. While waiting for a court date, he was under bail conditions that included a tracking bracelet and reporting weekly to the RCMP.
In February, he agreed to a peace bond that barred him from having a cellphone or a computer, but no longer required the electronic bracelet. He was to report twice a month to an RCMP officer in London and live with his sister in Strathroy. Asked why police did not alert the community to his presence, Supt. Jagoe told reporters there is nothing in Canadian legislation that would allow police to issue a public warning about someone released into a community on a peace bond.
"Quite frankly, I don't think anybody dropped the ball on this particular case," he said.
In recent years, attacks involving suspects acting without accomplices have popularized the notion of "lone-wolf" terrorism, but what happened this week points at another dynamic: how to deal with "known-wolf" cases. These are people who have already been detected – who are already known as having radical views – but who remain at large because they have not committed a specific crime.
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In France just last month, one of the killers of a Catholic priest turned out to be Adel Kermiche, a known IS supporter who was under a court-ordered curfew and had been required to wear a tracking bracelet.
Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer, said today's international counterterrorism systems are straining to keep track of the increasing numbers of extremists. "With a large pool of known [or] suspected extremists, to say nothing of the ones totally off the radar, law enforcement and [intelligence] services must prioritize risk and coverage," said
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right."
Before preparing the second dish, Carlson did his third shot. "It's actually like my fifth shot, so that works out well. And I'm going to venture to say that the bottle actually lies and I don't care for it any much more—any more now."
Next up was wild boar, cooked sous vide with Malort, house-made mole, and thyme and served with curry-roasted cauliflower and black sesame. It also came with a shot: cocoa nib consommé with Malort. Carlson used mole with the boar, he said, because the chocolate made it both bitter and sweet enough to stand up to the Malort. The cauliflower was "sort of the same concept. I think chocolate and cauliflower sort of share the same flavor profile."
Tasting it, Carlson said, "Yeah, that's pretty good. I don't know if I'd put it on my menu, but it's tasty." Between the two dishes, he preferred the first one he'd made. "The first one is I think a little more accentuated, the Malort... It seems to be a little cleaner flavor." And the second dish? "That's one where we just decided, hey, let's try to come up with another one, because that's what we do. You know?"
Carlson also admitted that the Malort "wasn't so bad. I'm definitely not going to buy any more bottles of it, though. That lady can sit and wallow in her cats."
Who's Next:
Shawn McClain of Green Zebra, working with fresh blood. Carlson said he's seen containers of blood in delis in the Vietnamese strip at Broadway and Argyle, but has never tried working with it. "I went to go buy it and then I got kind of creeped out. I'm like, I'm going to buy this, this is going to be great. It's nice and bright and red and it looks so fresh, and then I'm like, I bet this is loaded with disease."
He's not sure what animal the blood sold there comes from, "but I'm going to venture to say it's pig. Or people. You know, one of the two. Blood banks are easy to come by, you know."
Video by Michael Gebert/ Sky Full of Bacon
Carlson had this to say about his recipe for smoked hiramasa with Malort jelly (several components are below, sans instructions): "We measured this all out in shot glass form, so good luck. If anyone really wants to make this anywhere, I'll personally come to your house to make it instead. Because you don't want it."
Maple Foam
5 shots heavy cream
2 shots maple syrup
1/8 shot salt
2½ sheets gelatin
Malort Jelly
2 shots Malort
1 shot water
1 shot sugar
1/8 shot lime juice
3.5 grams iota carrageenan
Agar Lime
7 shots lime juice
3½ shots simple syrup
8 grams agar
Galangal Glass
2 shots galangal juice
10 shots water
8 shots simple syrup
2 shots View Tex 3For most of the 20th century, the paradigm looked like this: The television set was a piece of furniture — a box that sat in your living room, big and a little ugly, and cozy, too. It was the electric hearth everyone gathered around, and the shows you watched on it were comfort food. The movie theater, by contrast, was a palace, a church, a house of worship. The audience, united in holy silence, looked up at the screen to gaze at stars who were like oversized gods. The movies could be comfort food, too, but at their best they were greater than that. They took the rows of worshipers and swept them up into a dream of what life was, and what it could be.
So what happens when the small screen and the big screen trade places? By almost any standard of buzz, prestige, and the collective immersion of the audience, television now rules the culture as it never did before. It’s not just that people talk about TV more than they do movies; it’s that they respect it more. In fact, TV is now so powerful that it seems to have sucked the medium of cinema right inside of it.
Video-on-demand is a simple concept (even as it applies to a sprawling network of services, from cable VOD to Netflix to Hulu to iTunes to DirectTV Now), yet it describes a revolutionary form that has recalibrated how we watch, organize, and experience entertainment. If you’re old enough to remember going to a video store (the original video-on-demand), you know the kid-in-a-candy-store feeling it could give you. VOD is the candy store moved right into your living room: a never-ending feast of viewing pleasure at your fingertips. For the true entertainment junkie, is there a reason anymore to leave home?
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As the options for home viewing have exploded, and binge-watching has become the entertainment-consumption model of our time, a negative karma has crept into the moviegoing experience. We’ve all heard (or made) the litany of complaints: Going out to a megaplex today is a noisy, draining, soulless experience; you have to sit through 28 trailers (and, what’s worse, commercials); there are people who won’t turn off their cell phones; and even though most people do, the nonstop, wired metaphysic of digital-communications culture creates an environment where people are constantly talking, shifting, competing with the diversion on screen. The holy silence — the reverence — is gone.
The disillusion with the megaplex experience has become an American meme, one that raises an obvious question: In the age of VOD, why should anyone go out to the movies? It’s a question that has produced an equally obvious answer: You go out to the movies to see a major-spectacle entertainment like “The Force Awakens” or “Furious 7” or “Finding Dory” or the latest “Captain America” sequel — the sort of thing that lives (and belongs) on a big screen.
Sure, you could wait a couple of months and catch it on VOD. But you’d be missing something. As long as there is action and fantasy and spectacle, there will be movies!
Yet I think that argument misses the true essence of why the movie theater should — and, I believe, will — continue to be a transcendent aspect of our culture. If you had to name the quintessential movie experience of the 20th century, it might well be the interface of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca” — tender, passionate, melancholy, transporting. In other words: two people talking. And that was the glory of what audiences sought in that holy silence. Not visual spectacle. People went out to a movie to connect, in an emotionally boundless way, to the people on screen.
In 2017, films like “Moonlight” and “La La Land” are proof that this sort of magic can still happen. But let’s be clear about what the magic is: It’s when the most intimate of encounters — two men murmuring in a diner; a woman and a man staring across the years in a nightclub — comes to seem impossibly vast. When it becomes larger than life. When it takes place on a screen that is big enough to hold our dreams.MONTREAL – The Montreal Impact announced on Saturday that Sunday’s game against Toronto FC at Stade Saputo, at 4:30pm EDT (TVA Sports, TSN, ESPN, 98,5fm & TSN Radio 690), will be played in front of a sold out crowd of 20,801 supporters. The club invites supporters who will attend the game to wear blue.
Another edition of the IMFC Summer will start at 12:45pm, as the doors open, with the first Special Olympics friendly game in Canada between two MLS Clubs at 1pm. Two-for-one deals on all drinks from 2pm to 3pm will follow, and DJ Vito V will drop his electro and dance beats from 2:30pm.
The Impact recommends that supporters use public transit and get to the stadium early. Due to transformation work at the corner of Pie-IX Blvd. and Sherbrooke St., traffic delays may occur in the Olympic Park area, notably on Viau St., on Pierre-de-Coubertin Ave. and Notre-Dame St. E.
As usual, the MLS Bag Policy will be in effect. All backpacks, camera bags and large tote bags, as well as all bags bigger than 35 cm x 35 cm x 15 cm are prohibited.
Please also note that parking entrances have changed names since last season. Entrance PB is now called P5 (orange), while entrance PA has made way for entrances P1, P2 & P4 (yellow).
The Bleu-blanc-noir will end its series of four consecutive games at Stade Saputo on Saturday, September 2, with another meeting with the Chicago Fire (TVA Sports, 98.5fm, TSN Radio 690 – TICKETS).AUBURN, Alabama -- Auburn coach Gene Chizik said Wednesday that freshman quarterback Zeke Pike is no longer a member of the football team and will transfer.
Chizik reaffirmed that defensive back
as well, and plans to transfer.
"They're not with our football team anymore. Their intent is to transfer to another school. We wish them the best," Chizik said after the first day of fall practice.
Chizik said the decision not to bring Pike back was made in the last 7-10 days.
Chizik sent both players home for the summer. Pike was sent home after being arrested for public intoxication.
Chizik said quarterback Clint Moseley looked good, having bounced back from a sore shoulder that limited him in the spring.
"He's full go," Chizik said.
On freshman Jonathan Wallace, the freshman who can take Pike's place.
"He's capitalized," Chizik said.
We wrote about Pike
earlier Wednesday.
We posted a
and
earlier.
We'll be back with more...
Follow Auburn on Twitter:It’s a wonder he didn’t get sick of the taste first.
A Westchester man who says he ate 10 cans of tuna a week for nearly two years is suing Bumble Bee Foods for allegedly giving him mercury poisoning.
Lee Porrazzo of White Plains told The Post he and his roommate and workout partner, Roland Muccini, would make regular runs to the local Stop & Shop to load up on cans of tuna fish thinking they were eating healthy.
“There was tuna in my diet every day, just about,” Porrazzo said. “I thought it was the cleanest source of protein.”
But the 48-year-old BMW salesman said he was soon plagued by a mystery malady that gave him chest pains and sent him to the hospital “believing he was having a heart attack,” according to his White Plains federal court suit.
He’s blaming it on the canned tuna and wants unspecified damages for breach of warranty and negligence from the fish cannery. But he’s also suing the supermarket chain — for putting the tuna on sale.
Porrazzo says he started scarfing the seafood in January 2006 because Bumble Bee commercials called it “heart healthy” and the brand was “usually on sale” for $1 a can.
No one could figure out what was ailing Porrazzo until his doctor ordered a “heavy metals” blood test in October 2008 that revealed a “dangerously high” mercury level of 23 micrograms per liter, more than twice the normal amount, his suit says.
“One day I got a call from the [state] Health Department,” he said. “They said, ‘Normally we don’t contact people, but your levels are so high we had to contact you.’ I was taken aback and I was scared.”
The Health Department staffer also told him to stop eating tuna.
Experts warn not to eat more than 5 ounces of tuna a week to avoid high mercury levels.
Porrazzo said his mercury levels went back to normal a month later, but he remains concerned over potential long-term health problems stemming from his intake of the element.
He said he used to bench-press 400 pounds but has stopped working out. His weight has dropped from 225 to 196 pounds.
“It changed my life,” he said. “I haven’t been to the gym. I haven’t been able to do anything.”
A Bumble Bee spokeswoman said that, to the company’s knowledge, there’s “never been a case of mercury toxicity from eating commercial seafood in the US” and that “alarmism” on this issue “can have an adverse impact” on people’s health. Stop & Shop declined comment.
[email protected] Bayern's injury roster is shrinking. Holger Badstuber resumed parts of the squad programme on Friday, Douglas Costa is making progress after sustaining a muscle injury in his right thigh. "He completed a check-up on Wednesday. Everything's okay," reported Carlo Ancelotti on Friday. The Bayern head coach hopes the Brazilian will resume training "after the international break."
KidsClub in action
The FC Bayern KidsClub will offer a diverse supporting programme for Saturday's home match against Köln. On the occasion of the KidsClub matchday, staged throughout the Bundesliga, Bayern's youngsters will turn in a stadion lap, display giant banners, stage a penalty shootout and announce the line-ups together with stadium announcer Stephan Lehmann. A contest for all children will be staged on the Allianz Arena esplanade.
Siebert in charge
Daniel Siebert from Berlin will be the man with the whistle for the match between FC Bayern and FC Köln. The 32-year-old teacher has taken charge of five Bundesliga fixtures involving the Reds so far, including Bayern's 4-1 home victory over Köln in February 2015. His assistants will be Lasse Koslowski and Markus Häcker, with Tobias Christ acting as fourth official.
Wiesn atmosphere
On the occasion of the last Oktoberfest weekend the brass bands Unterdarching and Nußdorf im Chiemgau will play music before Saturday's match against the Rhineland side.FOA's old building in Ursvik, Sundbyberg. This building is now a school.
After World War II, Sweden considered building nuclear weapons to defend themselves against an offensive assault from the Soviet Union. From 1945 to 1972[1] the government ran a clandestine nuclear weapons program under the guise of civilian defense research at the Swedish National Defence Research Institute (FOA).
By the late 1950s the work had reached the point where underground testing was feasible. However, at this time the Riksdag prohibited research and development of nuclear weapons, pledging that research should be done only for the purpose of defense against nuclear attack. They reserved the right to continue development of offensive weapons in the future.
The option to continue development of weapons was abandoned in 1966, and Sweden's subsequent signing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968 began the wind-down of the program, which finally concluded in 1972.
Background [ edit ]
During the final phase of World War II, the Swedish Government saw value in the future of nuclear energy, especially the Allied interest in Sweden’s uranium-bearing black shale deposits. This led to suggestions that Sweden should establish state control over its natural resources, including uranium. Specifically, such controls would include export controls on uranium in collaboration with the American and British governments, exclusive Swedish controls over uranium ore, and a ban on commercial mining of uranium.[1]
Through its advisors, including Manne Siegbahn among others, the government realized the link between its ore and nuclear weapons. After American Ambassador Herschel Johnson brought up that question in a conversation with Cabinet Secretary Stig Sahlin on July 27, 1945, the issue was raised at the government meeting on August 2. On September 11, Sweden committed itself to establish state control over mining and export of uranium. Sweden rejected the American suggestion of a right to purchase Swedish uranium as well as a right to veto proposed Swedish uranium exports.[2]
The opening of the Cold War and fears of an attack by the Soviet Union led to increasing interest in Sweden possessing its own nuclear arsenal. They were only interested in tactical nuclear weapons that would be used in a defensive role on Swedish territory or nearby seas.[3][not specific enough to verify] For reasons not directly related to security, Sweden never considered strategic nuclear weapons that could reach the Soviet Union. British and U.S. ideas heavily influenced the Swedish Armed Forces’ doctrinal thinking at that time.
Early studies [ edit ]
Physics-oriented defense research started in Sweden during World War II, and drew many outstanding Swedish physicists to the Military Institute of Physics (MFI) founded in 1941. Here the focus was on conventional weapons. In 1945, MFI merged with two other organizations to form the Swedish National Defence Research Institute (FOA) in compliance with a 1944 proposal to reorganize the Swedish defense research.[4] Research at the FOA was focused on such things as jet engines, rocket technology, shaped charge systems, and radars.
In August 1945, just a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, Sweden’s Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Helge Jung, made a request via newly appointed research officer Torsten Schmidt that the recently founded FOA should find out what was known about those new weapons.[5] FOA's first report to the Supreme Commander in late 1945 was largely based on the Smyth Report, the official US report on Manhattan project and physics behind it, was published on August 12.[6]
Connection between nuclear weapons program and civilian use of nuclear energy [ edit ]
As soon as nuclear bombs became known, both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy drew significant attention in many countries. Immediately after the Smyth Report came out, discussions around peaceful use of nuclear energy in the US began.
Studies of military and civilian use of nuclear energy started in Sweden even before the end of 1945. In November 1945, the Atomic Committee (Atomkommittén, AC) was founded. AC was an advisory committee of experts with the mission to work out a defense plan and outline the alternative pathways for the development of civilian nuclear program (nuclear energy). In 1947, the government established the atomic energy company AB Atomenergi, 57 percent owned by the Government and the remaining 43 percent owned by a number of private companies active in the mining, steel and manufacturing industries. The company's task was to develop civilian nuclear power.[7]
Even though much of the military research was kept in secret, it seems that the connection between the military and civilian projects was initially was not controversial, and necessary because of the lack of available resources and expertise. AB Atomenergi had a close relationship with FOA from the start, and signed a co-operation agreement in 1948. The FOA had already established a research area south of Stockholm (FOA Grindsjön) that became the epicentre for military research and development (R&D).[8] Thus, the Swedish nuclear program emerged as a joint government-business venture quite distinct from other nuclear weapon programs - traditionally solely state-run.[8] When the anti-nuclear weapons movement began to gain influence during the late 1950s and became stronger during the 1960s, the connection between military and civilian nuclear research become viewed with suspicion.
Beginning of the nuclear program [ edit ]
Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces Nils Swedlund and Chief of Staff Richard Åkerman on their first day in office in April 1, 1951
Timeline of the Timeline of the Swedish nuclear weapons program Year 1945 The United States tries to gain a monopoly over Swedish uranium assets.
Atomic bombs are dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
National Defence Research Institute (FOA) is assigned to conduct investigative mission, to collect the existing data on the nuclear issue.
Atomic Commission is founded. 1947 AB Atomenergi is founded. 1948 FOA is assigned to explore the possibilities for nuclear weapons acquisition in Sweden - the actual start of the nuclear weapons program. 1952 Air Force Chief Bengt Nordenskiöld makes public statement on Swedish nuclear weapons. 1953 The United States launches the Atoms for Peace program. 1954 Report by the Commander-in-Chief takes a formal position on nuclear weapons.
The first Swedish reactor R1 is set in operation.
The first Swedish contemplations about whether to purchase nuclear weapons from the US. 1955 The first detailed drafts of Swedish nuclear warhead are completed.
The Social Democratic government proves to be divided over the nuclear question.
Sweden and US conclude the first cooperation agreement on civilian nuclear energy. 1956 A government report suggests that Sweden invests in nuclear energy based on the domestic fuel cycle, the so-called “Swedish line.” 1957 Report by the Commander-in-Chief features a clear position on Swedish nuclear weapons.
The public debate on nuclear weapons takes off.
AB Atomenergi purchases American materials for the Ågesta site to accelerate the civilian nuclear energy program. However, guarantees that it would not be used for nuclear weapons purposes hamper plutonium supplies for the nuclear weapons program.
Swedish contemplations at ambassador's level over the opportunity to purchase nuclear weapons from the United States. 1958 FOA presents two alternative research programs: defense research (S-program) and nuclear explosive devices research (L-program).
First studies of solely military reactors are presented – to insure the plutonium production.
Commander-in-Chief in his annual defense budget report calls on the Government to officially choose the L-program although the Minister of Defense advised against it because of the serious split in the Social Democratic party.
Government rejects the request for the L-program, but recommends funding of S-program under another scheme. The parliament approves this decision. 1959 A working group with the Social Democratic Party offers a compromise in the form of enhanced defense research with preservation of the freedom of action. 1960 The Social Democratic Party Congress accepts the offer of compromise, and the Government issues directives with the suggested conditions.
The United States decides neither to sell nuclear weapons to Sweden nor to support Swedish domestic nuclear development.
Due to the problems with plutonium supply, the cost estimates for Swedish nuclear weapons acquisition increase remarkably. 1961 Nils Swedlund's retirement is followed by the first skeptical views on Swedish nuclear weapons acquisition within the Swedish Ministry of Defense. 1962 The Commander-in-Chief's 1962 report is still in favor of Swedish nuclear weapons, yet not as pronounced as the 1957 report.
Sweden begins to take an active stance in the international negotiations on non-proliferation. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is established. 1965 The 1965 report supports the initiative of Swedish nuclear weapons, but does not contain any concrete proposals on their implementation. 1966 Sweden abandons the freedom of action doctrine, and begins pushing for a non-proliferation agreement. 1967 Sweden begins phasing-out nuclear weapons research. 1968 Sweden ratifies the NPT[9] and terminates its nuclear research with the exception of actual defense research. 1972 Termination of nuclear program is complete as the plutonium laboratory is shut down.[9] 1974 Ågesta reactor is permanently shut down. 2012 3.3 kg plutonium and 9 kg of uranium are exported to the US as part of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative.[10]
In October 1945, FOA made a request for additional funding for studies of nuclear weapons. The funding was eventually granted. Beginning in 1946, Sweden quickly established a well-organized and well-funded nuclear weapons research program (under guise of “civilian defense research”) divided into five distinct areas: research, plutonium production, construction funding for reactors and enrichment facilities, acquisition of delivery systems, and testing and assembly of nuclear weapons.[11] The Department of Nuclear Physics was founded in early 1946 within FOA's department of Physics (FOA 2), and by mid-1946 there were about 20 FOA-researchers and similar number of external researchers engaged in research on nuclear weapons or nuclear energy. Sweden found itself in a favorable position as it was, and still is, very rich in natural uranium. However, the ore grade is quite low (mostly shale), and therefore requires extensive mining and milling. The natural uranium was subsequently supposed to be reprocessed and used as a fuel in the reactors (plutonium recycling).
In 1947, AB Atomenergi (AE) was founded under initiative of the Atom Committee with the goal of building experimental reactors and developing methods to extract uranium from low-grade Swedish deposits for both civilian and military needs. Since 1948, a division of functions occurred between FOA and AB Atomenergi. AE focused on developing methods to separate plutonium from uranium and fission products (reprocessing) in order to allow the plutonium to be used as fuel in the reactors (plutonium recycling). This procedure would enable a more efficient use of the natural uranium.[12] While FOA's uranium activities were carried out, a collaboration agreement was drawn up (with final approval by the Government in 1950) to make sure that military research could benefit from the recently launched civilian nuclear activities.[13]
The actual start of the nuclear weapons program occurred in 1948. In February, the FOA's board decided to turn defense research toward work on nuclear weapons, perhaps because of the divisions that occurred between FOA and AB Atomenergi. Only a few days after the decision, the Supreme Commander, Nils Swedlund, assigned the FOA to explore possibilities for Sweden to acquire nuclear weapons. The exploration was carried out quickly, and on May 4, 1948, the report was finalized with Gustaf Ljunggren (Chief of FOA 1, Department of Chemistry) and Torsten Magnusson (Chief of FOA 2) as signatories. Central in the investigation was that they advocated for investing in nuclear weapons based on plutonium rather than on highly enriched uranium (U-235) since the uranium option turned out to be technically more difficult. The investigation also included a summarized plan for a Swedish nuclear weapons project with primary estimates of time and expenses. According to the report,the time framework was determined by the installation of reactors, mining of the raw material for them and production of plutonium in the reactors rather than the construction of the nuclear weapon itself. The contributing factor for this estimate was the misestimated critical mass of a plutonium pit, believing it to be 20–50 kg instead of the actual 6 kg.[14]
Basic materials [ edit ]
Plutonium ring
In order to create the plutonium needed for nuclear weapons, the plan was to run heavy water reactors where uranium would be turned into plutonium-239 (Pu-239). The basic materials needed in large amounts included, uranium, heavy water, and graphite, materials hard to obtain because of American export controls established to prevent other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. Significant amounts of uranium existed as admixture in the Swedish black shale deposits that had already been used during WWII by Swedish shale oil companies to produce fuel, whose strategic value was first realized following Allied propositions.[1] Ranstad was projected to be a major source of uranium.[15]
Heavy water was primarily thought to be gained from Norway, where the reactors had already been installed. Since Norway also initiated a nuclear program, the Swedes believed they could barter with their neighbor given the absence of high-quality uranium resources in Norway. Under secrecy, Sweden purchased five tons of heavy water from Norway. Later, they planned to produce heavy water at a plant in Ljungaverk. Acquisition of graphite was thought to be straightforward. Access to the required amount of plutonium remained the key technological question throughout the entire Swedish nuclear weapons program.
Already in Autumn 1948, criticism came out in a joint statement by AB Atomenergi and Atom Commission. The FOA reports predicted a military monopoly over Swedish uranium resources to the detriment of civilian research, and that much larger resources were being assigned to plutonium production. The feasibility of the plutonium project was under question. That was the first sign of antagonism of interests between military and civilian nuclear proponents. The plans had been predicated on the idea that each nuclear device required 50 kg rather than 6 kg of plutonium. None of those involved in the project realized that this was, in fact, an overestimation. Although the program was scaled to produce 5-10 weapons per year, given the estimated production of 1 kg of Pu-239 per day, it was actually scaled to produce sixty.[16]
1950s: The Government favors nuclear program [ edit ]
Bengt Nordenskiöld, 1941
In the early 1950s, the rivalry between the United States and the USSR accelerated markedly. Nuclear arms production proliferation increased as significantly as the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1949, and in 1953, their first hydrogen bomb. The Korean War broke out and the US adopted the strategy of massive retaliation following any use of nuclear weapons. This policy boosted the strategic value of Scandinavia as a potential location for strategic bombers within striking distance of the USSR.
In 1952, Air Force Chief Bengt Nordenskiöld proposed that Sweden should move beyond the defensive research on nuclear weapons and their effects. FOA researched the potential acquisition of nuclear weapons. In 1954, Nils Swedlund, Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, publicly declared that nuclear weapons were crucial for the country's national security. The 1954 report discussed new kinds of weapons including autonomous weapons, electronic warfare, and NBC (Nuclear/Biological/Chemical) weapons. Swedlund wrote in the preface to the report that Sweden needed protection and countermeasures against those new weapons, and needed to acquire the most appropriate and feasible ones for Sweden itself.[17] It was also emphasized that Sweden's nonaligned status implied that Sweden, unlike neighboring NATO-members, Denmark and Norway, did not benefit from any nuclear weapons guarantees from a superpower. In his assessment, Sweden’s position between two superpowers and the rapidly changing technological environment, argued for Swedish possession of nuclear weapons.[18] Although the Defense Ministry and Supreme Commander avoided laying out any concrete plans for nuclear weapons acquisition in the 1954 report, even Sweden’s official military publications were openly advocating nuclear armament. Although two years earlier, Air Force Chief Bengt Nordenskiöld had already advocated for Swedish possession of nuclear weapons, his comments were understood to be personal opinion and did not stoke much debate at the time.[19]
The R1 nuclear reactor below the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
The Swedish parliament decided to carry out the heavy water program aimed at producing reactors loaded with natural uranium. The program was called den svenska linjen ("the Swedish line"), and was one of the largest industrial projects in Swedish history.[12] Another feature of the Sweden's nuclear policy was that the program remain mostly under state control.
The “Swedish line” included the following design principles: - to use natural uranium as fuel since Sweden had an abundant stock of uranium; - to use heavy water instead of light water as a moderator; - to be able to refuel the reactor so that the used fuel can be replaced by the Plutonium isotope composition at certain phase of the process. [20][unreliable source?]
The first Swedish nuclear reactor, R1, was started in 1951 and it was placed in a dug out cavern below the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It was a small experimental reactor with a thermal power of 1 MW. The purpose of R1 was not to produce power or plutonium but to gain insight into reactor physics.[20][unreliable source?] Also, the uranium extraction site in Kvarntorp reached its intended production capacity. In 1953, the Swedish scientists realized that the critical mass for the plutonium fueled nuclear weapons had been overestimated and the figure was reduced down to 5–10 kg in a report by Sigvard Eklund, which meant that the production requirement for plutonium was significantly less than it was earlier anticipated. In 1955, FOA concluded that Sweden would be able to produce nuclear weapons once it had a plutonium reactor.[12]
In 1956 a second reactor, R2, was bought from the United States under bilateral safeguards. A third reactor, better known as Ågesta, was designed as a dual-use facility to produce electricity and a small amount of plutonium in a crisis. In 1957, FOA suggested using Ågesta to produce a small number of weapons quickly. A fourth power reactor, Marviken, was set to produce larger quantities of nuclear fuel for an arsenal of 100 weapons. In May 1957, the Supreme Commander gave FOA the task of carrying out a new study of the possibilities to produce nuclear weapons focused on the plutonium option.[12] Marviken was located approximately 150 km away from Stockholm. Initially it was designed as 100 MW pressurized heavy water reactor that had a secondary circuit, where steam is produced from plain water. In the meantime, parallel to the pressurized reactor, a larger and more complicated design of reactor was under way. The alternative construction included superheating mechanism, internal reshuffling machine, and a complex process of boiling water, which ultimately complicated design and raised serious concerns.[20][unreliable source?]
At a Government meeting in November 1955, the question about acquiring nuclear weapons by Sweden was raised for the first time. The opposition Conservative Party called for procurement of nuclear weapons, raising the public salience of the issue. In the 1955 polls, the majority of the Swedish population, the ruling Social Democrats, and the armed services voted in favor of a Sweden armed with nuclear weapons.[12] The Social Democrats were ambivalent: the majority was skeptical about the nuclear weapons program, whereas their leader and the then Prime Minister Tage Erlander leaned toward the nuclear option. The split in the ruling party became public knowledge. In 1956, an anti-nuclear faction of the party made it clear that they would not support the acquisition of nuclear weapons. As the party's crisis deepened in 1957, the majority of Social Democrats and the electorate apparently favored going nuclear. In 1957, the Supreme Commander in his report took an official position on the acquisition of tactical nuclear weapons by Sweden. That same year, the FOA (upon the Chief's request) undertook a detailed study of what would be needed to develop Swedish plutonium-based nuclear devices with estimates for timeframe and costs. Much was related to studies of plutonium and its properties, research that required very complex and highly protected facilities because of plutonium's many hazards.[21]
Tage Erlander 1952
The official position taken by Swedlund in 1957 brought the nuclear question into the realm of public policy debates in Sweden. Initially, the center-right politicians and the media were mostly positive while the social democrats were largely split. During the events that followed, the Government tried again to avoid taking an explicit position despite the fact that the defense position was laid out based on the Swedlund's position from 1957 and tensions were increasing globally. The pragmatic solution was to not directly invest into the development of Swedish nuclear weapons, but to provide increased funding for defense research in nuclear weapons, and to give the term “nuclear weapons” a very broad interpretation.[22]
Nuclear resistance begins [ edit ]
Östen Undén
The United States was concerned with the prospect of a nuclear Sweden, which jeopardized the world with further nuclear proliferation. In 1956, the United States and Sweden signed an agreement on civilian nuclear energy cooperation. The two parties agreed to exchange information regarding the construction, operation and development of research reactors. The Swedish government committed itself to providing the AEC with information regarding nuclear energy developments in Sweden.[23] The deal also implied that the US nuclear umbrella would protect Sweden, and so there was no need for any nuclear arms. In May 1956, the National Federation of Social Democratic Women in Sweden took a stand against nuclear weapons, which heretofore had not been a major public issue in Sweden.[24] Swedlund's position became the focal point for an intense debate in the media during 1957. The FOA's chief director, Hugo Larsson, also helped to energize the debate with an interview in Dagens Eko in 1957, in which he said that Sweden had the resources to build nuclear weapons, which could be completed in 1963-1964.[25] Among the proponents of Swedish nuclear weapons program was Dagens Nyheter's chief editor, Herbert Tingsten, and former Social Democratic Defense Minister Per Edvin Sköld.[26] Even the prospective leader of the Liberal People's Party, Per Ahlmark, was an advocate of Swedish nuclear weapons.[27] Many of opponents of Swedish nuclear weapons development were found on the cultural left. The nuclear weapons issue would appear frequently in the press cultural pages. Meanwhile, among the opponents were Inga Thorsson, Ernst Wigforss, and Östen Unden. The editor of Folket i Bild, Per Anders Fogelström, advocated against Swedish nuclear weapons in the magazine, and published a book “Instead of the Atomic Bomb” together with Social Democratic student politician, Roland Morell. In 1957, they launched a petition against Swedish nuclear weapons, that was signed by 95,000 people and was handed over to Tage Erlander in February 1958.[24]
The polls from the 1960s also reflected a rising public indignation with nuclear weapons program. A grass-root movement - “Aktionsgruppen mot svenska atomvapen”, AMSA (the Action Group Against Swedish Atomic Bombs) - was founded in the late 1950s, and became very successful in its struggle against Swedish nuclear weapon intentions.[28] Being a member of the U.N. Security Council, Sweden advanced a proposal for a nuclear test moratorium in 1957. “The international disarmament discussions and the nonproliferation norms emerging from the mid-1950s onwards and leading in 1968 to the NPT also affected the Swedish public debate and strengthened the arguments against Swedish nuclear weapons acquisition.”[28]
Defense research and design research [ edit ]
In July 1958, the FOA laid out two different research programs:[29] - “S-program” under the title “Research for Protection and Defense Against Atomic Weapons." - “L-program” entitled “Research for Preparation of Data for the Design of Nuclear Explosive Devices." The draft of the L-program was in essence an update of the data collected for the Supreme Commander a year earlier. The S-program, that emerged now for the first time, was described as a program to develop the knowledge about nuclear weapons which required the creation of Swedish defensive doctrine without nuclear weapons, which would be adopted to fight a war in which a nuclear strike could occur. Despite a completely different description of the purpose, the S-program included similar activities as the L-program, except it was stripped-down to around 75% of the cost. The S-program fit both the Chief's goal to acquire nuclear weapons and the Social Democratic Government's ambivalence, which the FOA under its new chief director,
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ers circled in the sky high above.
"Can you see it, Lieutenant?" Kontos, his sergeant, asked.
"I can see it," Irvine said around a Winston tucked into the corner of his mouth.
Rapidly approaching the corridor was their target, codename: Wintermute. From this distance it didn't look like much, the eye couldn't distinguish the individuals that made up its whole, and so it all blurred into what may have been a giant, fleshy worm careering across the desert.
"You really think this will work?" somebody else said. It might have been Martinez.
Irvine didn't know who was being addressed, and didn't want to lower the binoculars to find out, so refrained from sharing his opinion. He thought it would work. It had to work. He hadn't slept in over thirty-six hours, probably could go another day or two if he really pushed it, but by then the skip would reach Vegas and there'd be no opportunity for rest.
A butterfly stirred in his stomach. Through the magnification of the lenses it appeared as if the target was veering slightly from its southeast heading, and could potentially pass north of the butte instead of through the forecasted route. The change — if there was any change at all— was only by several degrees, and may have been distorted by the perspective angle or a trick of the setting sun.
Irvine dropped the binoculars to spare a glance at his men. One look at their faces was enough to convince him it wasn't his imagination. They'd noticed it too.
"Can you get the Chimney Sweep team on the line?" he asked Boyle, his radio operator.
"I think so, sir. They hailed us with the warning. I'll have to—"
The handheld squawked as Boyle reached for it: "Mercury for Man-Eaters. Mercury for Man-Eaters. Come in."
Irvine motioned for the walk-talkie. It was shaped like a telephone on steroids with a whip antenna. A thick cord ran from a socket beneath the mouthpiece to a transmitter that Boyle carried on his back like a rucksack.
"This is Eaters-actual, over," Irvine said.
"Eaters, we've just received word from Chimney Sweep that Wintermute has moved off course. Please confirm, over."
"Roger, Mercury. Target is off course."
Mercury was the Foundation's forward operating base located on the Jackass Flats of Nevada, east of Yucca Mountain. It consisted of a dirt airstrip set between hangers and Quonset huts.
"Copy that, Eaters. We'll get back to you with updated orders. In the meantime you're to continue pursuit."
The response generated groans and hushed protests from a majority of the squad.
Irvine said, "Mercury, you still got some of my men chaperoning the demolition team?"
"That's an affirmative."
"Well, I believe Private Pangborn has an M2 with him. Have him open up with that, see if it draws Wintermute's attention."
"Copy, standby."
A moment later they heard the purr of a heavy machine gun echoing through the defile. Irvine lifted the binoculars. Come on. Come on, you bastard. Take the bait. Take the fucking bait.
But it was too late. The target had skirted around the butte, and was already exiting the M2's field of view, shielded now by the butte's sandstone caprock.
It didn't make any sense. There was nothing in that direction for miles and miles except long-abandoned towns the Foundation had already confirmed were clear.
Had Wintermute anticipated the trap laid for it? Was that even possible?
Irvine returned the walkie-talkie to Boyle, who immediately began relaying the failure to Mercury.
"Saddle up," Irvine hollered, flicking the butt of his cigarette into the sand. "We're riding out."
They piled back into the jeeps and raced across the desert like a convoy of rum runners breaking for the state line. MTF soldiers on motorcycles retrofitted for the terrain covered the rear and flanks of the formation, weaving between the larger vehicles.
Two days. Two days of meticulous planning and preparation, and in less than a minute all of it extinguished, knocked down like a flimsy house of cards. Irvine white-knuckled the steering wheel and threw the jeep into second, gathering speed as they chased down the anomaly. He didn't know what they could do now. Was there even a failsafe for Chimney Sweep? If there was they hadn't deemed to share it with him, and right now it seemed like nothing could stop it.
2
Bruce fell asleep on the plane, lulled by the constant hum of the prop engines. He woke when his ears popped during the descent, and when he looked at his watch he saw only bare wrist. There was a loose pin in the butterfly clasp that sometimes caused it to fall off. He hitched up his pant legs and knelt on the floor, prospecting the carpet with his hands and scolding himself for not getting it fixed already.
It wasn't there. The pin he could see losing, it was small, but not the actual watch, and he was sure he was wearing it because he remembered checking the time when the aircraft took off. It was still dark outside the plane's rounded windows, and for all he knew he could've been asleep for an hour or ten, although it felt closer to the former.
Did someone steal it?
But there was no one else on the plane to ask or confront, and it shortly touched down on the tarmac. A ramp agent boarded and escorted Bruce down the steps and into the back of a Lincoln parked between two runway landing lights. A partition separated him from the driver.
They glided over a paved road that wound furtively through a wooded area. The road was wide, and Bruce guessed it could've accommodated four or five lanes, except there were no markings, and he saw neither a road sign or a house before they arrived at his apparent destination: a large compound that sprang up in the middle of the forest like something out of a fairytale. Bruce felt both overwhelmed and uneasy as the Lincoln was waved through by a guard at a gatehouse. The guard was dressed in a starched military uniform without insignia, and armed with a rifle.
The compound was an impressive example of the Art Deco architecture that had been popular a decade prior, with streamlined features and a façade of chrome, stucco, and Vitrolite. It reminded Bruce of several trainstations he'd passed through, although it lacked the ornamentation he usually associated with the style.
The compound disappeared as the livery car slipped down a ramp into an underground parking garage. They went down a further two levels before stopping in front of a door marked as maintenance access, its corrugated steel shutter rolled up. A tall man wearing slacks and suspenders, the sleeves of his checkered shirt pushed past his elbows, leaned next to the door. Bruce's mouth went dry and he forced himself to swallow. He didn't want to get out of the Lincoln, but the tall man didn't offer him any choice and opened the rear passenger door.
"Mr. Hand," he said, and Bruce immediately recognized the voice. "I'm Leonard. Nice to finally meet you."
He'd never met either Dr. Keller or Leonard before tonight, at least not in person. His handler had originally been an avuncular old man by the name of Dennis who had a head of thick white hair and a penchant for tweed jackets. Their interactions had been limited to brief conversations, usually conducted over the phone, once or twice a month. The topics varied but had always been related to market communication. About six months ago he'd been passed to a new handler identifying himself as Leonard, and initially everything had gone as expected, but over the past week the frequency of the phone calls suddenly ballooned to the point of harassment, and the discussions abruptly shifted to subjects in which Bruce had no experience. He was frequently asked bizarre and hypothetical questions, such as how he would go about concealing the deaths of thousands of American civilians from the general public, or what he would do if he was the only person to know that a nearby volcano was about to erupt.
"Please follow me," Leonard said.
Bruce grabbed his suitcase and allowed himself to be led through a painfully bright hallway, up three flights in an elevator, past a waiting area with a receptionist desk — deserted at this late hour — and through a series of rooms marked with biohazard and radioactive trefoil warnings. Down a flight of stairs. Left turn. Right turn. He began to suspect the layout was purposefully confusing and intended to disorient. They arrived at another door, this one with a Judas window, and a guard on the other side had to buzz them through.
They entered what appeared to be a dormitory, with tiled floors and fluorescent lighting. Numbered doors were evenly spaced along a hall that stretched the length of half a city block. All of the doors they passed were closed, the cadence of heavy breathing emanating from a few of them. At door number 306 Leonard stopped. He opened the door and flicked on the light.
Bruce's assumption of a dorm was accurate, although one he'd expect to find in a prison or state-run hospital. The floor was bare; walls cinderblocks with a coat of white paint slapped on. There wasn't even a window or desk, just a locker at the foot of the bed. At the sight of the thin mattress with its cheap motel sheets Bruce's anger and resentment flared, escalated by the shame he felt toward his own fear. This wasn't what he'd agreed to at all when he'd first met Dennis and signed his name on the dotted line.
"Hey, what the hell is this?" he said, backing out of the room. "I'm not sleeping in here. If you don't want to pay for it I'll spring for a goddamn hotel room myself."
He glanced over his shoulder, back down the hallway. The guard sat in a chair reading a newspaper and picking his nose, and Bruce had the disturbing revelation that he wasn't there to keep people out.
He was there to keep people in.
Leonard said, "The nearest hotel is more than fifty miles away, and there're no roads leading from the facility, other than the one you took to get here from the airport, of course. No, the only way in or out is on foot, by air, or by sea. We have a dock, but there're no boats berthed there tonight, and I'm afraid the current would be fighting against you. Are you a good swimmer, Mr. Hand?"
"No roads? Where is this place?" He'd been wondering this for quite some time, but hadn't had an opportunity to ask since departure. When he'd inquired about his destination to anyone back in New York they'd all responded that they didn't know.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Hand, I'm not authorized to disclose that information."
Bruce laughed. It was either that or scream. He would've strangled Leonard if he didn't have to crane his neck just to look him in the eye. The bastard reminded him of Lurch.
"Am I a prisoner?" he forced himself to ask. He didn't really want to know the answer, but the uncertainty was even worse.
"No, you're not. If you'd like to leave right now we won't physically stop you. We'd certainly try to convince you otherwise, and I personally advise against it. We hope to have the matter that necessitated this meeting resolved within a day or two, and after that you'll be returned home, along with a sizable gratuity based on your performance. Your cooperation, of course, is expected and could further expedite that resolution."
Leonard spoke monotonously, and yet there was an implacable strength projected through his stoic and infuriatingly polite mien. He would've made a great butler, and again Bruce was reminded of the mute Lurch from the Addams Family cartoons he used to read in the New Yorker.
Bruce said, "I never consented to this CIA covert bullshit, okay? I'm an American citizen. I'm a taxpayer. You can't treat me like this. If you don't take me to your supervisor immediately I'll contact my lawyer."
"Mr. Hand, we are not the CIA."
"What? Who the hell are you, then? FBI?"
"No." And as if that settled the matter Leonard directed his attention back to the room. "This is where you will be staying while you're here with us. Number three-oh-six. Remember it. There're no locks on the outside, but inside you'll find there is a deadbolt if you're so inclined. I do apologize for the lack of amenities."
Oh God, thought Bruce, have I been working for the KGB this whole time without knowing it? That would certainly explain the room's austere décor. Is he going to address me as comrade and tell me that if I don't play along they'll report me as a traitor? A vivid image flashed in Bruce's mind. In it he hanged from a gibbet, his pants dripping with urine, face bloated and tongue lolling on his lips like a dead fish left out in the sun. A crowd of people cheered and waved American flags.
"Who are you?" he repeated, voice reduced to a whisper.
Leonard ignored him and pointed to the end of the hall, opposite of where the guard idly thumbed through the sports section. "Down there you'll find the bathrooms. Why don't you go there now and freshen up? Shave, shower, do what you need to do. I'll meet you back at your room in half an hour and we'll begin."
"Begin what?"
"Your orientation. Welcome to the Foundation, Mr. Hand."
3
The moon was rising, had reached halfway to its zenith, when Echo Unit from the Mobile Task Force "Man-Eaters" arrived at Silver Creek. At the tail end of the last century, following the discovery of a silver vein, the town had experienced a moderate surge in immigration. But by the middle of the roaring twenties the lode had been exhausted, the mine was shut, and the population dwindled until the post office eventually closed in 1948.
Irvine parked the M38 next to a tar paper shack behind what had probably served as the town's church, community center, and town hall, all rolled into one. He hopped out, and to the pair of jeeps pulling up along side of him said: "Tsavo and Bruin, you men continue the chase. We'll meet up with you in a couple of minutes. Good hunting." The rear tires spun in the sand before catching, and the two vehicles drove off to the east.
"Leslie," Irvine called. He thumbed the wheel of his Zippo and cupped his hands protectively around the flame, lighting a cigarette. "Go around and lower the pressure in the tires by another pound or two. They're still sinking."
All of the men in the task force were expected to serve in a secondary capacity. Leslie — whose real name was Lesniewksi — pulled double-duty as the unit's mechanic.
"I'm on it," Leslie said and notched a salute.
Irvine strolled to the edge of the Silver Creek cemetery and swept his eyes over the grounds, trying to solve this new puzzle. The cemetery was illuminated by the jeep's headlights, a half acre of land overgrown with weeds and scrub, enclosed by a split-rail fence.
Sergeant Kontos approached a section of fence that had been knocked down and pounded into splinters. "Our target definitely came through here," he said, stating the obvious. Behind him Anderson began rolling with his camera.
Irvine nodded. He entered the cemetery through a small gap that had once been a gate — he could still see the rusted hinges screwed into the post on the left — and threaded his way between the plots. Brambles and Arizona thistle snagged at his boot laces and pants. Far away a group of coyotes yipped and howled at the moon, while a cold wind combed the desert and drove the top layer of sand across the flat like a rushing blanket of mist.
He counted fifty freshly exhumed graves, coffins torn open from the inside and the bodies missing. It was as if they'd suddenly been resurrected and clawed their way out.
"That must be why she zigged when we needed her to zag," Martinez said, jettisoning a wad of snuff from the pocket of his cheek. "Smelled the fuckin' corpses."
"They don't need to be…y'know, alive?" Boyle asked.
"See for yourself," said Martinez, indicating the shallow holes.
The Foundation had scoured the surrounding land for any human within a fifty mile radius of the Chimney Sweep corridor. They'd closed highways and mandated the evacuation of towns under the pretense of impending tornados. After airlifting two men from a broken down International Harvester on Route 32 and a group of paleontologists digging up fossils outside the town of Charlton, the Reconnaissance and Survey department had announced the area was clear except for the presence of limited Foundation personnel.
Irvine hunkered down next to one of the pits. He removed his hat — a black Resistol — and scooped up a handful of the disinterred earth, inhaling the rich clay scent. The dirt was cool and damp; it hadn't been exposed long enough for the air to dry it out yet.
"You think Martinez is right, sir?" Boyle said.
He tipped his hand and let the soil spill like a cataract from his spaded fingertips, hollowly pattering against the lid of the empty casket. On an impulse Irvine pulled off the ivy that covered the grave's marker, a flat piece of granite with a horseshoe engraved in one corner. The marker had been split into four fragments. The epitaph was worn but — when combining all pieces — still legible. It belonged to a veteran of the Spanish-American war.
Irvine exhaled twin contrails of blue cigarette smoke from his nose. "Yeah. Yeah, it seems Mr. Martinez is right."
A splash of red caught his eye among a patch of Indian tea. He plucked it from the leaves, thinking it was an odd place to find a child's toy, turned it over in his hand, and immediately dropped it.
Kontos said, "What? What was it?"
"Nothing," he said, rubbing his hands on his pants.
What he'd mistaken for a ball was actually a small head lacquered in blood, like a candied shell around a rotten apple. A millipede crept across its cheek. The lips were missing, and its milk teeth were just starting to come in through the gums. It wasn't from the graveyard, as it couldn't have been dead for more than a day or two. Irvine should've known better than to touch it. He told himself that even if Chimney Sweep had been successful it wouldn't have made the baby any less dead. Death didn't work on a sliding scale.
He sighed, put his hat back on and stood up. Nobody said anything. The Foundation was apparently unaware that dead bodies were affected by the phenomenon. They'd only searched for living people, and had performed a cursory examination of the Silver Creek ghost town before declaring it empty. Now the anomaly was off course, and tonight, instead of celebrating a successful mission over a couple of pints, Man-Eater was stuck wandering around the desert in the dark.
"So how come it didn't take all of them?" Kontos said.
It was a good question, one that Irvine had been mulling over himself. Almost half the plots had been left unscathed. And although most of the headstones had been toppled from their plinths and laid smashed to gravel among the weeds, there were a few that he could still make out. He compared the surviving stones on some of the undisturbed graves to the ones that'd been exhumed.
He said, "Most of the ones it left alone are older. A lot older. Look, this one's death is dated 1876. Maybe they're too far gone for it."
"It likes the fresh meat," Martinez said.
Irvine shrugged. "I don't think taste has anything to do with it. Boyle."
"Yes sir?"
"Get on the horn with Mercury. Tell them the news, and that it seems to be dependent on the state of decay." Anticipating the base's response, Irvine added, "And no, we don't know at what point in the decomposition process they become…ah, inedible. Inconsumable."
He could see it unfold if he closed his eyes — the skip battering its way through the graveyard, plucking the corpses from the ground like so many rows of ripened crops.
"Leslie!" he shouted.
"What?" came the response as Leslie returned from the jeeps, wiping grease off his hands with a rag.
"You finished deflating those tires?"
"Yes sir. Also topped off the fluids, fixed Damnatio's headlights, and replaced the fan belt on Mugger. If you guys continued this circle-jerk much longer I probably could've gotten a fresh coat of wax on 'em, too."
He was exaggerating, there was no time to complete all that, but Irvine chose to ignore it. "All right. No one likes a show off."
Leslie stuffed the rag in his back pocket. "Roger wilco. We do have one problem though, sir."
"Just one?" he said. "Well, that comes as good news to me. Come on, spit it out man."
"We're low on fuel."
Irvine frowned beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. "How could that happen?" he said.
"It's Chimney Sweep all over again. We didn't plan on having to drive beyond the corridor."
"So how much gas do we have?"
Leslie said, "Less than half a tank."
"And where will that get us?"
Leslie completed the simple arithmetic in his head. The fuel tanks held fifteen gallons, and in this terrain the jeeps got about fifteen miles to the gallon. "We're looking at around a hundred, a hundred and ten miles. Maybe."
"What about the bikes?"
"The bikes get better mileage but they've got smaller tanks, so it evens out."
They might make it on that. Then again they might not. There was no way for them to condense the number of M38s to four, nevermind three, to try and save on fuel. Not without breaking up the task force. There were sixteen members of Man-Eaters in the unit, and what little space in the jeeps they didn't occupy was packed tight with their supplies, gear, equipment and ammo. The rear seat of the jeep that Lesniewski drove had been removed specifically so that extra canisters of gasoline could fit.
If it came down to it, Irvine would just have to siphon gas off from the other jeeps and leave the rest of the unit behind.
Hopefully it wouldn't come down to it.
"Come on," Irvine said, "I don't know about you but I've had enough of this place. Let's get the hell out of here and catch up with Tsavo and Bruin."
The wind would've long erased the tread marks left by Tsavo and Bruin. Not that it mattered. The skip itself wasn't hard to find.
All you had to do was follow the trail of the dead.
4
Bruce was ushered into a large office, with bay windows providing a vista of the forest outside and polished furniture made from Brazilian rosewood. He felt a pang of jealousy at its luxury and understated opulence. It was nicer than his own Lower Manhattan office. The scent of tobacco and lemon lingered in the room. Sitting behind a massive desk, like a defending soldier ensconced behind the walls of a fortress, was a man with more salt than pepper in his hair. Thick bifocals hung from a lanyard around his neck.
He stood when Bruce entered and held out his hand.
"Mr. Hand," he said. Bruce shook the proffered hand. "So good to finally meet you. I'm Dr. Keller. Please sit down, sit down."
Bruce sat in a Morris chair with fluted woodwork.
Dr. Keller waited politely before taking his own seat. He stared intently at Bruce while his hands explored the topography of the desk, probing until they found what they were looking for: an antique meerschaum pipe. He removed a pinch of tobacco from a nearby tin, packed the chamber and sparked a match, all the while his hooded eyes remained focused on Bruce. He took several drags from the pipe and shook the match out. "Hand, Hand, Hand," he said. His gaze finally broke as a cloud of smoke occluded his face. There was a not entirely unpleasant aroma to the smoke, hinting at Asian spices and cloves and citrus. "Hand. That's an interesting surname. I don't think I'm familiar with it. May I inquire about the origins?"
Bruce crossed his legs. "It's Jewish. It was Handelsman but was shortened when my family emigrated to America." He was tired, had gotten only four or five hours of sleep after orientation, and the coffee he'd drank earlier that morning had long since worn off. "And yours, doctor? What is the origin of Keller?"
"Ah. I believe I've put my proverbial foot in it."
"I think you mean you've put your foot in your mouth."
"Yes, probably. I've never quite grasped American idioms. But before we get off on the wrong track — or, if we already have, please allow me the opportunity to steer us back onto the right one. My name is German, as I'm sure you're aware. I left Düsseldorf in nineteen-twenty and came to the United States, probably for many of the same reasons as your own family, if I can be presumptuous. I have a passing interest in genealogy, which is the only reason I asked the question. My maternal grandfather is of Jewish descent, and I assure you there is no ulterior motive regarding eugenics, and certainly not the Übermensch or any other nonsensical tripe preached by the Third Reich." He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers over his paunch. The leather made a dull sound as he shifted, like crumpling a paper bag. "There. Does that… clear the air?"
Maybe the doctor was telling the truth. It was undeniable that he spoke English fluently, albeit with an accent. But after everything Bruce had learned in the past twelve hours about the Foundation, he wouldn't put it past the shadow organization to forge immigration documents in order to get a Nazi scientist on the payroll. He tried to remember what he knew about Dr. Keller. What was he a doctor of? Bruce racked his brain. Leonard had mentioned it in one of his phone calls.
It came to him like a metaphorical light-bulb going off above his head — psychology.
And what could the Foundation possibly want with a German psychologist?
The explanation was obvious: manipulation. Influence. Propaganda. Indoctrination. Proselytization. He could go on and on. The Germans had practically invented the field, although if you asked Bruce it was more of a pseudoscience.
"Did I use that correctly? Clear the air?"
Before he could respond Dr. Keller raised his index finger, requesting Bruce wait a moment. He leaned over and rifled through the contents of a desk drawer. "That reminds me, the cleaning crew found this on the airplane. I believe it's yours?"
He pulled out Bruce's silver Breitling watch and gave it to him. "Thank you," Bruce said, nonplussed. He hadn't expected to ever see it again. The time on the watch matched the clocks in the building, (Or was it the other way around?) implying that he'd remained in the same time zone.
Doubtful. He'd left New York in the middle of January. Looking out Dr. Keller's office windows, evergreen trees soared until their saw-toothed peaks were lost in clouds. The ground was hidden under a shag rug of moss and lichen. That same moss bearded tree trunks; it draped like shawls from branches and bent saplings under its weight.
It didn't look like anyplace Bruce had ever seen. It looked prehistoric. Primordial.
He inspected the clasp on the band of the watch, and to no surprise found that the loose pin was still secured in place. That meant they were either an incredibly thorough cleaning crew, to find it and put it back, or it hadn't fallen off in the first place.
He realized that the doctor had been speaking to him. He slid the watch onto his wrist, fastened the band and looked up. "I'm sorry? I didn't catch that."
"I was just saying that Leonard told me he's caught you up with our current predicament."
"Yes. I mean, as much as possible. It's a lot to take in, and I'm not really sure what I can do to help. I'm an account executive with an advertising firm."
"It's quite simple: we need your expertise, Bruce. May I call you Bruce?"
He nodded his acquiescence.
"Good. And please, call me Felix. We don't have time for the trappings of formalities. We've got work to do." Dr. Keller retrieved a manila folder from a cabinet, opened it and thumbed through several pages, then slid a sheet of paper over to Bruce. "That came in a couple of hours ago."
Bruce picked it up and read it.
STATUS REPORT DEPARTMENT OF STRATEGIC OPERATIONS AND COMMAND Foundation Base Camp Mercury, Nevada CLASSIFICATION: Top Secret MEMORANDUM FOR: Operation Ranger Date: 01/25/1951 From: Robert O'Neill, Col USAF (Ret)
L4 FD Senior Field Coordinator To: Wesley Peebles, S.O.W, C.S.D.,
L4 FD Div Operations and Strategy Target: Wintermute is ACTIVE. At current rate it will reach LAS VEGAS (POP 50000) no later than 01/29/1951, and possibly as soon as 01/26/1951. Impact: SEVERE. Civilian casualties continue to climb and are currently estimated at 75,000 with expected fatality rate higher than 99%. DEFENSE CONDITION 3. Potential for K-CLASS scenario is SLIGHT to MODERATE. Resources Deployed: MTF Gamma-5 ("Red Herrings") is currently ENGAGED. MTF Epsilon-4 ("Slanted and Enchanted") is MIA and PRESUMED DEAD. Artillery strike success is VERY LOW. SUPERFORTRESS aerial incendiary bombardment SUPERFLAMER and BLOCKBUSTER met with LOW success. HIGH EXPLOSIVE bombardment was also VERY LOW. Target Wintermute is highly mobile and evasive. Project CHIMNEY SWEEP is a COMPLETE and UTTER FAILURE. Target Wintermute failed to arrive at predicted location. Schedule unlikely to allow for second attempt but CHIMNEY SWEEP II has been implemented and is currently underway. Project ENKIDU has been implemented and is currently underway. Project TOPEKA moderate success and continues. Resource Update: MTF Eta-8 ("Man-Eaters") has replaced MTF Epsilon-4 ("Slanted and Enchanted"). Acquisition Request: IMMEDIATE deployment and discretionary approval for package ABLE.
Finished reading, Bruce frowned and tried to figure out what it all meant. As far as he was concerned it might as well have been written in a foreign language.
He returned the sheet to the desk. "I'm sorry Dr. Keller — excuse me, Felix — but I still don't see why I'm involved."
Dr. Keller handed him a second slip of paper. Bruce sighed but indulged the doctor once more.
Notes: The below transcript was broadcasted throughout the state of Nevada in violation of FCC regulations. Source: NOAA Weather Radio Project Codename: TOPEKA, Operation Ranger Original Broadcast Date: 01/25/1951 Voice Message: …THIS IS THE NEVADA WEATHER SERVICE… …THIS IS NOT A TEST…
…THE NEVADA WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED A TORNADO EMERGENCY FOR… LANDER COUNTY, CENTRAL NEVADA. HAZARD…DEADLY TORNADO. AT 245 PM CDT…NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE ACQUIRED VISUAL CONFIRMATION OF AN EXTREMELY LARGE AND DEADLY TORNADO ON THE GROUND IN THE TOWN OF RIVELL, MOVING SOUTHEAST TOWARD PRISCILLA CITY, LANDER COUNTY…THIS IS AN EMERGENCY SITUATION. SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY! …THE NEVADA STATE EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT HAS ISSUED MANDATORY EVACUATIONS FOR…
ABBINGTON, LANDER COUNTY
PRISCILLA CITY, LANDER COUNTY
SANDY SPRINGS, LANDER COUNTY …RESIDENTS OF THESE TOWNSHIPS ARE ORDERED TO VACATE THEIR HOMES AND GO DIRECTLY TO THE NEAREST MUNICIPAL BUILDING. THE NATIONAL GUARD AND NEVADA STATE DEFENSE FORCE HAVE BEEN DEPLOYED AND WILL TRANSPORT YOU TO A SAFE LOCATION. THIS IS NOT A TEST. YOU ARE IN IMMEDIATE AND DEADLY PERIL! MOVE DIRECTLY TO THE NEAREST MUNICIPAL BUILDING IN YOUR TOWN FOR EVACUATION. YOUR LIFE IS AT RISK…YOU ARE IN MORTAL DANGER! …THIS MESSAGE WILL REPEAT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS…
Topeka, he thought. God, they must think they're so clever. He admittedly felt a bit like Dorothy himself, a stranger in a strange land. Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
He said, "Okay, so I think I'm starting to figure this out."
During a recent phone conversation with Leonard, Bruce's answer to a random question about what he'd do to conceal the deaths of thousands of Americans had been to fault a natural disaster. Like an earthquake or a flood. Or a tornado. He'd rationalized that you couldn't blame anyone or anything for a tornado, except maybe Mother Nature or God. The voice out of the whirlwind and all that.
Based on the two documents they'd taken his speculative, off-the-cuff remark and applied it to the real-world. Real people. Real people who were really dead.
Suddenly Bruce didn't feel so good.
He still couldn't comprehend what the Foundation expected from him, despite Dr. Keller glossing over it with generic flattery. His expertise? What the hell was he an expert in that would be remotely applicable, that would make him in any way qualified? Didn't they realize that he dealt with client acquisition and juggling the management of accounts? He spent most of his days triaging deadlines and finding work-arounds for budgetary constraints.
"Look, I think you've got the wrong guy. I'm an account exec, which means—"
"We know exactly what it means. We also know that you didn't start off as an account executive and that you graduated with a bachelors in design arts. I won't detail the highlights of your career — I'm sure you're already familiar with them — and in return I'd ask that you don't sit there and tell me with a straight face that you're not the right man for the job."
"The kind of work you're talking about… I haven't done it in a very long time."
"No, but out of all the marketing and advertising specialists we keep on retainer your assistance has proved most valuable."
Bruce clenched his teeth. "What do you want from me?"
Dr. Keller placed his pipe on the desk. "I'm asking for your help, Bruce. I thought I made that clear. I'm asking for your help coming up with a story to protect the public from this threat. You've already given me one successful cover, which is the reason you're sitting across from me today. But we're not out of the woods yet. If this thing reaches Las Vegas, we need to be prepared."
"I don't understand why you didn't just stop it a week ago."
"We tried," Dr. Keller said, grimacing. "We didn't have much information to go on. We still don't, but we tried. We thought — based on certain properties — that it may be the Gerasene demon, commonly referred to as 'Legion'. You may not be familiar with the story, it's from the New Testament, but it's no longer relevant. It was believed it had to be that or a similar Judaic-Christian entity. The Tower of Babel, although not an entity, was also conjectured. We deployed a task force to the impacted area, call-sign Slanted and Enchanted, which specialized in theological phenomena.
"The task force was dispatched to exorcise it only if containment proved inviable. A Catholic priest was sent along as part of the team, and we flew in pigs all the way from Iowa so he could cast the demon into their bodies — don't laugh, it's worked before. Obviously it didn't this time, and so we resorted to burning plants and animals, even gave it wine and gold as an offering." Dr. Keller paused and tweezed the bridge of his nose as if it pained him. "They're all dead now. Slanted and Enchanted, that is. Well, you know, you read the report. We didn't… we didn't know about the area of effect it had. After that aerial and ground bombardment commenced, but it was already too late."
They were interrupted by a knock at the door. "Come in," said Dr. Keller.
A young man with a buzz cut, dressed in a uniform similar to the one Bruce had seen the guard at the gatehouse wearing last night, stepped into the office. No rifle, but a pistol was holstered on his hip. He crossed the room in four swift strides and handed a letter to Dr. Keller, then spun on his heels and left without uttering a word.
Dr. Keller tamped his pipe and lit another match. He produced a letter opener and sliced the envelope open in a single, practiced stroke and unfolded the two pages contained within. He put on his bifocals and cleared his throat.
"What?" Bruce said. "What is it?"
Dr. Keller handed the pages over to Bruce. ""We know what it is," he said.
5
The anomaly shed body parts like a molting snake shedding its skin. Arms and legs, heads and genitals — never a complete body, just the parts.
Buzzards and crows orbited in thick clouds, gliding on thermal pockets of air. Irvine couldn't see them; sunrise was still an hour or so off, but he knew they were there all the same. They were always there. It was a goddamn feast for the scavengers and carrion eaters. The skip's stench wafted for miles downwind
|
it starts getting pretty hairy. Watch King of Kong and then see how you match up to world champs.
Donkey Kong Jr.
One or two players (sequential)
Arcade vine-climbing action
Arcade crossover like this always mean practicing the fundamental movements and situational awareness that, in bygone days, would have saved you a quarter. The levels are designed to trip you up, so pay close attention.
Double Dragon II: The Revenge
One or two players (simultaneous)
Beat-em-up in the streets action
The original may be the one we remember, but if we’re honest, it was kind of a clunky game. The sequel is faster, less obtuse and supports two players at the same time in the story. It’s nowhere near as good as River City Ransom, but then again, what is? Pro tip: “Mode B” turns on friendly fire if you want to fight.
Dr. Mario
One or two players (simultaneous)
Match-3 medical puzzler
Fever or Chill? Choose your soundtrack, find a partner and get ready to rage at each other as each fills the other’s flask with bacteria, or viruses or whatever those things are. Like Tetris, this game is extremely easy to learn but difficult to master.
Excitebike
One or two players (sequential)
Side-scrolling motorbike racing
One of the all-time NES greats, Excitebike is still a ton of fun. Get a friend, design some outlandish courses and revel in the satisfyingly responsive controls and tricky strategies for winning. Pro tip: Never let up on the turbo.
Final Fantasy
One player
Classic JRPG
The original, with its many pleasures and many, many pains. RPGs have evolved a lot since the first Final Fantasy, but the fact is all the critical pieces are here: a grandiose story line, stats and gear to obsess over, gold pieces, fantastical creatures and — if you’re smart — a lot of grinding for gold and XP. Remasters on other systems actually improved this game a lot, so unless you want the full experience, seek out one of those. Pro tip: Save really often. Especially near wizards.
Galaga
One player
Arcade space bug shoot-em-up
Another arcade port. Galaga is a great game, and this is a good way to hone your skills so you can impress your friends at the arcade (you still go, right?). Practice your timing, remember the bonus wave orders and don’t be afraid to let your ship get captured. Pro tip: Tapping fire is faster and more precise than holding it down.
Ghosts ‘n Goblins
One player
Controller-throwing action
This is one of the games that lent weight to the term “Nintendo Hard.” It’s not as bad as Battletoads, but unlike the arcade Ghost ‘n Goblins, you can’t keep pumping quarters in to keep going. You have to defeat Satan with the lives you get, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll have bite marks on your controller long before that happens. Pro tip: Prepare to die.
Gradius
One or two players (sequential)
Konami shoot-em-up
Gradius still plays extremely well, though it’s far less frantic as modern shmups. This is less about twitch skills and more about knowing and preempting the unique threats posed in every level. It’s still incredibly hard, by the way — I checked. Pro tip: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, start.
Ice Climber
One or two players (simultaneous)
Climb-em-up
Another of the early arcade-style NES games, this one has simple controls that may strike you as restrictive. Play through the first couple of mountains and you’ll see how devious it gets. Don’t play this with anyone you’re not willing to leave behind if they can’t make the jumps.
Kid Icarus
One player
Mythological action RPG
One of my favorite games of all time, Kid Icarus is a long and difficult, but very rewarding, adventure that controls beautifully and hides quite a bit of gameplay depth. Keep a FAQ around to help you out with the hidden scoring mechanisms and pot-dwelling Gods of Poverty in the treasure rooms. Pro tip: Fear the Eggplant Wizard!
Kirby’s Adventure
One player
Brutal enemy-devouring action
This was one of the later and most advanced games on the console; inhale your enemies and wield their own power against them. Great graphics and controls, plus smart and cute level design. Don’t let the puffy looks fool you, though, this is a challenging title.
Mario Bros.
One or two players
Turtle-kicking sewer action
Here’s one to pull out to settle grudge matches. You can work together or sabotage each other — just don’t waste that POW block. That is inexcusable.
Mega Man 2
One player
Robot-mastering action
This was the correct Mega Man to include: the first was rough around the edges and the ones after this weren’t quite as laser-focused on the core gameplay. It’s got great music, solid controls and it’s just the right level of “Nintendo Hard.” Pro tip: Do Metal Man first and then wreck everything with his weapon. Even himself.
Metroid
One player
Subterranean exploration action RPG
It’s truly amazing how advanced the original Metroid was. Not only does it control well and have a huge, labyrinthine map to explore at your own pace, but the music and mood are amazing, too. If you’ve never played through Metroid, you’ve got a treat ahead of you — but be prepared for a serious challenge. Having save states is immensely helpful with this game. Pro tip: Rather than look up a map, get some graph paper and make your own — it’s more fun that way.
Ninja Gaiden
One player
Cinematic ninja action
This game and its sequel really pushed the storytelling on the NES to new heights, with narrative-driven levels and detailed cut scenes in between. I happen to like the sequel better, but the original is great (and punishing). Pro tip: Pay close attention to the actual size and duration of your sword slash.
Pac-Man
One or two players (sequential)
Dot-munching arcade action
I really don’t have to review Pac-Man, right? I guess it’s worth saying that the NES version is a decent port of the original, though you will miss having a joystick.
Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream
One player
Navel-punching action
Notice something about the title? Yeah, it isn’t Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! The game is exactly the same, but you fight a palette-swapped Tyson at the end — they made him white and changed his name to Mr. Dream. Sad, really, but how often did you even get that far? Pro tip: Turns out this is a great party game.
StarTropics
One player
Action RPG
An underappreciated gem, StarTropics combines interesting action with puzzles and a full RPG overworld and story. Thinking of playing through Zelda or Castlevania again? Why not try this instead? I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Super C
One or two players (simultaneous)
Run-and-gun action
It’s incomprehensible to me that Nintendo chose to put this one instead of the classic Contra on this thing — a major disappointment, really. But Super C is still a good game, even if it isn’t as universally loved as the previous one. Pro tip: Fire is actually good in this one.
Super Mario Bros.
One or two players (sequential)
Mushroom-clambering platform action
This one definitely doesn’t need any introduction. It’s just as good as it always was. Looking for an extra challenge? Watch a few speedruns and see how you stack up.
Super Mario Bros. 2
One or two players (sequential)
Inexplicable egg-riding action
Do yourself a favor and replay this one — all the way through. It’s deeply weird, super fun and has great level design that’s totally different from the other Mario games. Probably because it’s just an asset swap with a game where you play an Indian family going through a book of stories. Pro tip: Toad is the man on digging levels.
Super Mario Bros. 3
One or two players (sequential, mostly)
Genre-defining platform action
Still one of the best games of all time, and always worth playing again. Take advantage of the game save ability and get past World 4 for once! Bring a friend, it’s basically twice the lives and you can learn from each other’s mistakes. Pro tip: Watch “The Wizard.”
Tecmo Bowl
One or two players (simultaneous)
Extremely realistic football action
It may not be quite as detailed as Madden 2017, but schooling your friends is just as fun. Pro tip: Pit computer players against each other to simulate (and predict) the post season.
The Legend of Zelda
One player
Triangle-collecting action RPG
Never heard of this one. Doesn’t look very good IMHO.
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
One player
Underappreciated action RPG
So, back in the 1980s they weren’t sure how video game sequels should work, so they basically made the second Zelda a completely different game. It’s not what Zelda fans wanted, but the truth is it’s actually a really good game! The translation is weird and some of the puzzles are random, but with a FAQ handy I think you’ll find Zelda II is a lot of fun if you just pretend it isn’t a Zelda game at all. That shouldn’t be hard, because it really, really doesn’t resemble one. Pro tip: I am Error.
Wow! That was a long review.
In case you scrolled down here to get the gist (which I actually put above the games), it’s this: If you love NES games, buy this thing. It’s a great value, it has a few (though not nearly all) of the best games available for the system and it plays like a dream — apart from some minor gripes regarding the save system. There will probably be more, with different selections, but this is easily good enough to recommend. Buy a second controller (possibly a wireless one) and go to town.Rust Belt Reboot Has Downtown Cleveland Rocking
Enlarge this image toggle caption Joshua Gunter/The Plain Dealer Joshua Gunter/The Plain Dealer
Almost 11 years ago, Phil Alexander opened his company, BrandMuscle, in the affluent Cleveland suburb of Beachwood.
We can leave our apartment and walk five feet to a restaurant to get something to eat or to go shopping.
The company sells marketing software to corporate clients worldwide, and its offices have a lean, energetic vibe, with 20-somethings tossing around ideas in multiscreened meeting rooms or a comfortable coffee bar.
The place is young. It's hip. And it's leaving town. A few years ago, you might've chalked that up as another economic blow to northeastern Ohio. But BrandMuscle isn't moving to a major metro area like Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, but instead about 20 miles away — to downtown Cleveland.
"Downtown has a new energy, a new vitality; things that we really didn't see a few years ago," Alexander says.
It sure doesn't sound like the place that was long the butt of jokes by late-night comics, and there are similar stories coming out of Detroit, St. Louis and Buffalo. Blue-collar towns seem to be attracting a new generation of residents looking for an affordable urban lifestyle.
One of the wake-up calls for Alexander came when two of his employees asked him if he knew anyone in downtown Cleveland because they were on a waiting list for an apartment.
"We were actually on a waiting list for four months before we got in," says Veronica Tarasco, who now shares one of the hippest addresses in the city – East 4th Street – with co-worker Kristen Babjack.
On most nights, that part of downtown is bustling with restaurants and live music.
"We can leave our apartment and walk five feet to a restaurant to get something to eat or to go shopping," Babjack says.
Enlarge this image toggle caption John Kuntz /The Plain Dealer John Kuntz /The Plain Dealer
A brand-new casino, just a couple blocks away, has brought even more people into the neighborhood. And Tarasco, who used to live on the East Coast, says there are plenty of other entertainment options.
"We have all of our arenas and sporting areas and concerts all in one pretty-much walkable area," she says. "If you go to a Giants game out in New York, if you're going to the game, you're going to the game. You're not going to tailgate and then get on the train and go back into the city."
An Evolving Downtown
Ari Maron is a partner in MRN Ltd. a family-owned real estate development, construction and management company. His father first started developing properties on East 4th Street 20 years ago. Back then, he says, it was better known for its wig shops, drug deals and prostitutes.
The Maron family bought up much of the old, empty office space above the street and converted it to apartments. He says local developers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.
"The apartments are all filled [and] there's new apartments being built every day," Maron says. "I think what we're really doing is riding the wave of a national trend of people rediscovering cities."
Richey Piiparinen, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University, has been tracking that trend in northeastern Ohio and nearby states.
"A lot of young people in Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh whose parents grew up in the inner city, and whose parents left during the white flight movement — they have this attraction to the roots that they never knew," Piiparinen says.
Jim Russell writes an economic development blog about Rust Belt refugees who are looking to come home. He confirms that downtown Cleveland is booming. He says recent Census migration data for the area has been positive to the tune of 400 to 500 new residents.
"That's a pretty significant chunk of people, who tend to be young and college-educated," Russell says. "That's a win."
Piiparinen warns, however, that it may be just one win in a much larger battle for repopulation.
"This is a very complex problem, but getting an inflow of talent into a city is one way to tackle that," he says.
Piiparinen says young people like Veronica Tarasco are a blank slate, not burdened with memories of all the old Cleveland jokes.
"My friends on the East Coast, they call names to Ohio and Cleveland and stuff, but I think it's just a bad rep that we get," she says.
For Cleveland and some other hard-hit Midwestern cities, that "rep" is starting to change.As I write this, the most downloaded item for Amazon’s Kindle is a novel by Jenna Bayley-Burke called Compromising Positions. Here is part of the plot description: “David Strong knows how to do a lot of things—run an international fitness company, finesse stock portfolios and stay out of emotional entanglements. That is, until he gets tangled up with Sophie Delfino and her Sensational Sex workout. He’s supposed to help her demonstrate Kama Sutra positions for her couples-yoga class. … And his co-instructor unexpectedly tests his control to the limit.” If that nudge and wink aren’t clear enough, this is attached: “Warning: This is one exercise program you won’t need to consult your doctor before beginning—unless he’s hot and available for house calls. The Kama Sutra isn’t for the prudish or faint of heart, and neither is this story.”
You won’t find Compromising Positions anywhere on the New York Times or USA Today best-seller list. So how did it become the No. 1 item on the Kindle, slightly outpacing Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom? Price. To buy the paperback on Amazon costs $10.20, plus shipping and handling. The Kindle version? $0.00, which includes instant delivery. Christina Brashear, publisher of Samhain Books, explains that she usually makes one title in a series available as a freebie for two weeks, betting that some readers will pay for future titles. Based on the performance of August freebie Venus in Blue Jeans, it’s reasonable to assume that some 35,000 people will download Compromising Positions during its freebie run. While few would dare try Samhain’s giveaway tactic with a physical book, the tactic seems to be working digitally.
Many—including the publishing industry—would not label Compromising Positions pornography, and with good reason. For decades, romance and women’s fiction novels have featured fairly explicit sexual passages, which readers apparently feel comfortable with as long as they are surrounded by what one Amazon commenter labeled “a tastefully written story of deep love and emotional commitment.” And so the stellar performance of this Kindle novel represents little more than the savvy technological marketing of a longstanding genre.
But as you scroll down the list of Kindle offerings, you can’t help but notice all of the steamy writing that seems to be targeted at men—an emotionally uncommitted genre which, if not exactly new, is associated with book publishing less commonly than with Penthouse Forum. Take, for example, a novel called Office Slave, in which an attractive female CFO is found to be embezzling from her manufacturing company. Rather than go to prison, she agrees to her boss’s demand to become the company’s sex slave. She is forced to wear slutty (or no) clothing at work; he films her in intimate acts; he instructs male coworkers to beat her physically for perceived transgressions; and she has sex with everyone imaginable, including factory workers (to reward productivity gains), prospective customers (to secure new contracts), a coworker (as a retirement gift), teenage boys (who deliver lunch to the office), etc. And—whaddya know?—no matter how physically abused and mentally degraded she is, she finds she actually enjoys it.
Presumably, some small percentage of women might be attracted to this material. But much can be adduced from reader comments, such as, “I don’t see how any woman could enjoy this … just seems like every man’s fantasy.” There’s no point in dancing around it: Amazon is distributing men’s erotic fiction, and its bargain-basement Kindle pricing—in many cases, this material, too, is given away for free—means that some of it shows up on “best-seller” lists.
Is it porn? Well—would you tell your mother you were reading it? Here’s another test: There are tens of thousands of sex scenes in novels which you could imagine being photographed or filmed in ways that would not necessarily be pornographic. But any faithful filming of, say, the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom—and, I would argue, Office Slave—is going to include moments of pure porn. And if that doesn’t meet your definition, there are Kindle books for five bucks or less dealing with incest, bondage, rape, and bestiality. Sooner or later, everyone is going to hit a Potter Stewart threshold.
Like the Kindle itself, the marriage of porn and e-reader is relatively new; much of this digital erotica has been added to the Kindle library in the last 18 months or so. From a technology standpoint, anyone who’s seen Boogie Nights or Middle Men could predict this development. Every time a major new content platform—print, film, cable, VHS, DVD, the Internet, mobile phones—has experienced massive growth, it has either been driven by a porn boom or at least brought the porn industry along for the ride. (The biggest exception is probably radio.)
But there are other aspects of this phenomenon worth chewing on. Verbal (as opposed to visual) porn for men is probably a niche taste. Yet the growing ubiquity of e-readers could unleash latent demand for nonvisual pornography. The Web long ago eliminated the embarrassment factor of having to purchase erotica at a store or newsstand; stored in digital form on an e-reader, it needn’t be seen by partners, families, or anyone at all.
Another question: How comfortable is Amazon with being identified with this material? There are thousands of pornography sites on the Web (paid and free), and while you can’t access them without some kind of device and software, you’re not pointed toward them in any meaningful way. The Kindle, however, pushes Amazon over the line from mere enabler of erotica to promoter and producer. Many of these e-titles are specifically being published by Amazon; others are sold by “Amazon Digital Services,” meaning that Amazon—based on its usual publishing arrangement—is getting a considerable cut of the sales.
For those who’ve criticized Apple’s prudish filters, Amazon’s open-mindedness may be something to celebrate (although Amazon, too, has come under attack for the way that it categorizes gay- and lesbian-themed books). And, certainly, as a loss-leader strategy, giving away racy stories might be an effective way to sell more Kindles. It’s hard to believe, though, that Amazon can wander too far down the path of peddling cheap-to-free porn without encountering pushback from Christian and conservative groups. When and if those protests come, Amazon will have to make a decision: Is it valuable to the company to goose interest in the Kindle with erotica giveaways, or will the presence of e-books like Compromising Positions at the top of Amazon’s charts sully the e-reader’s reputation?
Like Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.Steven Motlop and Geelong are in no rush to start contract talks
STEVEN Motlop's future is unlikely to become clear until late in the season with the forward and Geelong still in no rush to start contract negotiations.
Motlop was put up for trade at the end of 2016 after a frustrating year when he reported for pre-season training overweight and then struggled to perform consistently despite finishing second at the club for goals (38).
The forward attracted early interest from Richmond, but despite his game-breaking talents no serious trade suitors emerged, with his 2017 salary – believed to be up to $600,000 – a complicating factor for rival clubs.
Motlop is set to become a restricted free agent at the end of this season, but both he and the Cats are content to delay serious contract talks for now.
The 26-year-old reported to 2017 pre-season training in excellent condition and has pleased the Cats this season with his improved defensive efforts and adherence to team structures.
Over the first nine rounds, he has averaged 20.3 possessions a game – 31.3 per cent of them contested, up from 25.7 per cent last year – and is ranked first at the Cats and equal second in the AFL for running bounces (24), third at the club for goal assists (seven), and fourth for goals (11) and inside 50s (32).
However, as good as Motlop has been at times this year, he has again struggled for consistency.
It's believed the Darwin product is happy at Simonds Stadium but understands more than ever after last year's trade period that AFL football is a business.
Motlop's restricted status will give Geelong the right to match any rival offers made when this year's trade period opens in October.
Selected at pick No.39 in the 2008 NAB AFL Draft, Motlop has played 121 games and kicked 164 goals for Geelong.
He finished second in the Cats' 2015 best and fairest award and was in the 40-man squad for the Virgin Australia AFL All Australian team in 2013 after kicking a career-high 44 goals.Fence. Weedpatch, CA. 35°14'17" N 118°54'53" W #geographyofpoverty | Photo: Matt Black.
When we say a certain percentage of Americans can't find a particular place on a map, we're not just complaining about their ignorance of geography. Knowing where something is, being able to point at it -- this is a primary way of understanding a locale, seeing it not as an abstraction, but as a real place with real people.
Rural photographer Matt Black knows this phenomenon well. His Geography of Poverty series presents starkly compelling black-and-white photos from California's Central Valley, including Kern County. The project lives on Instagram, where he geotags each photo's location and often includes demographic info to help bring the message home. His account has over 65K followers.
"In a lot of ways, it's a condensed version of what I've been trying to do with photography from the beginning, which is to shoot the Central Valley and put these communities literally on the map," he says. "It's a very simple thing to say, 'Look, this is where it is,' but I think it connects things in a way that sometimes photography can struggle with, because photography is all about abstracting things and condensing things and making a very distinct visual statement, but sometimes that gets de-connected from reality."
Storefront. Taft, CA. 35°8'31"N 119°27'21"W #geographyofpoverty | Photo: Matt Black.
Being able to see something on a map is a metaphor, but it's also a real feeling. "By linking the photo in this very concrete way, you say, 'Boom, here it is,'" he says. "'This is where Taft is, this is where Weedpatch is.'"
Taft and Weedpatch are both in Kern County, where 22.9 percent of people live below the poverty line. Weedpatch's 2,658 residents have it particularly rough, with 46.8 percent below the line.
In 2013 the United States Census Bureau set the poverty level at $11,888 for an individual and $23,834 for a four-person household.
These low income levels extend across the Central Valley.
Front door. Taft, CA. 35°8'33"N 119°27'23"W #geographyofpoverty | Photo: Matt Black.
"That's serious poverty with lifelong implications across the board," says Black. "And that's right here in California. Three hours away is Apple headquarters to the north. Three hours south is Los Angeles."
In Orange County, only 12.4 percent of people live below the poverty line, with the number creeping up to 17.8 percent in Los Angeles County. Santa Clara County, home to Apple headquarters, has 10.2 percent of residents below the line.
Black was born in the Central Valley, and he's seen the region's prospects dry up more and more in comparison to other places in California.
"The big, big, big change is water," he says, "and it's more than drought. It's been this steady, constant decline, how much water is available for agriculture... When I was a kid, there was just so much flood irrigating, literally just pouring water out on the ground, that you'd walk outside in the middle of summer, in July, and it'd be a hundred degrees outside, and it'd be humid from so much water evaporating. And that's gone."
Shopping cart. Bakersfield, CA. 35°22'23"N 119°1'6"W #geographyofpoverty | Photo: Matt Black.
Black has been documenting the region for 19 years, with photo essays appearing in The New Yorker, Mother Jones, and Vice, but his Instagram project might be bringing more attention to the issue than any traditional media outlet ever could.
The success broke through some of his initial skepticism with the medium: "When you think of Instagram, what you think of is food and puppies and kittens and whatever else. How are images of poverty going to be received on this?"
Judging from the interaction on his Instagram account and the attention the photos have received, the answer is definitely better than expected.
"It says something to me about humanity that people are willing to engage with this stuff in that way," he says. "Serious issues do have a future in this digital space we're creating."
The Los Angeles Center for Photography is hosting "An Evening With Matt Black" on February 26. You can follow his Geography of Poverty series on Instagram.
Texas migrant in her yard. Teviston, California. The Kingdom of Dust | Photo: Matt Black.
Plum harvest. Kingsburg, California. The Kingdom of Dust | Photo: Matt Black.
Protesters stopped by a security guard. Mendota, California. The Dispossession | Photo: Matt Black.
Jobless man shaves at his shantytown home. Fresno, California. The Dispossession | Photo: Matt Black.
Dig this story? Sign up for our newsletter to get unique arts & culture stories and videos from across Southern California in your inbox. Also, follow Artbound on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.How can a civilization "win"? A good civ hopefully feeds, educates and provides a rich future for its inhabitants, but there are epoch-defining moments in any society, a tectonic shift from one way of living to another that will be remembered forever. Civilization: Beyond Earth imagines what those might look like in the far-flung future with new win conditions that take your civ to the fringes of science fiction.
Winning a game of Beyond Earth is different to previous Civ games. Victory conditions are tied to a new quest system that gives you a series of objectives to complete before your final bid for a victory, and there's a strong element of risk/reward to the five paths. Co-lead designer Matt Miller says "We decided early on that we wanted victory in the game to be something you start a little bit earlier, and a bit of a gamble. This is it, you're taking your shot, you're making your run and be very dramatic."
Let's take a look at each one, and examine some strategies that'll help you get ahead of those pesky competing factions.
Domination
A classic win-state for conquerors, domination invites you to capture every faction's capital city. According to Firaxis, the "cornerstone of a Domination victory" is production. By researching technologies that improve the efficiency of your factories, you can cut down the time it takes to get troops on the field and steamroller the futuristic armies of your enemies.
Civilization V players will recognise the one-unit-per-hex combat of Beyond Earth, but there are significant differences, especially in the different military approaches of Beyond Earth's affinities. Harmony players can field units that incorporate the strange creatures that inhabit the planet's surface, which are a match even for a Purity faction's levitating gun platforms. The machinist elements of a Supremacy army work better when networked. Make sure your units are adjacent in formation to get the most out of them.
Also bear in mind high-level spies can be pressed into service as devastating saboteurs. A suitcase nuke or a well-placed Siege Worm thumper can undo a city in a single stroke. The aggressive path isn't as subtle as some victory conditions, but it will give you a chance to use Civilization: Beyond Earth's most explosive gadgets.
The prestige of discovering and making first contact with a sentient alien race is enough to earn you a win in Civilization: Beyond Earth. It's not easy. You'll need a little luck and a lot of persistence to decipher the Progenitor code, beam the contact signal into deep space and establish a link with the precursor race.
First you have to find the code. Scout for Progenitor Ruins and use your explorers to plant expeditions to examine them. These investigative sites have a chance of finding a copy of The Signal among the mysterious inscriptions carved on these monuments. Alternatively, there's a chance you could find a fragment of the signal by scanning space from orbit. In Beyond Earth you can launch satellites into a strategic orbital layer. They normally convey bonuses to units and cities beneath them, but if you build a Deep Space Telescope it'll dutifully scan the cosmos for clues as to the Progenitors' whereabouts.
If you'd rather not rely on luck, you can research the Transcendental Equation, though you'll need a strong scientific infrastructure to support this highly advanced research. You only need to achieve two of the three methods listed here to achieve the victory, so roll the dice with exploration missions while shoring up your research. A lucky expedition could put you in touching distance of victory relatively swiftly.
Transcendence
The Transcendence victory is the most environmentally friendly victory condition. The study of alien biology reveals an interconnected consciousness that binds the biomatter of the entire planet into one giant organism. If you manage to make contact with that entity, you'll shuffle humanity into a new era of progress, and win the game in the process.
Powerful scientific understanding is the key to quickly attaining Transcendence. Transgenics, Swarm Intelligence and Nanorobotics are the three key pieces of research you need, which means building lots of academies, and other structures that add to your research power.
Trading can also boost research so set up trade routes early with whoever you can—trade relationships become more lucrative with time. Also: pay close attention to any nearby business enterprises. These independent organisations set up shop in the wilderness and can give you free technologies and decent science bonuses if you establish contact with a trade envoy.
Transcendence is a victory option for factions that pursue the Harmony affinity. You can accelerate the progress of your Mind Flower by building Mind Stems and Xeno Sanctuaries in your cities as you bring together the best of human ingenuity and the power of humanity’s new home.
The Promised Land
The Promised Land and Emancipation victories are two different takes on the same idea. Through the construction of a Lasercom Satellite, both victories seek to reestablish contact with Earth. They're co-lead designer Will Miller's favourite ways to win. "It's not just 'I build this thing and I win,'" he says, "it's 'I build this thing, and you turn it on, you have to protect it and all the other players know you're gunning for it. It's a neat twist on winning Civ.'"
The Promised Land win condition envisions your alien planet as Earth 2 in waiting. It's your duty to prepare the planet for habitation and bring Earth's inhabitants through the portal to the verdant paradise you've built.
But how best to achieve this? First you have to build and launch the Lasercom Satellite, of course. The Promised Land and Emancipation victories require you to defend this fragile orbital unit with everything you have. Combine the bare minimum of technological advancement with a strong defensive military presence to keep your orbital Wonder alive.
The Promised Land victory is an expression of the Purity affinity. The Purity civ seeks to preserve humanity in its current form, untouched by the influence of alien life or consciousness-altering technology. In a way, The Promised Land represents the ultimate conquest victory for the Purity player, pulling troops across the stars to colonise the new world.
Emancipation
The Emancipation victory also requires a Lasercom Satellite, but this win condition treats Earth as a neglected, broken motherland to which advanced humans are destined to return. Your job is to bring salvation to the lost people of Earth with your superior technology, by force if necessary.
Thematically, it's an expression of the Supremacy path, which imagines what would happen if humanity embraced technology completely and started augmenting the human form with bionic gadgetry. Instead of bringing Earth to the new planet, you're taking the new planet to Earth. That means you'll need to send troops through the portal to do some conquering, for the greater good, of course.
As you'll be sending troops into the portal and defending it at the same time, you'll need a lot of military units, which means strong production. Set up trade routes between your own cities for a boost in both production and growth, and turn your civilization into one gigantic military factory.
Those are the five ways to ultimately win a campaign in Civilization: Beyond Earth, but the means by which you achieve them is your choice alone. Which victory will you pursue first?By of the
A Grant County judge on Monday ordered state Sen. Jon Erpenbach to turn over unedited emails for the court's review, as part of a public records suit filed against the senator two years ago.
Earlier, Erpenbach (D-Middleton) had turned over emails the MacIver Institute requested in 2011 -- but with the names of the senders blacked out. The request was for emails concerning Act 10's changes to collective bargaining for most public employees. The MacIver institute wants to know whether the emails reflect improper political activity by public employees, on public time using government computers.
Each side filed requests for summary judgment in the case. Grant County Circuit Judge Robert VanDeHey denied both motions but did order Erpenbach to provide unredacted copies of the requested emails within 30 days for an in camera inspection.
According to VanDeHey's 12-page order, Erpenbach argues that as a state senator, his interpretation of the Open Records Law in redacting the emails is not reviewable by the court, under the separation of powers.
Even if it were, he says, he balanced possible harrassment of the senders against the public interest in knowing their names and determined the latter did not outweigh the former.
VanDeHey quotes liberally from a Wisconsin Supreme Court case that found that even emails sent by public employees from government computers during work hours may not be disclosable under the public-records law if they are of "purely personal" nature. But if, upon his private review of the emails, he finds they reveal violation of law or policy, they might have to be disclosed -- with the senders' names.
The institute is represented by the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty. President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg said “We are heartened that the Circuit Court affirmed the status of these emails as ‘records’ under the Open Records Law and made clear that the law applies to legislators like Senator Erpenbach.”The June issue of Vogue includes the Features Director's struggle to cook a few outrageously expensive vegan meals for her affably useless husband. It includes the line: "It was all down to me, it seemed, and pretty soon I was having a chickpea-induced nervous breakdown." Oh, honey.
After Peter, Features Director Eve MacSweeney's husband, experiences serious heart problems, his doctor recommends a vegan diet. Since Peter "likes cooking in the virtual sense — watching chefs on TV" (don't we all), MacSweeney decides to dedicate all of her time to cooking vegan meals that entice her husband's picky palate. "I found myself on a treadmill of food preparation, my evenings — previously finely sliced between spending time with the boys, making dinner, and pursuing my own interest and social life — consumed by toiling over the stove," she writes (in a piece that's only in print). What was she doing in there? Hasn't she ever heard of lentils?
Problem Number One (hashtag #Vogue
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hundreds. You can read them all in full over here.
However, to make things easier to follow, we've started a new blog for the session. Do feel free to add your questions here if you haven't already asked them - but don't worry that we're ignoring your questions if you posted them on the old blog. Not at all. They've all been read - although, of course, it would be almost impossible for them all to be answered – and you'll find Neil in the comments field from 4pm, where he'll be replying to some of them.
Among the most popular queries have been those asking if Neil will do another Doctor Who episode in the future, which doctor is his favourite, and whether the script will be released either in a print or audiobook form. There was a great question from @slrome114 about where or when Neil would go if he stole a Tardis, and an interesting thought about which medium Neil would most like to write Doctor Who in, from @cameronkieffer. Lots of you are wondering who Idris was previously, and whether or what her name means – as well as asking what it was like to write the Tardis' first ever dialogue.
Join us from 4pm as Neil takes to the comments and answers some of those questions for you.
You asked, Neil answered
Click on the link to go to the full answer. We've shortened some questions, just to make things a bit easier to follow
@SPT777: Why did you use the Tennant-era TARDIS as the alternate control room? I would have loved to have seen an earlier version?
So would I. But I was not able to reach any of the earlier producers in time and ask them to keep their sets up …
@inconsistentlysane @megamisswho @Sphinx24 @JosieLondon @AndrewFB @AJCunningham @Nancelarrikin @DManning18 @Pphotography @Vamp61616 and others: Will you write another episode? If so, do you know what it might be about? Would you consider becoming a regular DW writer?
I don't know. I'd love to write another episode: this is DOCTOR WHO we're talking about …
@emlynmb: Was this the one great Who story you've always wanted to tell or are there many which have been brewing since childhood?
I've always wanted to go deeper into the TARDIS. Don't we all? …
@CameronYJ: Which Doctor Who episodes have you watched and wished you'd written them?
I love being a member of the audience …
@cameronkieffer: If you could write Doctor Who in any medium (tv, comics, limericks in grungy bathroom stalls) what would be your preference and why?
TV. Doctor Who is a TV show …
@DanVine: Is Doctor Who more difficult or easy to write than the average script?
I think it's harder. Most scripts have a consistency of tone, and standing sets, and you know what's in there.
@nacarrell, @HowardShum, @Sphinx24 @hayheyley: Did you have total creative control? Or a storyarc to work to - and did that change when this episode became part of season six? Anything you wanted to do but couldn't?
Nobody has total creative control. You're always up against the practicalities
@Willwebbful @Valamist @llincathryn @SarahR89: Who was Idris before? How did she get to the asteroid
You know, in early drafts we learned a lot more about Idris …
@thorngirl: Didn't the Doctor once regenerate from just a hand? Auntie had the Corsair's hand attached to her, can the doctor regrow the Corsair from this?
The Corsair's arm (kidneys, spleen etc) is on a bubble universe
@dholiday: Was it made clear exactly what happened to House? I feel his fate was left a little ambiguous, I imagine his essence still floating around out there....starving maybe...but still alive...waiting for food.
In almost all the drafts of the script until we reached shooting, they buried Idris's body.
@Acey90: If there are dozens of new control rooms that the doctor hadn't even seen, does this mean that the plan is to just keep going with the regenerations and ignore the rule of 13 bodies?
It's interesting, that rule. It was obviously bendable to begin with
@A1batross: Am I being petty if I ask how the TARDIS was translating language if it had been removed and stuffed into a pretty lady? Or was the asteroid-demon politely speaking English?
For the same reason the doors opened and closed, and the whole of the inside of the TARDIS hadn't become the same size as it was on the outside …
@NevarAnoi: What happened to the souls of other TARDISes?
They were put into the heads of people who had wound up being sucked through the Rift-Plughole and were not expecting what happened to them …Food produced near the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan could be heading to British supermarkets due to loopholes in safety laws, an investigation has revealed.
Security experts warned the UK’s food import regulations are not strong enough to prevent products contaminated with radiation from entering the country.
Foodstuffs containing radiation typically have low levels of cesium and radioactive iodine, both which are mildly carcinogenic.
Contaminated products such as tea, noodles and chocolate bars have already been exported from Japan by fraudsters using false labels.
An investigation by the Independent newspaper discovered there is a risk such food may have already arrived in the UK due to loopholes in safety regulations.
The report follows revelations in Taiwan last month that more than 100 contaminated products from Fukushima were being sold in stores under false labels.
According to the China Post, imported soy sauce labeled as ‘Tokyo-made’ was in fact manufactured in prefectures surrounding Fukushima that are subject to export restrictions.
The scandal caused public outcry, prompting Taiwanese officials to introduce new import regulations.
Food produced in the ‘danger zone’ around Fukushima prefecture must be declared and tested for radiation before being exported and on arrival in the UK.
According to the Independent, the system relies on honest certification and reports of fraudsters attempting to pass Fukushima foods off as from elsewhere in Japan has raised suspicion over import security.
“I suspect what has happened in Taiwan might well have already happened in the UK,” a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts and principal adviser to the London-based food safety consultancy Shantalla, Alastair Marke, told the paper.
“Intermediary supply chain middlemen can buy food in bulk and package and label as they like – before shipping them to the UK.
“Although we have adopted one of the world’s most comprehensive and stringent traceability laws, the UK has virtually no control over how foods are processed, manufactured and packaged in Japan.”
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was the site of a nuclear meltdown in March 11, 2011, triggered by one of Japan’s largest earthquakes.
The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), admitted in October 2012 the company failed to take adequate measures to prevent potential nuclear disasters.
Radioactive fallout has contaminated crops in the region surrounding the plant, while ‘radionuclides’, which are transferred through soil into vegetables or animals, may build up over time.
“There is a risk that radioactive food is getting on to the UK market,” the Institute of Food Safety Integrity and Protection’s Eoghan Daly told the Independent.
READ MORE: Robot sent to Fukushima reactor core records fatal radiation levels (VIDEO)
He added the potential health impact of consuming contaminated food is relatively low, but not entirely negligible.
Japan’s Health Ministry told the Japan Times food exports are regularly checked for radioactive contamination.
The government department said between April 1 last year and March 1 this year, around 292,000 samples were tested for radioactive cesium. Some 502, or 0.17 percent, exceeded the regulation level.
According to the World Health Organization, cesium can linger in the human body for decades and increases the risk of cancer.
Radioactive iodine, another material found in nuclear fallout, increases the risk of thyroid cancer, particularly in children. However it quickly decays, meaning most of the radiation is gone within two weeks.
A robot sent into the primary containment vessel of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Monday detected radiation levels of 9.7 Sieverts per hour, or enough to kill a human within one hour.
The TEPCO robot was expected to be operational for 10 hours, but died within three hours of starting its mission.
News of the ongoing problems in Fukushima come as a court in Japan halted the relaunch of a nuclear power station in Fukui prefecture on Tuesday.
Judges sided with residents, who sought an injunction against the Takahama plant’s reopening on safety grounds.Josh Miller/CNET
Galaxy Gear
JK Shin, the co-CEO of Samsung, just had to have thein lime green.
Samsung executives had spent the last few weeks before the public unveiling of Gearfinalizing various colors for the smartwatch band. At first, Samsung planned only to make Gear in black and white, to ease the production process. But some key execs were convinced that it needed more variety, more splash, especially since a smartwatch is as much about fashion as it is tech. The marketing team decided to add "rose gold" and "wild orange" into the mix, while the sales team suggested "mocha gray."
But with just a few days before the launch, Shin, who heads the mobile division, decided to add lime green too, according to people familiar with the development process. No one was going to argue with the boss.
The 11th-hour decision forced the company to scramble to get samples ready for the September 4 unveiling, which took place at Berlin's IFA consumer technology trade show. It couldn't get enough demo units for the exhibition, and the lime-green version became the hard-to-find gadget on the showroom floor.
That Samsung could pull off such a change in so little time underscores the impressive speed at which the Korean behemoth can move. With Gear, the company managed to get everyone, from Shin down to the engineers, moving as a single entity to get a brand new product out in roughly a year's time. It's a stunning feat considering that most smartphones take a year and a half or more to develop.
Galaxy Gear, of course, is no mere smartphone. It represents a new area for Samsung and is the company's answer to the white-hot trend of "wearable computing." The introduction of Gear also marks an important shift in the company's position in technology: long known as a "fast follower" that's able to pick up, emulate, and even improve upon existing industry trends, it is now moving to cut its own path with the unproven watch.
While many companies have been working on wearable computing devices, Samsung is the largest mobile player to come to market, beating out Apple, which reportedly has been working on an "iWatch."
The reaction so far, however, has been tepid, the lack of capabilities and compatibility a possible victim of the Gear's rapid development time. CNET editor Andrew Hoyle said the Gear represents "style over substance" and criticized the lack of e-mail and social network support, weak battery life, wonky voice command feature, and limited compatibility with other devices (it currently works only with the Galaxy Note 3 and the 2014 edition of the Galaxy Note 10.1, but will eventually support other Samsung phones).
"Samsung's take on the smartwatch has some potential, and it does get some things right, but its inability to perform truly'smart' functions means it falls far short of expectations," Hoyle said.
Hoyle isn't alone. The Verge, Engadget, USA Today, and other publications also have voiced concerns about the product -- particularly its $300 price. Many acknowledged that it represented a decent first step for Samsung, but they still weren't sold.
Regardless of the early reaction, Samsung appears committed, and, ultimately, of course, consumers will decide if they like the Galaxy Gear. Either way, Samsung knows the Gear may not sell well initially, but it's trying to create an entirely new market as smartphone growth slows.
Moving as one
Once Samsung makes a decision, it throws all of its efforts behind it and moves faster than almost any other technology company in the world. It takes some companies two years to create what Samsung can make in a matter of months.
That's partly due to Samsung's authoritative management structure, which in many ways resembles the Steve Jobs model of operating a business. When a top executive makes a call on something -- such as device color -- the company scrambles to execute. Also helping its speed: the ability to design and manufacture most or even all of the components in-house.
Shara Tibken/CNET
This isn't Samsung's first attempt at a watch. Its engineers and designers have been working on concept devices and actual products for years. The company launched its first "watch phone" in 1999. Samsung tried again over the years, but all were flops.
But interest in smartwatches picked up with the introduction of devices such as the Pebble, and as reports surfaced in December that Apple was hard at work on a smartwatch of its own. For its part, Samsung says it began working on Gear before the rumors popped up.
In the case of Gear, the company started testing concept designs in early 2011. Key features and the decision to move forward with a product came in part from surveys Samsung conducted more than a year ago, said Young-hee Lee, the Samsung executive vice president who oversees mobile marketing.
Samsung didn't ask people if they wanted smartwatches. Instead, it sought to find out more about what people find annoying with smartphones. Samsung concluded that a big concern for people was missing out on things in the time it takes to get out their phones, such as not being able to take a photo fast enough. That contributed to plans for a camera in the Gear band.
Once Samsung had that survey data in hand, it was time to get high-level executives on board. It's unclear who spearheaded Gear -- Samsung won't say -- but top executives championing Gear early on included Shin and DJ Lee, president and head of sales and marketing for Samsung's mobile business. Once top management made the decision to build the product, things started to come together quickly.
"We put all things together and said let's just go for it," Young-hee Lee told CNET.
Snacking on Samsung's "lunch box"
Samsung's design team suggested the current device about a year ago, but it was slow going until this year. The US team, for instance, only saw a simple sketch on a piece of paper shortly after January's CES. The company got really serious about building Gear during the first quarter, said executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Samsung designers, speaking during a panel at the IFA show in Berlin, said they considered more than 100 designs before settling on the model unveiled in September.
In the couple months before launch, Samsung handed out Gear prototypes, dubbed "bread boxes" or "lunch boxes," that run on software and components similar to the final device but that look different in terms of the hardware, according to several people who saw those products. The company used to provide actual working prototypes with hardware similar to the end product, but Samsung tightened security starting with the Galaxy S3 to cut off leaks to the media. In the case of Gear, one bread box was in the form of a wearable, but it was made of black plastic and was much bulkier and heavier than the final product.
Most people working on the device -- including those within Samsung and others at external partners -- didn't know what the actual product looked like until Gear's launch on September 4 at IFA.
Andrew Hoyle/CNET
"We'd been working on prototype hardware that was big and bulky," one app developer, who didn't want to be named, told CNET. "Over in Berlin for the Unpacked event, we were a little nervous. We hoped it wasn't this huge, 3-pound weight. We were happy to see how far they'd gone on the design when Gear showed up."
Samsung took other steps to keep its smartwatch project secret. The company required app developers working on Gear to limit the number of people in their offices who had knowledge of the device, even telling some to lock the bread box in windowless rooms in their headquarters. Within Samsung, too, security was tight. Those assigned to the project had their ID badges coded with a certain color to designate that they were part of the team. In meetings, everyone would have the same color on their badges, for example, to make sure only approved people attended.
Lining up developers
Despite the tighter security, Samsung was mindful of ensuring that developers had the support they needed. Executives from Samsung's Open Innovation Center -- a new group focused on startups and led by David Eun -- met with app makers in the US starting in late June to talk about Gear and to try to persuade them to develop for the smartwatch. Many of the US apps came from OIC partnerships, though Samsung hasn't disclosed the total number.
Some early Gear apps include Banjo and Glympse, a couple of location-sharing apps; EasilyDo, a smart-assistant app; Path, a social-networking app; and Pocket and Zite, a couple of news-reading apps. Other apps on Gear include the MyFitnessPal RunKeeper and the TripIt travel app, as well as bigger names like eBay and the Evernote note-taking app.
"There's a general excitement around wearables and a general excitement around Samsung," said Marc Shedroff, vice president of Samsung's Open Innovation Center and the executive in charge of forming partnerships with startups. "Between those two things, we didn't have to shake the trees too hard to find partners to launch with."
Now playing: Watch this: Meet the Samsung Galaxy Gear
Samsung distributed bread boxes to app makers from about late June until early August, giving most developers about a month to create their Gear apps. The developers communicated directly with the Korean engineering team working on the device, and engineers would respond to requests at all times -- day and night.
"We'd send an e-mail over and get a response within hours," one app developer said. "I think the Gear team worked 24 hours a day."
Last-minute tweaks
Samsung repeatedly made changes to Gear's hardware and software before launch. It frequently overhauled the user interface, including changing the color scheme, how gestures work, how users access features, and other items. A week before launch, in fact, the user interface looked entirely different from the final product, said one Samsung executive who didn't want to be named. The app layout had resembled the standard grid of Android icons, which the executive said was "more traditional and less clean." Now, the apps show up as tiles similar to Microsoft's Windows Phone interface.
Samsung even made tweaks to the hardware -- altering the screws on the top of the smartwatch -- just days before the unveiling.
Finally, there was Shin's command to add lime green as an option for the Gear, and the frantic rush to get the device ready for IFA early last month.
With Gear now going on sale around the world, and hitting US stores Friday, Samsung has an even more daunting task: persuading consumers to pay $300 for what amounts to a flashy accessory for their phone. Consumers are fickle, after all, and can make decisions just as fast as Shin can decide that he wants lime green.Barcelona (CNA).- A comparison between Picasso and Romanesque art will be one of the highlights of The National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC)’s 2016 season. Besides this, other exhibition centred on Luis “el Divino” Morales, Renaissance painting, 20th century photography and features on several Catalan artists, such as Lluïsa Vidal and Ismael Smith, will complete the MNAC’s agenda for 2016. The museum also announced the postponing of its upcoming Baroque and Renaissance exhibition, originally planned for autumn 2016, to spring of 2017. The MNAC’s director, Pepe Serra, celebrated that the museum is finally “starting to have a normal planning rhythm for a museum of its size” which will allow the MNAC’s calendar to synchronise with “other international museums”.
The MNAC reviewed what its 2016 exhibitions would consist of, although the showings unofficially begun in December of 2015. The star exhibition of the season will be ´Picasso and Romanesque Art´, a joint venture with the Picasso Museum in Paris. This showing will explore influences between the work of the Spanish painter and the art of the Romanesque period. The painter was in fact well acquainted with the movement thanks to his stay in 1906 Gósol, a village in Catalonia, and a visit to the MNAC itself in 1934. The exhibition will take place in the section of the museum dedicated to Romanesque art, with the objective of allowing the observer to establish “possible similarities” between the two.
Other outstanding examples of the programme include a temporary exhibit, featuring 19 recently acquired works (given by Antonio Gallardo Ballart) which will subsequently be included into the permanent medieval and Renaissance art collection. Patrons can also look forward to an exhibition dedicated to the Renaissance painter Luis de Morales, i.e. “Divino Morales” (as he was known), which is a product of the MNAC´s collaboration with the Prado Museum of Madrid and the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. Outside the walls of the museum itself, one can also enjoy a showing held in the Cau Ferrat Museum in Sitges (a seaside town southwest of Barcelona) to mark the 150th birthday of Ramon Casas, Catalan artist and portraitist. The showing is inspired by a piece recently acquired by the MNAC, a collection of 9 Chinese shadow puppets drawn by the painter. The museum will also feature a ´discovery´ of photographer Marianne Breslauer and of her journey to Spain in 1933, which will be held in one of the permanent exhibition halls. Moreover, the MNAC will continue its series of monographic expositions developed in the last few years, focused on “recovering” relevant artists. In 2016, the protagonist will be Lluïsa Vidal, one of the few women artists represented in the collection, as well as Ismael Smith, who was “one of the most important Catalan sculptors”, according to Pepe Serra.
Looking ahead
According to Pepe Serra, the MNAC is finally “starting to have a normal planning rhythm for a museum of its size”. This rhythm, Serra reiterates, “should continue as planned” and will allow the MNAC´s calendar to synchronise with “other international museums”.
“The museum is strong”, Serra asserts, referring to having survived many years of budget cuts and internal restructuring. While the museum starts out with an extension of their 2015 budget, Serra relies on the fact thatgovernment funding for the museum will increase in 2016 and in the years to come. With this prediction, in fact, the museum plans to allocate 1.1 million euros to its exhibition projects, a much higher sum than the 700,000 euros available in 2015. However, this rise ultimately depends on said increase in public funding. Budget aside, the planning of some long-term projects has already been “finalised” for the 2017 and 2018. Pepe Serra disclosed a few.
“We have a series prepared for the coming years, an intersecting thematic series centred on our collection”, Serra announced. In 2017, in collaboration with a Parisian museum, the MNAC is preparing an exhibition “centred on the idea of revolution”, as well as a monographic dedicated to painter Gabriele Münter. One will also be able to enjoy an exhibition about ´Arts and Crafts´, organised jointly with Madrid, centred on William Morris.
“Working on eponymous collections is one of our objectives”, noted head curator Juanjo Lahuerta. In this case, he added, it´s specifically about relating our Modernism collection with its “international parallels”.
The new Baroque and Renaissance collection will have to wait
In the spring of 2017, the MNAC will unveil the presentation of its new Baroque and Renaissance art collection, the design of which is almost completed. This is an “extraordinary” collection, taking after the museum´s medieval and modernist ones, according to Lahuerta. Ultimately, the collection will not be presented this autumn, as originally planned, due to the projected high exhibition activity of the museumScientists have found a way to allow for more effective use of Quantum Dots (Qdots) in cancer cells by overcoming a common hurdle using Sendai virus. Qdots are small fluorescent particles, 1,000 times smaller than a cell, that latch onto biological molecules, such as antibodies. They allow for the tracking of antibodies in a cell and the protein it recognizes, which can help in cancer diagnosis and treatment. Researchers have developed a technique that uses the Sendai virus to coat the Qdot. This tricks brain cancer cells, which often excrete Qdots as waste, into accepting them. “While cells have complex defense mechanisms to protect themselves against attack, viruses have evolved ways to fool the cell into letting them in. We were able to exploit these mechanisms by fusing inactivated mouse parainfluenza virus with liposomes containing Qdots,” explained Maribel Vazquez, who worked on the study.Senator Marco Rubio (Joe Raedle/Getty)
From the top tier to the hopeless, my odds for the current candidates.
With Ted Cruz announcing and Rand Paul and Marco Rubio soon to follow, it’s time to start handicapping the horses and making enemies.
No point in wasting time on the Democratic field. There is none. The only thing that can stop Hillary Clinton is an act of God, and he seems otherwise occupied. As does Elizabeth Warren, the only Democrat who could conceivably defeat her.
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On to the GOP.
First Tier:
1. Marco Rubio. Trails badly in current polls, ranking seventh at 5 percent, but high upside potential.
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Assets: Foreign policy looms uncharacteristically large in the current cycle, and Rubio is the most knowledgeable and fluent current contender on everything from Russia to Cuba to the Middle East. The son of Cuban immigrants, he can break into flawless Spanish (so can Jeb Bush) and speak passionately about the American story in a party that lost the Hispanic vote by 44 points in 2012.
Liabilities (in the primaries): His Gang of Eight immigration apostasy, though his current enforcement-first position has wide appeal. Second, after Barack Obama, will voters want another first-term senator with no executive experience? (Same for Cruz and Paul.)
Major appeal: Fresh, young, dynamic persona is a powerful counterpoint to Clinton fatigue.
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Odds: 3-1.
2. Jeb Bush. The consensus favorite (though I remain a bit skeptical). Solid, soft-spoken, serious, with executive experience and significant achievements as governor. What he lacks in passion, he makes up for in substance. And he has shown backbone in sticking to his semi-heretical positions on immigration and Common Core.
Obvious liability: His name. True, it helps him raise tens of millions of dollars, but it saddles him with legacy and dynastic issues that negate the inherent GOP advantage of running a new vs. old, not-again campaign against Hillary.
Odds: 7-2.
• Charles Krauthammer: Handicapping the 2016 Field
• Jonah Goldberg: Can Jewish Americans Support Both Democrats and Israel?
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• Mona Charen: ’Death to America’
• Katherine Timpf: Stop Defending Phil Robertson
3. Scott Walker. A fine record of conservative achievement. Has shown guts and leadership in taking on labor unions and winning three elections (five if you count proxy elections) against highly energized Democrats.
Good, rousing speech in Iowa, but has stumbled since, flubbing routine questions on evolution and patriotism, then appearing to compare the Islamic State to Wisconsin demonstrators. Rookie mistakes, easily forgotten — if he learns from them.
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Pandered on ethanol and fired a staffer who complained about Iowa’s unwarranted influence. Sure, everyone panders to Iowa, but Walker’s calling card is standing up to pressure.
Most encouraging sign: ability to maintain altitude after meteoric rise. Numbers remain steady. And his speeches continue to impress.
Odds: 4-1.
RELATED: Scott Walker Is His Own Best Political Operative
Second Tier:
#related#4. Chris Christie. Some politicians have their one moment. Christie might have missed his in 2012 when his fearless in-your-face persona was refreshingly new. Over time, however, in-your-face can wear badly. That plus Bridgegate cost him traction and dropped him out of the first tier. Biggest problem: being boxed out ideologically and financially by Jeb Bush for the relatively-moderate-governor-with-cross-aisle-appeal slot. 12-1.
5. Ted Cruz. Grand, florid campaign launch with matching rhetoric. Straightforward base-oriented campaign. Has developed a solid following. Could break out, especially in debate. 15-1.
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RELATED: Of Course Ted Cruz Could Win
6. Mike Huckabee. Great name recognition, affable, popular. But highly identified with social/cultural issues — how far can that carry him beyond Iowa and evangelicals? 15-1.
7. Rand Paul. Events have conspired against him. Obama’s setbacks and humiliations abroad have created a national mood less conducive to Paul’s non-interventionism. His nearly 13-hour anti-drone filibuster would not fly today. Is trying to tack back, even signing the anti-Iran-deal letter of the 47 senators. Strong youth appeal, though outreach to minorities less successful thus far. Bottom line: High floor of devoted libertarians; low ceiling in today’s climate. 30-1.
Longer Shots:
8. Carly Fiorina. Getting her footing. Given current societal taboos, she is best placed to attack Hillary and has done so effectively. Can she do a Huckabee 2008 and, through debates, vault to the first tier? Unlikely. But because she’s talented and disciplined, not impossible. 50-1.
9. Ben Carson. Polling high, but is a novice making cringe-worthy gaffes, for example, on the origins of Islam and on gay choice (“a lot of people who go into prison, go into prison straight — and when they come out they’re gay”). And not knowing that the Baltic States are in NATO. Truly good man, brilliant doctor, great patriot. But not ready for the big leagues. Chance of winning? Zero.
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RELATED: Ben Carson: The Learning Curve of a Candidate
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Others:
Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and John Kasich — still below radar. If they surface, they’ll be featured in the next racing form.
RELATED: Kasich Waits in the Wings
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2015 The Washington Post Writers Group.Indian medical students with a foreign MBBS degree will be now be able to work in India without writing any tests according to the proposal sent by the Union health ministry to the Medical Council of India. This measure is being taken to combat the acute shortage of 6 lakh doctors in the country. At present, the lack of medical colleges in the country leads to many students opting for foreign countries like China, Russia, Nepal, South East Asian and Eastern European countries to get MBBS Degrees. These students are required to write and clear the Foreign Medical Graduates Examination by Medical Council of India – MCI to be eligible to practice in the country. If the proposal is accepted by MCI, these students would be ale to practice in India without writing the examinations, in effect recognizing most of the Medical Degrees offered by universities abroad.
The examination was seen as a deterrent by many and statistics further support the same. As per report shared by the Medical Council of India, approximately 29,968 students have appeared for the foreign medical examination and only 3,610 have passed. Just about 19 percent of the students who appeared for the examination between 2012 and 2015 have managed to clear the examination. The variation in the syllabi and the teaching pedagogy could be one of the biggest reasons. Failure to get a license to practice in India forces these students to continue practicing in countries they have studied. This move is aimed at attracting these students to the country which is facing a major health management concern. ALSO READ: NEET UG 2017: Colleges that are not covered under NEET
The teaching standards abroad are different which are not on par with Indian standards. The unequal division of seats in private medical colleges has forced many students to study abroad. Apparently 50 per cent of seats in private medical colleges are reserved for the government, 20 per cent is in the management quota and the remaining are paid seats which are very expensive. These seats cost allegedly Rs 1.5 core. That is one of the major reasons that many students opt for seats outside India. At present, several Indian doctors who got their degrees abroad and were rejected in India are practising in the countries they passed out from. ALSO READ: NEET UG 2017: Notification awaited for medical entrance exam NEET at aipmt.nic.in
While the motive of the Union Health Ministry is noble and provides a good solution, providing a free entry to all degrees abroad might raise concerns with the medical community in the country. Concerns can be raised regarding the level of these students and their preparedness for handling medical situations. It could also open up a larger competition in the urban areas while the rural population continues to fight for basic medical care.
From the point of view of the Medical Colleges, this could also hamper the already grim prospects of the many private medical colleges. While the admission to the private medical colleges have already taken a hit due to the introduction of National Eligibility cum Entrance Examination, this move would further hamper their fee structure. Many European Countries offer economical options for students inclined to the profession. Furthermore, the increasing requirement of doctors in the Eastern European Countries attracts students from India, which has the widest resource pool. This brain drain can be stemmed by attracting these students back to country.We may be impressed with the Xperia Z5 family already but Sony is said to be working on a higher Xperia for release in Japan. The device is believed to be an Xperia Z5 Compact Premium according to a recent report by CNBeta. The Chinese website has published a teaser of a new phone due for release this coming October.
The Xperia Z5 Compact is the smallest phone among the recently launched smartphones. This Japanese version is rumored to feature a 4.6-inch Full HD screen, 4GB RAM, Qualcomm MSM8994 Snapdragon 810 processor, 5.1MP front-facing camera, 23MP main camera, and a 2900mAh battery. Specs are definitely better than the Z5 Compact we saw last week at IFA 2015 in Berlin.
We’re not really surprised about Japan getting a special variant because it was the same case with last year’s Xperia Z4. We learned that it was just an improved Z3 and that it’s actually known as Z3+ to the rest of the world. The reason for the name change was that the Japanese always want the latest model. The Xperia Z5 Compact Premium is expected to be available from DoCoMo according to a video that showed a Hatsune Niku branding on the phone.
We’re still regarding this as a rumor until Sony makes an official announcement. We have no idea on pricing and exact launch date or if it will be available in other regions outside of Japan. Let’s just wait and see.
VIA: Talk AndroidRussia has consummated some huge energy deals with China in recent weeks. These deals are – or at least are being advertised as – major steps forward in the Russo-Chinese energy relations, Russia’s pivot to Asia – which uses big energy sales to upgrade its influence and standing – and the development of the energy base in Eastern Siberia, the Arctic and the Far East. All seen in Moscow as necessary preconditions for Russia’s return to the stage as a great, independent Asian power, and as a major energy player for years to come.
In the biggest deal, worth an estimated $270 billion, Rosneft agreed to supply CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation) with 365 million tons of oil over 25 years. In return, CNPC has apparently made a pre-payment to Rosneft of around 70 billion. The deal represents 15 million metric tons of crude oil annually for 25 years, at just over $10 billion each year. The oil will probably go through the existing Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline to Daqing, China
Rosneft will also sell LNG (liquefied natural gas) from a terminal it is planning with Exxon Mobil on Sakhalin to Japanese trading firm Marubeni and the Sakhalin Oil and Gas Development Company, another Japanese company.
Novatek, an independent gas producer, has meanwhile granted CNPC a 20% stake in its LNG project on the Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic. CNPC will become an “anchor customer” and import 3 million tons of natural gas annually.
It is worth observing who got what from these deals to determine their significance.
In Japan’s case, the deal with Rosneft clearly betokens a gradually improving energy and political relationship between Russia and Japan and probably presages other future deals – if a Russo-Japanese peace treaty and determination of the Kurile Islands can be signed and if Japanese concerns about Russian business can be allayed. This deal also hints at a growing Russian – or at least Rosneft – capability to sell LNG, an area where Rusia has lagged and which has cost it significantly as the international gas market changes. To the degree that it can develop an indigenous LNG capacity Russia benefits, especially in East Asia.
But while Japan gains modestly and has hopes for the future, Gazprom – the leading gas company in Russia and chief rival to Rosneft and Novatek – has lost again in these recent deals. Although it says it is pivoting to Asia, there is still no gas deal with China despite constant announcements that one was forthcoming. The giant may be setting up a special-purpose company to manage development of a 15 million-ton LNG facility in the Far East, but Gazprom is clearly well behind its rivals in that region. Indeed, Gazprom’s entire record, going back a decade, has revealed a consistent stubbornness when it comes to selling gas of any kind to the Far East, a factor that has allowed its rivals to steal several marches.
Just as Gazprom has lost a round, there appear – at least at first glance – to be significant advantages for Novatek and Rosneft. These companies will now be allowed to sell LNG abroad, signaling an end to Gazprom’s monopoly on gas exports. Moreover, they will clearly be active in the Arctic, the
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, was forced to stand down after appearing to mislead ICAC over a bottle of expensive wine.
ICAC’s current investigation involves slush funds set up by the New South Wales Liberal Party to obscure donations to the party from property developers, a practice banned under New South Wales law. At the centre of the investigation is former Energy Minister Chris Hartcher, who appears to have been intimately involved with a special fund, mysteriously named ‘Eight by Five’.
Money that could not be directly donated to the Liberal Party flowed into Eight by Five, including from the now-notorious Australian Water Holdings. Eight by Five in turn donated generous sums to the New South Wales branch of the Liberal Party. Hartcher has already resigned, followed in short order by Police Minister Mike Gallacher.
Long riven by internal tensions and factional warfare, it now appears as though affairs inside the New South Wales Liberal party are every bit as disreputable as the right faction of the New South Wales Australian Labor Party. That must be a concern for the federal Liberal Party. After all, the New South Wales branch of the Liberal Party is the home branch of Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Treasurer Joe Hockey.
Both Abbott and Hockey have appeared agitated, to say the least, when questioned by journalists about the federal implications of the New South Wales stink. In a press conference after the resignation of Barry O’Farrell, Abbott was asked by journalist Nicola Berkovic from The Australian whether he trusted the New South Wales government, “which is proving to be corrupt”.
The Prime Minister bristled. “That is an entirely unjustified smear,” he snapped. Since that press conference, of course, even more New South Wales government ministers and backbenchers have stood down. Just today, ICAC said it had discovered “a strong prima facie case of serious electoral funding irregularities" against Gallacher.
This is the context in which we learned yesterday, courtesy of an investigation by Fairfax Media, that Treasurer Joe Hockey has been charging sky-high prices for membership of a political fundraising club, the North Sydney Forum. In an article provocatively titled “Treasurer for sale”, the Sydney Morning Herald detailed a secret donations club, with undisclosed membership, in which intimate access to the Treasurer of Australia was offered in return for Liberal Party donations. According to the Sydney Morning Herald’s Sean Nicholls, “in return for annual fees of up to $22,000, members are rewarded with ‘VIP’ meetings with Mr Hockey, often in private boardrooms.”
Nicholls apparently sent a detailed list of questions to Hockey’s office, asking how and why the fundraising club worked. Top of the list: who was in the secret club? But instead of answers, Nicholls was met with fierce denials and the threat of a lawsuit.
In a statement released yesterday – under an official Commonwealth letterhead – Hockey’s office informed interested observers that he was calling his lawyers.
“Accusations made in Fairfax Media today are both offensive and repugnant,” he wrote. “The Treasurer will not let this distract him from the important task of putting the Budget together. As the matter is now in the hands of lawyers no further comment can be made.”
Let us recall that Hockey has been mentioned at ICAC before. Donations from Australian Water Holdings flowed to Hockey’s campaign fund, and were later repaid. Hockey has refused to give details about why and when the repayment was made.
New Matilda is not implying or suggesting any wrongdoing by Treasurer Hockey. Indeed, current federal regulations around political donations make fundraising clubs like the North Shore Forum perfectly legal.
But it is worth reflecting on the implications of one of the most senior ministers in the government of Australia suing a media outlet over a matter that is manifestly in the public interest. After all, this is a government which claims free speech is so important that it has to amend the Racial Discrimination Act to make it easier for newspaper columnists to have their say.
In the normal cut and thrust of politics, politicians do not sue media outlets over stories with which they disagree. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, or that threats aren’t made. Clive Palmer is suing the Courier-Mail over an investigation into his business interests. Craig Thomson sued Fairfax over the brothel allegations that eventually led to his conviction. Julia Gillard threatened to sue a number of times over the Australian Workers Union scandal, although no proceedings commenced.
When politicians sue, they usually do it to clamp down on debate. A defamation action signals that a politician is prepared to gamble on the risk that the facts of a particular allegation will be raked over in a court of law. That poses risks all of its own, for instance when uncomfortable details emerge in public for the first time.
Threatening to sue generally does damp down on media coverage of a particular issue. Other media outlets can be loathe to cover the allegation, for fear of being added to the action and therefore subject to expensive damages should an adverse finding be made. For a small, independent media outlet, a lost defamation decision can spell the end. Notoriously, Crikey founder Stephen Mayne was forced to sell his family home after a court found in favour of broadcaster Steve Price in a defamation suit.
Whatever the particulars, Hockey’s decision to bring in lawyers should alarm those citizens who are concerned about the health of Australia’s democracy. As ICAC has discovered in New South Wales, there appears to be no shortage of funny money looking for a way to influence public administration. And we know that under Sinodinos, the Assistant Treasurer working with Joe Hockey, the government decided to strip away Future of Financial Advice reforms to the financial planning sector, reforms that would have prevented corruption. Some think the benefit to the big banks and financial institutions by removing the reforms could run into the billions.
Of course, you might argue that big business types who want to influence Joe Hockey have no shortage of opportunities to press their case. This is one of the most pro-business governments in decades. Its Commission of Audit, convened by Hockey, was run by a former top lobbyist for big business, Tony Shepherd. Nor is Hockey exactly shy about boasting of his regular conversations with business leaders. As the saying goes, the real scandal about politics is what’s legal.
And that’s the real concern about the Hockey allegations. If his fundraising operations were entirely legal and above-board, why is he refusing to answer legitimate questions about who attended, who donated, and what was discussed? If Hockey genuinely believes he is innocent, why not simply put forward the available evidence that clears this up? Why stonewall? Why sue?
In short, what has Joe Hockey got to hide?Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Prince William said Africa's wild elephants and rhinos could be extinct before his daughter Charlotte's 25th birthday
The Duke of Cambridge has unveiled plans to help the global transport industry crack down on illegal wildlife trafficking routes.
A declaration was signed by 40 companies at Buckingham Palace, to tackle criminals moving horn, ivory and other animal parts for huge profits.
Signatories include bosses of shipping firms, airlines and customs operators.
Prince William said the Buckingham Palace Declaration was a "game-changer in the race against extinction".
Image copyright AP Image caption Prince William told the organisations signing up to the agreement: "We cannot afford to waste a single day"
The duke, who in a TV interview before the announcement also addressed criticisms he was a "workshy prince", told the signatories the poaching crisis was unique because tackling it had widespread support.
"We have faced up to the fact that if current trends continue, the last wild African elephants and rhinos will be killed before my daughter Charlotte reaches her 25th birthday," he said.
"Everyone agrees that losing these animals from the wild would be a disaster for humanity. This means that halting this crisis is only a test of our will. The question is: can we be bothered to do our bit?
"By signing this declaration, you, the leaders of some of the most important transportation companies and agencies on earth are answering with an emphatic, 'yes'."
He warned that if the crisis was not turned around within the next five years, the battle would be lost forever.
On the poaching front line
Image copyright Alastair Leithead
By BBC Africa correspondent Alastair Leithead
Garamba in the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of Africa's oldest national parks but has lost more than 90% of its elephants.
It covers 14,000 sq km but has fewer than 100 rangers protecting its elephants from heavily armed groups crossing from South Sudan, Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army from Uganda, and other poachers from the DRC and Sudan.
In the 1970s there were 22,000 elephants, but today there are only 1,200-1,400 left. And the Northern White Rhino, for which Garamba was given World Heritage status, has already been wiped out by poaching.
Garamba National Park is now managed by African Parks, which is arming and training rangers to counter the threat.
They go out on regular foot patrols and have aircraft to monitor movements in the park, but often find the carcasses of elephants, with those responsible long gone.
The park has few tourists and so its management is paid for by a European Union grant and by private donors.
African Parks hopes it will be sustainable in the future, but fears it will take many years because of the security threat and the instability around the park.
Lord Hague of Richmond, who was part of the taskforce behind the agreement, said the most effective answer to the problem was to end the demand for the illegal goods - but while that work went on the team had looked at ways to prevent their transportation.
He said it was a complex area, with 500 million containers shipped around the world every year and more than 100,000 flights every day, but "action was possible" and the declaration would target the "chain between suppliers and consumers".
"It is nearly too late to save our rhinos, elephants, tigers, and other iconic species, but it is not quite too late," he said.
"It will require our combined efforts, resolve, and intensified determination - and that is what this declaration is about."
Image copyright AFP Image caption Prince William and Lord Hague visited the London Gateway port to highlight the new agreement
Richard Thomas, from the wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic, said the focus had been on protecting the animals at the source - by employing more rangers and giving them better equipment and training - and on inspections at exit and entry points.
Transportation was a "vital piece of the puzzle" and another point of intervention, he said.
Image copyright AP
The threat of wildlife trafficking
Illegal wildlife trade covers a wide range of animals and plants. Animals are killed for their meat, skin and body parts and used for a variety of purposes, including medicine and decoration
Valued at between £3bn-£13bn, it is the fourth most lucrative global crime after drugs, humans and arms
It is one of the biggest threats to the survival of some of the world's most threatened species, including rhinos, elephants and tigers
95% of the world's rhinos have been lost in the last 40 years - powdered rhino horn is used in traditional Asian medicine as a supposed cure for a range of illnesses from hangovers to fevers and even cancer
22,000 African elephants were killed by poachers for their ivory in 2012. The ivory is carved into ornaments and jewellery - China is the biggest market for such products
3,200 tigers may be left in the world
Source: WWF and United for Wildlife
The declaration contains 11 commitments, including a database highlighting the routes being used to move illegal animal products and wildlife, and the method of transport - so companies can report concerns to the authorities.
It is the culmination of a year's work by the United for Wildlife Transport Taskforce - which was convened by the prince and chaired by the Conservative peer and former Foreign Secretary Lord Hague. It consisted of representatives from the transport industry, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and governments from various countries around the world.
Signatories included Emirates Airline, Qatar Airways, World Wildlife Fund - UK, the World Customs Organisation and industry bodies such as the International Air Transport.
'Part of the job'
Prince William is president of United for Wildlife - an alliance between seven of the world's most influential conservation organisations and The Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry.
In an interview with ITV about the poaching crisis, the prince was also asked about recent press articles suggesting he was not carrying out enough royal duties.
The 33-year-old had been dubbed a part-time royal after it was reported he had undertaken 87 appearances in the UK last year and 35 on overseas trips, compared with his elderly grandfather the Duke of Edinburgh, who carried out 250.
"It's part of the job," he said of the accusations.
He went on to explain how engagements to highlight his campaigns took "a lot of planning and a lot of knowledge-building, a lot of conversations".
"I didn't want to get to 45 or 50 and sit back and say, 'I could have said something about that issue but I didn't because I worried about what people thought or what people said'," he added.Yes, you can spend the night in Luke Skywalker’s home, see the hermit habitat of Obi-Wan Kenobi up close, and view other remnants of the original Star Wars movie via a series sets turned since turned into long-standing habitable buildings (contemporary on-location photos above by Könczöl Gábor and maciekke).
(Images by Hoylen Sue)
Los Apos provides an introductory guide with coordinates should you find yourself wandering Tunisia – meanwhile, here are some of the highlights of the journey, including bits and pieces of the fictional Mos Eisley and Espa.
(Images by Eckart and Michael)
Some of these buildings survive the first film trilogy, while others were rebuilt for the second series (or first, depending on how you look at it). But why? Because, in many cases, locals saw the structures as entirely serviceable and kept using them for housing, hotels, shops, storage and more.
Some of the locations cater to fans: “In Matmata you can actually sleep in Luke’s home. The Hotel Sidi Driss served as the interior of the Lars homestead. Aunt Beru’s kitchen is still there, but except for some fiberglass and wooden frames, and the fresco on the dining room ceiling, you won’t find any props. Even so, it is easy to get excited when sitting in the very same dining room that the Lars family used. The hotel also has a well stocked bar with lots of Star Wars memorabilia and a Star wars inspired menu.”
(Images by Roger Noguera Arnau)
Savvy fans will recognize even building-free locations where Sandcrawlers roamed, Tusken Raiders pounced or Stormtroopers attacked. These are, one might say, the landscapes you are looking for. Still, whether the trip will spoil the fun or enhance the fantasy all depends on the traveler.Mpumalanga - Members of the ANC's top 6 who have spoken out against the cabinet reshuffle are "ill disciplined", Mpumalanga ANC chairperson, David Mabuza, said on Sunday.
He was referring to President Jacob Zuma's dramatic cabinet reshuffle which included the firing of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan.
Zuma's decision has been met with outrage, with some members of the party's top 6 openly admitting that there was no agreement over the firing of some ministers.
The ANC secretary general, Gwede Mantashe, said the president's list of new appointments seem to have come from "elsewhere".
Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa called Zuma's decision "totally unacceptable", while ANC treasurer general, Zweli Mkhize, said the briefing by Zuma left an impression that "the party was no longer at the centre".
Mabuza, addressing journalists in Bushbuck Ridge on Sunday after welcoming former ANC members back in the party, said Mhize and Ramaphosa, "must remember they are not the president. There is only one president.
"I don't know if they want to exercise the same powers that the president has. It is quite ill disciplined that people will go out and say they differ with the president. That is ill disciplined," said Mabuza.
He said, "To hire people, to hire ministers is the prerogative of the president. To hire MECs is my prerogative as premier".
Zuma, said Mabuza, could decide to outsource that prerogative and "give it to other people to assist him in making a decision on who to appoint".
"To me the deployment of people is not the most important thing in the ANC because we don't own these positions. I was not born to be a premier. You can remove me tomorrow and to be honest I won't have a problem," he said.
Mabuza said he didn't want to read a lot into what the president has done, "exercising his prerogative".
He said the president had the responsibility to run the country and that he could not fail the people of the country.
"You can't hang your dirty linen out there. What are you trying to do, whom are you trying to appease?" asked Mabuza.
"We are working very hard on the ground to unite the ANC but they are doing their best to divide it," he said.Friday 21 April 2006
THQ has announced first-person shooter Frontline: Fuel of War for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, which offers up cutting-edge military tech in order to let you experience the "frontlines of tomorrow". And they're not talking about Saturday's shopping crush.
The team behind the game, Kaos Studios, had some fundamental input into Battlefield 2, so it's little surprise to see that Fuel of War offers some 60 vehicles and weapons, including next-gen assault tanks and remote control drones.
Fuel of War won't be a typical A-to-B duck hunt for terrorists, either. Instead, it'll draw on GTA's appeal by offering an open-world approach and non-linear missions for both solo players or teams of wannabe warmongers.
Imagine Mercenaries meets Battlefield meets Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, then. We've no idea what it's going to look like yet, so you're welcome to send us a drawing or two.France has been urged to consider extending its contentious 2004 ban on Muslim headscarves in schools by also forbidding students from wearing the garments in the country’s universities, French newspaper Le Monde claimed on Monday.
According to Le Monde, a report by the High Council of Integration (HCI), which is set to be delivered to the government later in the year, makes 12 recommendations aimed at defusing a "growing number of disputes" stemming from religious differences at higher education institutions.
The key and almost certainly most controversial recommendation HCI makes is to forbid the "wearing of religious symbols openly in lecture theatres and places of teaching and research" at French universities.
A controversial 2004 law prohibits the wearing or open display of religious symbols in all French schools, inlcluding crucifixes, Jewish skull caps and the Muslim headscraf - the Hijab, but does not apply to universities.
A similarly contentious law was introduced in April 2011 which effectively banned the wearing in public of the full face veil, the niqab. It did not however forbid the wearing of the hijab headscarf.
The authors of the HCI report have been made aware of a number of problems and disputes centred around religious differences that are occuring at universities and are keen to ensure "religious neutrality" in France's establishments of higher education.
Among the issues faced in French universities according to the HCI are "underground acitivity of religious groups", "demands to be excused from attendance on religious grounds" and "disagreements over the curriculum".
There have also been reports of students refusing to work in mixed sex study groups.According to Le Monde, the HCI says the freedom of expression granted to users of higher education "should not affect educational activities and public order".
The report’s writers say that "the public service of higher education is secular and independent of any political, economic, religious or ideological influence,” so there is no reason why higher education should be any different from schools, Le Monde reports.
President of the HCI Benoit Normand confirmed that the report was passed over to the France’s National Observatory on Secularism earlier this year but “will not be made public until the end of the year”.
For his part, Jean-Louis Bianco, president of the government linked National Observatory on Secularism, poured cold water on the report, saying the “issue of head scarves in universities is not on the table”.
'No justification to ban veils in universities'
Some experts on secularism in France say there is no need to crackdown on religious symbols, particularly those belonging to Islam in French universities.
“Demonstrations of religion in universities have not increased in recent years. Secularism is not in danger,” Raphael Liogier, director of the Observatory on Religions and author of “The myth of Islamisation” told Europe 1 radio said.
“Wanting to ban the veil in school is justified by the need to protect children from the influence of their parents. But it makes no sense in higher education,” he added.
However making a distinction between schools and universities has caused its own problems.
Earlier this year The Local reported how a university lecturer was foreced to apologise after ejecting a Muslim student from one of his classes for wearing the hijab.
The teacher, who had worked in secondary schools, had forgotten that the ban on headscarves did not apply to universities.
The veil ban continues to cause controversy in France and only last month the country's Interior Minister Manuel Valls was forced to defend the law after a weekend of rioting in a Paris suburb.
The violence followed a police stop on a woman who was wearing the full face veil in public. However local residents and police doubted the two days of clashes that followed were due to anger over the law and were more likely the result of historic tensions between youths and authorities.WARNING (This story contains graphic content. Discretion is advised):
Toronto police are asking the public for help identifying the body of a man recovered from Lake Ontario Saturday.
Police responded to a call of a person floating in the lake near Billy Bishop Airport around 9 a.m.
The man was pulled from the water but pronounced dead at the scene.
READ MORE: Man dies after falling into Lake Ontario near the Toronto ferry terminal
He is described as aged 45 to 55, approximately 5’9”, 160 pounds, with short black-and-grey hair and a black-and-grey beard. He was wearing a grey long-sleeve shirt, blue jeans, and aqua-blue running shoes with orange stripes.
Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 416-808-1400, Crime Stoppers anonymously at 416-222-TIPS (8477), online at http://www.222tips.com, text TOR and your message to CRIMES (274637).
SlideGreen Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is carted off the field after breaking his collarbone in the game against the Minnesota Vikings on Oct. 15. Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports (Photo: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports)
Aaron Rodgers hit the comeback trail after his collarbone surgery — by playing the new Assassin's Creed video game with TV talk show host Conan O'Brien.
The full segment is set to air on "Conan" at 10 p.m. Thursday on TBS.
In the promo video for the segment — a recurring bit on the show called "Clueless Gamer" — the Packers quarterback and O'Brien battle it out, ineptly, on an early edition of "Assassin's Creed: Origins." The 10th installment in the popular game, which comes out Friday, takes the game to ancient Egypt, when the titular Brotherhood of Assassins was born.
O'Brien boasts that Rodgers, who suffered a potentially season-ending broken collarbone in Green Bay's Oct. 15 game against the Minnesota Vikings, "postponed his surgery because he wanted to play video games with me."
" 'Conan and this video game mean more to me than my future in the National Football League.' That's a quote. Maybe," O'Brien tells his studio audience.
In the clip, Rodgers retells the story of his injury and surgery, which took place Oct. 19. "Thirteen screws later, and here I am," Rodgers said.
RELATED: Packers QB Aaron Rodgers undergoes surgery on broken collarbone
RELATED: Aaron Rodgers thanks fans on Instagram, says'surgery went well' and vows 'comeback'
The promotional clip shows the two of them in a battle involving hippos, and O'Brien trying to drive a chariot through some crowded streets.
"Can this be the whole game?" O'Brien says about his reckless driving, as Rodgers laughs.
Read or Share this story: https://jsonl.in/2haUwlhThe Forum (the newspaper in Fargo – the largest city in North Dakota) had an article on their website today. The Insurance Commissioner of North Dakota has been looking into BCBSND. Here’s the lede from today’s Forum story (DETAILS ONLY IN TODAY'S FORUM: Blue Cross Blue Shield execs profited from bogus bonuses -- unfortunately, you may have to sign up with the website to read the story):
Nearly $15 million in employee bonuses that were almost assured regardless of performance. Sales reward trips to posh resorts totaling $1.2 million. A $3.5 million investment in a murky hotel partnership lacking audited financial statements. All this and much more during just the past five years are among almost half a billion dollars in expenses detailed in a report by state insurance examiners who probed spending practices by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota.
Also, they’ve been jacking up their prices every year. Why not? They’re almost a monopoly. And they need that money to fly their top salespeople to the Grand Caymans. It gets cold in North Dakota.
Yeah, they’re non-profit. Yeah, they’re "owned" by policyholders. They’re almost a co-op. But they’re also the best argument for getting rid of health insurance and switching to a government plan.
Wait, there's more.
Before posting this, I checked DKos and found Kiku’s diary, Conrad's co-op would include BCBS. Here’s a quote from the NY Times (thanks, Kiku):
Mr. Conrad’s own state demonstrates the uncertainties surrounding cooperatives. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota dominates the state’s private insurance market, collecting nearly 90 percent of premiums. As a nonprofit owned by its members, the company would hope to qualify as a co-op under federal legislation, said Paul von Ebers, its incoming president and chief executive.
Kiku not only links to the NY Times article, but to a couple other diaries. If you want, you can read lots more about BCBSND.
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WOW! Rec-listed. Cool.
UPDATE: BCBSND called a press conference for 2pm (Central), but it was pushed ahead to 3pm and now 4pm (2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern). If it happens, you can stream it from wday.com (click on the AM radio button).
Here's what I learned. The 100-page insurance commissioner's report was finished last week. Blue Cross Blue Shield of ND asked for two weeks to read it and come up with a reply. It was supposed to be made public on Sept. 18 (which just happens to be three days after the Sept. 15 deadline for a health care bill).
But it was leaked to the Forum, who wrote a story about it. BCBSND gave the insurance commissioner permission to release the report today. So I think that's what will happen at 4pm. Stories about it will be in the news tonight. I'm guessing that later tonight or tomorrow, you can also probably download a PDF from the ND Insurance Commissioner's website.
Re-update: Nothing very interesting. BCBS says, basically, "We got caught. We're sorry. It won't happen again."
The ND Insurance Commissioner's Report is here: Hamm releases Blue Cross Blue Shield target exam report. There's a link that gives you the PDF.It was only last week that a weather reporter on KCCI was rudely interrupted live on air by a prompt to upgrade Windows to a newer version of the OS, and now a pro gamer’s live stream has fallen victim to Microsoft’s perpetually annoying updates.
Erik Flom was broadcasting his gaming session to his more than 130,000 followers a few days ago when updates, which he appears to disable just minutes before the incident, shut down his PC while he’s mid-game. It’s one thing to get a prompt for installation, but it’s quite another to just shut down the computer without any warning while it’s actively being used.
The stream has been viewed more than 120,000 times, including the live viewers that had to sit through a double update.
Needless to say, Strom wasn’t massively impressed.
What!? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN!? Fuck you, Windows 10. Let’s see if we can maybe get this back. Hurry up! Fuck! God, you have one job PC. WE TURNED OFF EVERYTHING.
Handily, the whole thing was captured on a second device that was recording his gameplay, so you can check out the full nine hour session for yourself. Hardcore.
Windows 10 updates are now ruining pro-gaming streams on Via The Guardian
Read next: 10m users' data reportedly stolen from Indian Railways site and sold for $225Austin airport travelers are experiencing major delays, others cancellations. This is all because of water damage to the control tower. While a temporary tower is now in place, it will still be several days before things improve.
On Friday, more than 14 inches of rain fell at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport flooding the runway and the first floor of the control tower. Cables and electrical equipment in the radar room were left under a foot of water.
Monday, travelers were still feeling the effects of the storm damage and will for some time.
"I was supposed to leave at 5:35. Got here at four. It's now been pushed back to 8:40," said Susan Banning.
George Strouhal was supposed to leave at 7 a.m. 12 hours later, he had returned to the airport to board a new flight home.
"They told me when I did the outside check-in that my flight would be on time, but I don't know. I got an email that said it might be a half-hour later," said Strouhal.
Looking at the departure board, only five flights are one time. Four flights have been canceled.
Federal Aviation Administration Spokesperson Lynn Lunsford says the delay is due in part to a Houston center that is now providing radar separation for flights and a temporary tower that has been brought in while repairs are made to the permanent structure.
The temporary tower is basically an RV with windows around it in the front. Sight is limited, so only one runway is in operation and the spacing between flights has increased.
"The FAA's primary mission is to provide safe and efficient travel and what we're doing in this case is insuring the travel is as safe as possible. The additional space in between airplanes means you don't have to worry about coming to close to another aircraft," said Lunsford.
Lunsford says very soon Austin controllers will operate out of the radar room at the San Antonio airport.
"At that point we should be able to significantly increase the amount of traffic that we're able to get into the Austin airport," said Lunsford.
For now, be prepared to wait. For Strouhal that meant a nap and hugging his grandkids one more time.
Thankfully, our Austin visitors don't seem to hold it against us.
"It will be fine as long as I get to leave," said Banning.
We will get a better picture of the situation Tuesday. Lunsford will be here in Austin and is expected to give the media a tour of the temporary tower.As of Sunday, snow now covers the ground in Forest. Snowballs also started appearing, although I didn’t attempt to build any snowmen on the first day.
I had a chat with my newest neighbor Lily, and she told me both of her Toy Day clues. I know she wants pink clothes for the holiday.
On Monday, I bought the Santa beard at Able Sisters. I just need the jacket now and I’ll be all Santa’d up.
The northern lights were on display up in the sky, so I took a picture from my western bridge.
I finally started up a game of Desert Island Escape using my in-game Wii U console. You can use Amiibo cards to select your three animals, or you choose from the villagers in your town. But if you do choose from your existing villagers, you have to pay 2 Play Coins for each one! I decided to use the cards for now; I went with the same trio I used most often on the Wii U version: Goldie, Stitches, and Rosie.
The object of the game is to escape off of a desert island by building a raft from a sail and three logs that will be scattered across the island. Along the way, you may fight enemies, make tools, catch fish, and more. Make sure you don’t run out of food! For a more detailed description of how the game plays, see this blog entry about the Wii U version.
Since I’m already familiar with the game, I had no problem completing the first few levels. Just like the version in Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival, it’s an enjoyable game that will provide hours of fun.
When I had a chat with Hamlet afterwards, he told me he was moving out of town on December 22nd. That’s a week from tomorrow. Carson recently asked me about Hamlet, so please let me know if you’re still interested. You will need to have a vacancy in your town on the 22nd, of course. Or if anyone else wants to be a backup in case Carson can’t take Hamlet for whatever reason, let me know.
Last night, it was snowing in town…and I caught a coelacanth!
After depositing some money into my bank account, my balance topped 86 million bells.
Today, Flandre informed me that Aika Village is now back online with a new dream address. (Update: 2D00-002A-49A0 is the newest version). Many people (including me) had assumed that the town was lost forever in the dream purge of November 2016. But I’m glad to see it’s back!
Of course I had to check it out once again, and I finally got a picture of the room where the eyes look at you if you turn the camera around. I missed that part when I originally wrote up my Dream Suite Adventure of the town, and lots of people let me know about it. 😛
I also found out that another town I’ve featured before, Shamrock, has also been brought back to life with a new dream address (6E00-0026-F069). A lot has changed in Shamrock: It’s winter there, and the mayor has changed the paths to snow-covered patterns that don’t feature all the shamrocks and pots of gold that it had before. I imagine he will change it back once the snow melts, but time will tell.
I also noticed that the player houses are very different as well, although the Irish pub looks even better than ever. It’s still a great town, but I must admit I liked it better when everything was green. Still, it’s good to have another great dream town back online!
There was a meteor shower in Forest tonight, and I sat on my metal bench to enjoy some of the shooting stars. And of course, my illuminated tree looks especially good this time of year.
I decided to change my path back to my winter usual, the icy brick pattern. Hopefully, visitors will remember to wear non-slip shoes. 😉
I managed to build a perfect snowmam tonight, next to an accidental snowboy I made last night. I can now exchange three snowflakes for a piece of ice furniture. It’s a great way to make money in winter.
Camofrog asked me to catch a bitterling for him, so I did a little fishing in the river. It took me a few minutes, but I caught what he wanted. When I took it back to him, he rewarded me with a frog costume!
I’m expecting to receive a pack of Welcome Amiibo cards in the mail any day now. So check back soon to see which cards I get.
And if you haven’t seen my parody of Amiibo cards, check out Amiibo Placebo over on Blah Games. Hopefully it’ll make you laugh. 🙂
Luna told me my recent dream visitors have been Adaline from Willow, BlueHour from Twilight, and Jelly from Roses. Thanks for visiting! 🙂I do not envy any company wishing to enter into the Player versus Player scene. There’s a reason why this competitive corner of massively multiplayer games is known as a cesspool because all too often those whos take part in this aspect of the game fulfill the stereotype. From a personal perspective, I’ve always loved PvP. It offers gameplay that can’t possibly recreated in a PvE environment and while there is some douchebaggery, I honestly think it’s worth putting up with for the enjoyment on offer. As for Guild Wars 2, I’ve always enjoyed its PvP but I also think it’s fair to say that it never reached the lofty heights that were promised during its pre launch hype. Does that mean Guild Wars 2’s PvP is bad? Absolutely not. How does it fair however, in comparison to its competition? I’ve started to find out.
For anyone who isn’t aware, until recently I’d taken at least a 6 month break from Guild Wars 2. I’d covered the game since June 2011, was fortunate to be part of the closed Beta and had played and covered the game almost exclusively until a few months ago. I needed the break and having played much of the competition in the mean time, I still believe there’s very little out there to challenge Guild Wars 2.
The Good
During my time away from Guild Wars 2 I spent a lot of time covering WildStar. While the game isn’t perfect, it prides itself on its telegraph based combat system. I have to admit I’m a huge fan of it and there’s something uniquely brilliant about never having to tab-target anyone. While there are some skills which require targeting (primarily single use heals) for the most part your ability to hurt your opponent is entirely reliant on your aim. Some telegraphs are certainly generous in their size and shape (making it difficult to actually miss with them) while others require high levels of accuracy. I honestly thought I’d struggle to move back to Guild Wars 2 because although it has cleaving and ground targeting, there are an abundance of skills that auto-track the opponent once you have them selected. Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to get used to Guild Wars 2’s combat again and I realised there’s actually a
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place since 1980.
Mountaineers on Everest die for a number of reasons - more than 20% are killed by exposure or acute mountain sickness.
According to statistics given to the BBC by the Himalaya Database in 2015, by far the highest number of people who died did so because of avalanches (29%), with falls being the next largest cause of death (23%).by
A little while back, I made an offhand comment about a certain camera being my choice for ‘serious’ work which spurred a lengthy subsequent discussion offline with a reader; it got me thinking: what exactly constitutes ‘seriousness’? But beyond that, how does a photographer’s choice of camera, or format, or medium, influence the final image? More importantly, is there any way we can use that to make stronger images – because ultimately, that’s what photography is all about. We’ll explore that in some detail in today’s article.
I think the concept of ‘seriousness’ implies some degree of care and attention paid to the task at hand; there is an investment both mentally and possibly financially. A good example would be large format film: you know each exposure is going to cost several dollars, and to yield something technically acceptable, you’re going to also have to carry a tripod and spend some time adjusting the camera’s movements. I think it’s safe to say that almost no photographer would use one of those things as a casual point and shoot when out on a stroll – however, I’ll come back to this later. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the masses – ‘serious’ photographers included – will use cameraphones to document events that are of no real consequence; one is shooting with whatever is to hand, just to have a recorded image for posterity – technical quality be damned. Depending on your ‘effort appetite’ and financial means, most photographers* will land up somewhere in the middle of this continuum.
*People who actually care about the final image, not just the gear – there are a lot of people who would not qualify as photographers on this basis alone; it’s an important distinction to make now because it all boils down to intention.
Before I continue, it’s important to note that not all equipment and intended purposes are interchangeable: unless I had very strange clients, it’s unlikely that they’d allow me to shoot luxury product with my iPhone, and similarly, if I was just making a photographic record of a document or something to email, I wouldn’t use my Hasselblad and digital back. So, there’s definitely an element of ‘right tool for the job’ in play. Still, within that range there is still some wiggle room: you might have to shoot sport with a DSLR, for instance, for its continuous AF abilities; but whether you use an APS-C one or a FX one is entirely up to you – both would work just fine. Are they different enough to produce markedly different results? At the technical level, no. How about at the artistic level? Again, probably not, because the equipment requires the photographer to use both cameras in a nearly identical way: handling of the gear alone presents insufficient subconscious cues to suggest changing the photographic process in a way that’s sufficient to produce different results.
Understanding how our equipment can foster the production of a different outcome is ultimately the point of this essay. I think one can take two approaches: either you try to be as equipment-independent as possible, or you embrace the difference between formats and tools and let the gear dictate the outcome to some extent. The simple fact that some things are better suited to some subjects/ purposes than others suggests already that there is an optimum somewhere; using the right gear might well help you produce the best technical results, or it might give you sufficient control to be able to focus on other things – such as timing and composition. A good example here is autofocus: without it, we’d be concentrating on keeping our moving subjects in focus, probably at the expense of watching the edges of the frame, resulting in weaker compositions. If we use a camera with strong tracking AF, after ensuring it has locked on, we can focus on timing our shutter release to coincide with the right arrangement of elements within the frame. I like to think of this result as ‘evolutionary photography’: we do the technical part a little better, a little more specialized each time – but there are no fundamental changes in the way we shoot.
On the other hand, using something very different tends to result in significantly different pictorial results: this is one of the main reasons why I shoot with such a diverse mix of formats. At first, it’s the limitations of the unfamiliar camera that will make themselves felt: the inability to do what your old one did is going to be more immediately felt than the advantages the new one can offer, especially if you’re shooting with something that isn’t obviously fit for purpose. The best example I can think of has to do with format size: if you’ve always shot a compact, moving up to a DSLR, almost everybody gets obsessed with bokeh: simply because it’s new, different, and you didn’t have the ability to throw backgrounds out of focus before. The reverse is also true: most beginner DSLR users looking for a smaller, more portable rig tend to be disappointed with the lack of isolating ability in compacts.
Is this a problem, pictorially? Actually, it isn’t. The ability to form strong compositions and isolate your subjects by light and color rather than depth of field actually results in much better images. Since you’re not relying on depth of field isolation, you’ve now inadvertently expanded your shooting envelope: you can also produce a strong image where the conditions are not conducive to shallow depth of field – e.g. when backgrounds are close to subjects, or when everything is past the hyperfocal distance. Let’s go a bit further: the enormous depth of field of a compact can actually be used to advantage under several situations: to produce hugely compressed scenes with everything in focus that can’t be done with a large format camera since you can’t stop down enough; the ability to have more of the scene in focus under situations where you’re forced to use a large aperture (low light, for instance). A weakness has now become a strength.
At the psychological level, what’s happened here is that a restriction in the equipment has forced us to change the way we work; by changing the technical part of the photographic process, our minds are forced to reprioritize the compositional aspects, too: we land up thus putting more or less emphasis on certain compositional elements. The outcome is a different artistic result. By doing this with a large variety of formats/ equipment, one can ‘force’ oneself to experiment and shoot differently; by being consciously objective about what methods produce what changes to the outcome and whether you like them or not, you can thus build up your technical repertoire. Through knowing what is possible, one can visualize different final images; by understanding the technical whys of how to create that effect, then it’s easy to combine those techniques with the existing strengths of other formats to create something visually unique.
One of the comments levelled at me is that my images tend to look the same: it’s deliberate, and a conscious stylistic choice. Another comment is that I use too much gear! By shooting with a lot of different gear, I force myself to experiment compositionally and stylistically; by understanding what affects what and how, I can create consistent images regardless of the equipment I’m using. I think ultimately I’m going to settle with whatever it is that allows me to combine the most possible techniques – ideally, I think that would be a compact FF35 view camera with the ability to use AF or movements; sadly, it doesn’t exist. Ironically, the heavy equipment dependence is to lead precisely to the opposite outcome: equipment independence.
I’d like to end this article by talking about the images I’ve chosen to illustrate it with: I’m pretty sure none of you would argue that the compositions are ‘unserious’, but at the same time, I swear that all of them were opportunistic grabs with no more than a second or two’s conscious thought between seeing and capturing. To top it off, almost all of them were shot with small format consumer cameras; even camera phones. (Clicking through to the image on Flickr will give you EXIF data, if you’re curious.) Ultimately, to change the way we shoot, we need to change the way we think: though some with extremely strong wills can do that, the majority of us can’t – fortunately, there’s the crutch of equipment to help us out… MT
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Enter the 2013 Maybank Photo Awards here – there’s US$35,000 worth of prizes up for grabs, it’s open to all ASEAN residents, and I’m the head judge! Entries close 31 October 2013.
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Images and content copyright Ming Thein | mingthein.com 2012 onwards. All rights reservedIt’s been bitterly cold here the past week or so (I know, when it’s below zero in the double digits up north, it seems petty to complain about simply being below freezing, but this is North Carolina, and I didn’t expect it).
Life’s been interesting around here for the past week – I came away from a doctor’s appointment last Wednesday with several food restrictions that are indefinite in nature (the problem: my estrogen levels are through the roof. As in, more than twice the upper end of the normal range. This is, apparently, bad, although now I can blame my curvy figure and non-traditional lifestyle on the ‘Marilyn Monroe hormone’. Go science!)
So, in addition to being a strict vegetarian (20 years and counting), I am now supposed to avoid all dairy and unfermented soy, avoid simple sugars, and eat more cruciferous vegetables – and exercise every single day! Needless to say, this has put something of a monkey-wrench into my daily routine, and I’ve needed some down time to sort it out. In particular, I just haven’t had the mood to bake, as I can only taste small parts of it.
Humans are resilient creatures, however, and the urge started to bite again last night, with the following result:
I saw this recipe the other day at Smitten Kitchen (she adapted it from the Clementine Cake recipe by Nigella Lawson), and as I had half a box of clementines needing to be used up, I couldn’t resist! I am renaming it as a torte, though, because as it is based on nut flours instead of wheat flours, it is more properly a Torte.
Torte Clementine
4 to 5 clementines (about 375grams/slightly less than 1 pound total weight)
6 eggs
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (225 grams) sugar
2 1/3 cups (250 grams) ground almonds
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder
Optional: Powdered sugar for dusting.
Put the clementines in a pot with cold water to cover, bring to the boil, and cook for 2 hours [ note: you will likely have to replace water a few times, even with a lid]. Drain and, when cool, cut each clementine in half and remove the seeds. Then finely chop the skins, pith, and fruit in the processor (or by hand, of course).
Preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C).
Butter and line an 8-inch (21 centimeter) springform pan with parchment paper. (I used an 8.5-inch, and noticed no difference in cooking time.)
By hand, or using a mixer:
Beat the eggs. Add the sugar, almonds, and baking powder. Mix well, adding the chopped clementines.
Food processor instructions (I did everything in the processor, as I had to use it to grind the almonds and clementines anyways, and who wants to get more dishes dirty?)
First step: Puree clementines. Set aside.
Second step (I didn’t bother cleaning the bowl): Grind almonds with sugar (so they don’t turn into nut paste).
Third: Stir in baking powder.
Fourth: Drop eggs into bowl and pulse until mixed in.
Fifth: Add puree, and pulse to mix.
—
Pour the torte mixture into the prepared pan and bake for 60 minutes*, when a skewer will come out clean; you might have to [note: will have to] cover the torte with foil after about 20 to 30 minutes to stop the top from over-browning.
Remove from the oven and leave to cool, in the pan on a rack. When the torte is cold, you can take it out of the pan and dust it with powdered sugar.
—
My notes about the cooking time: Smitten Kitchen took hers out after 30 minutes, using a 9-inch pan. I checked mine at 30 – still goopy, but definitely brown on the edges. Covered with foil. Checked every 10-15 for another half an hour, at which point it looked set (and skewered clean), so I took it out. However, after it had cooled and I’d cut a piece (above), the middle was still on the ‘extremely moist’ side – almost gooey. Given how quickly this browns, next time I make it I will use cake strips on the side and cover it with foil throughout, to prevent overbrowning.
I had a bite of the torte the same day it was made, and it had a nice citrus flavor to it, and nice graininess from the almond flour. Jeff took it to work the next day, and reports that after sitting overnight, the almond flavor really has a chance to show up, making this a super-wonderful torte. I’ll definitely make it again!
AdvertisementsReddit calls itself “the front page of the internet,” but some of the people who frequent its many pages take their talents offline to solve crimes.
These so-called “websleuths” use the power of the crowd, and of the internet to enhance images and videos, dig up long-forgotten information, and locate persons of interest long after the trail’s gone cold. They even have their own version of the FBI.
The results have been astounding in some cases, horrific in others, but the thirst to aid in solving crimes remains. Here are just some of the more famous instances where Reddit intervened in legal cases, for better or for worse.
Crowdsourcing for Truth
Michael Slager
Redditor Daniel Voshart animating footage at his desk. Photo credit: Compy Films
You probably saw the shooting of Walter Scott, a black man from South Carolina who was fatally shot by police officer Michael Slager. Scott was unarmed, and running away from Slager when he was shot eight times. The reason you were able to see the horrifying footage is because a bystander filmed the whole thing on his phone. What you might not know is that a Canadian Redditor named Daniel Voshart stabilized the shaky footage so that the order of events was clear. A cinematographer by trade, Voshart says he got involved because “the truth is the foundation of everything,” which made things all the more interesting when he spotted a piece of evidence that could potentially corroborate the police officer’s defence. Voshart’s story is chronicled in the new CBC short documentary Frame 394, online now.
Grateful Doe
In 1995, Eric Hager picked up a young hitchhiker in his van. The van would eventually swerve off the road and hit a tree, killing both passengers. The hitchhiker was too injured to be identified, and without ID, but with Grateful Dead ticket stubs in his pocket, he was identified as “Grateful Doe.” Some 20 years later, a redditor named Layla Betts found the cold case online and started digging, eventually starting a Grateful Doe subreddit where others joined in the hunt for answers. Eventually some photo reconstructions and a chance message from what would turn out to be the victim’s former roommate led to Jason Callahan’s mom who confirmed her son went missing after he left to follow the Grateful Dead’s tour in ‘95. That turned into DNA confirmation, and after 20 years Jason Callahan was finally put to rest thanks in large part to Betts and the Reddit community who backed her dogged curiosity.
Hit and Run
Following a hit and run, a Reddit user named Meatheaded posted an image of a piece of broken taillight, asking the internet if anyone could identify the kind of vehicle it came from. After a lot of back and forth—over 400 comments-worth—the headlight fragment was determined to have come from a gray 1991 Cadillac Brougham. “Meatheaded” took that information to his local police auto theft unit, and the hit-and-run suspect was matched to a stolen vehicle, adding theft to his charges.
Bad Information
Boston Marathon Bombings
The scene at the 2013 Boston Marathon, following the lethal bombings. Photo credit: Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
One of Reddit’s most famous cases of involvement is also one of the biggest black marks on its sleuthing resume. Following the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013, Redditors scoured hundreds of photos, circling anyone carrying a bag and treating them as possible suspects in their unofficial investigation. But without any fact-checking or accountability, innocent people were caught in the fray, including the two men the New York Post declared to be “Bag Men” on their front page. (Salaheddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaimi have since settled a defamation lawsuit with the Post for an undisclosed sum.) To make matters worse, once the FBI released photos of the actual perpetrators, the Tsarnaev brothers, Redditors misidentified a missing Brown University student named Sunil Tripathi as one of the suspects, and rained down accusations on his concerned family. Reddit’s general manager, Erik Martin, apologized for the grievous errors after the fact, but this case was a window into the scary world of online justice without accountability.
A Shared Obsession
Serial/Making A Murderer
Steven Avery, the subject of Netflix's Making A Murderer. Photo credit: Canadian Press Images
When the media serves up delicious unsolved mysteries like the podcast Serial and the Netflix series Making a Murderer, leave it to Reddit to take up the charge of finishing the job. Or, at least, talking about it—a lot. Making a Murder’s subreddit has almost 65,000 subscribers and Serial’s has almost 51,000. Both forums are full of theories, speculation and even some on-the-ground “reporting” like guided video tours of the locations mentioned in Serial. But nothing much new was uncovered, and the unsanctioned investigation gave a lot of police officers and reporters pause—how can we be sure 50,000 untrained truth-seekers will keep ethics in mind when digging for answers? We can’t. Siblings of both Hae Min Lee, the victim at the centre of Serial’s story, and Adnan Syed, the man convicted of murdering her, have intervened online, reminding sleuths they’re dealing with real people, real families and real lives.
For more on the Redditor who stabilized and analyzed footage in the Michael Slager case, watch the full short documentary Frame 394. To learn the story behind the Brown University student who was wrongly implicated in the Boston Marathon bombings, watch the Passionate Eye documentary Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi.Ancient Mesopotamian astrologers devised a seven day week inspired by the heavenly bodies that wandered about the sky. There were seven in total. The equally sized flashlight and nightlight in the sky, the sun and moon, along with the other five wandering orbs of light thus form the basis of this alchemical cosmology.
The word planet comes from the Greek planētēs, meaning “wanderer”. So by definition the Sun and Moon were considered planets to the Ancients.
Of the days that are not named directly after the seven planets, their name is derived from the Norse Gods associated with the respective planet. The origin of Sunday is of course from the Sun in the sky. Of the seven known metals, the Sun has always represented gold, irrespective of time and place.
Monday or more properly, ‘Moon-day’, is known as Lunes in Spanish, and dies Lunae in Italian. (lunar space craft, lunar eclipse). The Moon has always been associated with silver. The word ‘month’ and ‘menstruation’ also have etymological roots in the Moon, in addition to having cyclical intervals of about 28 days.
The atomic mass of silver is about the number of moons -stacked side by side- that it would take to fill the space between the two cosmic bodies, roughly speaking.
Tuesday comes from Old English “Tīwesdæg,” after Tiw, or Tyr, a one-handed Norse god of dueling. He is associated with Mars, the Roman war god and also the Greek War God Ares. In other languages, the etymology of the days of the week is less occult(hidden). Whereas in English, we disguise Tuesday through Friday with the Germanic and Norse Gods, in many other languages they are named after the planets directly. Tuesday, or “Marsday” is martes in Spanish, and dies Martis in latin.
Wednesday is “Wōden’s day.” Wōden, or Odin, was the ruler of the Norse gods’ realm and associated with wisdom, magic, victory and death. The Romans connected Wōden to Mercury because they were both guides of souls after death. “Wednesday” comes from Old English “Wōdnesdæg.” Hermes Trismegistus is also long associated with Mercury.
Thursday, “Thor’s day,” gets its English name after the hammer-wielding Norse god of thunder, strength and protection. The Roman god Jupiter, as well as being the king of gods, was the god of the sky and thunder. “Thursday” comes from Old English “Þūnresdæg.” Thursday is Torsdag in Swedish, and jeudi in french.
Friday is named after the wife of Odin. Some scholars say her name was Frigg; others say it was Freya; other scholars say Frigg and Freya were two separate goddesses. Whatever her name, she was often associated with Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility. “Friday” comes from Old English “Frīgedæg.” In Spanish Friday is Viernes, and in Portuguese, Vernes.
Saturday comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “Sæturnesdæg,” which translates to “Saturn’s day.” Sabado in Spanish, and dies Saturni in latin. Lead is Saturn’s alchemical metal.
There are seven clearly visible wandering heavenly bodies, and they may be arranged around a heptagon in order of their apparent speed against the fixed stars. The Moon appears to move fastest, followed by Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Planets were assigned to days, still clear in many languages, and the order of the days was given by the primary heptagram shown. – John Martineau: A Little Book of Coincidence
The days of the week are labeled in green. Start with the Sun and follow the green arrow around the heptagram to get the proper order of the week.
In red are the heavenly bodies ordered by their apparent speed against the fixed stars. Start with the moon and follow the red arrow.
The seven planets have long been associated with the seven known metals; Gold, Silver, Iron, Mercury, Tin, Copper, and Lead. Shown in blue, they are arranged in sequence by atomic number. Start with iron(Mars) on the top right with the atomic number of 26 and follow the blue arrows.
In yellow is the electrical potential of each planet’s associated metal. The faster the planet appears to move in the sky, the better the planet’s metal conducts electricity. Begin with lead on the bottom right and follow the yellow arrows around the heptagon.
Isn’t it amazing how all of these ‘circuits’ simultaneously work in tandem with each other?
“We see then that planetary movement is metamorphosed into the properties of earthly metals” -Rudolf Hauschka 20th Century anthroposophist and inventor
‘The orbital motion of the planet correlates in sequence with its corresponding metal’s conductivity… The slower a planet moves, the less able its corresponding metal is to conduct electricity!’ -Dr Frank McGillion
“He learned chemistry, that starry science” -Moffat’s biography of Sir Philip Sydney
From antiquity up until the mid-eighteenth century, the number of metals known and recognised as such was seven. They were: lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, mercury and silver. …Belief in a linkage of these seven metals with the ‘seven planets’ reaches back into prehistory: there was no age in which silver was not associated with the Moon, nor gold with the Sun. These links defined the identities of the metals. Iron, used always for instruments of war, was associated with Mars, the soft, pliable metal copper was linked with Venus, and the chameleon metal mercury had the same name as its planet. Then, around the beginning of the 18th century these old, cosmic imaginations were swept away by the emerging science of chemistry. The characters of the metals were no longer explained in terms of their cosmic origins but instead in terms of an underlying atomic structure. New metals started to be discovered which made the old view appear limited. –Nick Kollerstrom
Men are from Mars & Women are from Venus
The two standard sex symbols denoting male ♂ and female ♀ are derived from astrological symbols from the planets Mars and Venus which represent iron and copper respectively.
The two signs, planets, days, and metals sit diametrically opposed to each other at 10 and 2 o’clock on the heptagon above. Woman and Man. Venus and Mars, Friday and Tuesday. Copper and iron. The Norse and Germanic equivalents, Freya and Tiw, are also of course female and male.
Women are from Venus because Venus is associated with copper. Women have about 20% higher copper serum in their blood than men. Men have about 33% more iron in their blood than women. Of course Mars is associated with iron, the brute and rustic metal, and as the axiom goes, that’s where men come from.
The deep significance of this fact is entirely ignored by modern medicine. Iron and copper levels are sex-linked in exactly the way expected from the gender symbolism of their planets. The level of copper in human blood is critical, being around one part per million by weight, and normally it remains fairly steady around this value.
Copper in women’s blood serum has a monthly cycle in tune with their menstrual period, peaking a week or so before the period arrives. This is because their serum copper exists chiefly as the protein, ‘ceruloplasmin’, whose metabolism is closely linked to the female sex hormone oestrogen. The Pill works by emulating conditions of pregnancy where oestrogen is high, and this has a drastic effect upon serum copper levels. During pregnancy, copper serum in the mother climbs up to double its normal level, reaching 1.9 parts per million. Conversely, iron in foetal blood also increases as the time of birth approaches, so a copper-iron polarity develops between mother and child. Insomnia, depression and changeable moods towards the end of pregnancy have been related to the raised copper levels. A woman taking the Pill has blocked off her monthly rhythm of serum copper, and instead retains a permanently high level corresponding to the ninth month of pregnancy. Evidence suggests that copper has a dynamic role in the reproductive process, rather than just being a by-product of the raised oestrogen.
In the early 1970s it was discovered that coil contraceptives using copper were much more successful than previous coil designs. The ‘copper-7’ coil became the most popular design and was marketed world-wide, used chiefly by women who have already had one child. Despite intensive research however, no-one had any idea as to the mechanism whereby copper in the coil helped prevent conception. Copper ions have a biological action on the inside of the uterus, preventing implantation of the fertilised ovum. Its modus operandi is thus quite unconnected with that of the Pill, where overall blood serum levels are raised. The sole connection is that in both situations a striking Venus-quality is shown by copper’s behavior.
Having compared copper and iron in the blood, let’s compare them in other aspects – as their two planets are nearest to us, one within Earth’s orbit and the other outside it. Pure copper is a metal of reddish-pink hue, and has a warm, beneficial glow which contrasts with the cold glint of steel. With something made out of iron one may feel ‘how strong’ or ‘how useful’, whereas with something made out of copper, the first impression is more aesthetic. Whether it is a copper bowl, a trumpet, or a green-domed copper roof, it is the visual appearance rather than the utility of the metal which first strikes one. It is such a soft and pliable metal that it needs to be alloyed with other metals, into brass or bronze, before it can be used for a structural purpose.
–Nick Kollerstrom
He who knows what iron is, knows the attributes of Mars.
He who knows Mars, knows the qualities of iron. -Paracelsus
The above illustration is from the multi-book Quadrivium, which includes A Little Book of Coincidence in the Solar System by John Martineau
The Order of the Planets
The Solstices, Cancer and Capricorn, the two Gates of Heaven, are the two pillars of Hercules, beyond which he, the Sun, never journeyed: and they still appear in our Lodges, as the two great columns, Jachin and Boaz, and also as the two parallel lines that bound the circle, with a point in the centre, emblem of the Sun, between the two tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. -Albert Pike
Boaz and Jachin were two copper, brass or bronze pillars which flanked the entrance of Solomon’s Temple. They are said to represent the Sun and Moon, but there is also a masonic interpretation. Albert Pike pointed out they represent Cancer and Capricorn, which are respectively ruled by the Moon and Saturn. Since they are positioned at north and south (like the twin towers in New York), the Sun passes east to west in between them.
So we have, in order, Boaz(Saturnday), Sun(Sunday), and Jachin(Moonday). Filling in to the right of the Moon is Mars (Tiw’s day), and Mercury (Wooden’s Day or Wednesday). To the left of Saturn is Venus(Freya’s Day or Friday) and finally Jupiter(Thor’s day or Thursday).
The Planetary Metals found in Hermetic Writings
The Rebis (from the Latin res bina, meaning dual or double matter) is the end product of the alchemical magnum opus or great work. This illustration was found in Heinrich Nollius’ Theoria philosophiae hermetica, 1617. It depicts the Sun and Moon, along with the other five heavenly wanderers.
After one has gone through the stages of putrefaction and purification, separating opposing qualities, those qualities are united once more in what is sometimes described as the divine hermaphrodite, a reconciliation of spirit and matter, a being of both male and female qualities as indicated by the male and female head within a single body. The sun and moon correspond to the male and female halves, just as the Red King and White Queen are similarly associated. The dragon in alchemy represents the prime matter, as well as the third alchemical element sulfur. The winged dragon suggests ascension, a merging of material and spiritual. Fire is a common transformative symbol. -wikipedia
VITRIOL, 1614
This alchemical mandala is used as a teaching device much in the same way Tibetans used yantras. By meditating on this image the initiate brings together in his mind the recipe “VITRIOL”, the symbolic powers of numbers one through seven and many astrological and mythological signs. At the very center of the picture is the face of an alchemist. This places him at the point of totality, the place where things arise and return to his consciousness. One is the symbol of identity. Out of the one issues the archetypal pair of royal opposites: the Solar King of masculine consciousness and the Lunar Queen of feminine consciousness. Each can be seen on either side of the diagram. The King sits on the back of a lion and the Queen is mounted upon a whale or dolphin. The elements of earth and water are shown as the hill beneath the lion and the ocean from which the giant fish emerges. The large, inverted triangle outside the main circle indicates the realms of Body, Soul and Spirit. Body is at the very bottom represented by the cube of earth surrounded by five planets, Soul (anima) is positioned in the upper left hand angle accompanied by an image of the sun, and spirit is in the right angle above a picture of the moon.
Earth and water elements that occupy the bottom corners of the diagram are completed with the salamander, the elemental creature of fire, and a bird symbolizing air in the upper right hand corner. Thus, we have all four elements represented. The alchemist’s body presents us with five elements. His left foot is in the water, his right in the earth element, his left hand holds a feather (indicating air) and his right hand is shown with a torch (fire). Finally, above the alchemist’s face, at the very top of the diagram is a pair of outstretched wings. These represent the ultimate spirit, or quintessence. The number six is found in a combination of two triangles, one drawn directly on the alchemists face and the other as the larger triangle already described in the number three. The inner triangle represents Salt which corresponds to the cube of earth, Sulphur relates to the solar forces and Mercury, in this case, refers to the lunar spirit. –Alchemicalpsychology
Seven Planes of Ptolemy
More notes on Se7en:
7, according to Pythagoras, was the “vehicle” of life. To him, the number seven signified the union of spirit and matter – the union of three (the triple nature of the spirit) combined with the four elements of matter (earth, air, fire, and water)
7!, pronounced ‘factorial seven’, is simply 1x2x3x4x5x6x7 which equals 5040, Plato’s favorite number.
7 was considered among the Pythagoreans to be the middle ground between the first 10 numbers(the decad) since 1x2x3x4x5x6x7 = 7x8x9x10
7 Notes of the musical scale
7 Systems of Symbolism – symbolism of numbers, symbolism of geometrical figures, symbolism of letters, symbolism of words, symbolism of magic, symbolism of alchemy, symbolism of astrology.
7 Colors and 7 Rays – Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Violet.
7 Personality Types – Solar, Lunar, Martial, Mercurial, Jovial, Venusian, Saturnine.
7 Arch Angels – Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Chamuel, Jophiel, and Zadkiel.
7 Metals – Lead, Tin, Iron, Copper, Mercury, Silver, Gold.
7 Chakras – Muladhara, Svadhisthana, Manipura, Anahata, Vishuddha, Ajna, Sahasrara.
7 Stages of Alchemy – Calcination, Dissolution, Separation, Conjunction, Fermentation, Distillation, Coagulation.
7 Hermetic principles – Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, Gender.
7 Spheres
7 Root Races
7 Days of creation
7 steps taken by Buddha at his birth.
7 heavens and 7 earths in Islamic tradition.
7 worlds in the Hindu universe.
7 Seals in the Book of Revelations.
7 Virtues in Christianity – Faith, Hope, Charity, Fortitude, Justice, Prudence, Temperance.
7 Vices in Christianity – Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth/dejection, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust.
7 Stages of Man – the infant, the school-boy, the lover, the soldier, the judge, the elderly man, the senile one.
7 Sciences – grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy – the first three in the Trivium, the remaining four in the Quadrivium.
7 Wonders of the World – Pyramids of Egypt, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Mausoleum of King Mausolus at Halicarnassus, Colossus of Rhodes, Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria.
7 Seas – Arctic, Antarctic, North and South Pacific, North and South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.
7 Continents – North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia and Antarctica.
7 Seven Sisters of the Pleiades star system.
7 Parts to the embryo – Amnion, Chorionic Villi, Spinal Cord, Heart, Brain, Umbilical Cord, Yolk Sac.
7 Parts of the body – Head, Thorax, Abdomen, Two Arms, Two Legs.
7 Glands – Pineal, Pituitary, Thyroid, Thymus, Adrenal, Lyden and Gonad.
7 Divisions to the brain – Cerebrum, Cerebellum, Pons Varolii, Medulla Oblongatta, Corpus Callosum, Spinal Cord, Meninges.
7 Parts to the inner ear – Vestibule, Auditory Canal, Tympanic Membrane, Ossicles, Semi-circular Canal, Cochlea, Membranous Labyrinth.
7 Parts to the retina – Cornea, Aqueous Humor, Lens, Vitreous Humor, Retina, Sclera, Iris.
7 Cavities to the heart – Right and Left Ventricle, Right and Left Atrium, Tricuspid Valve, Mitral Valve, Septum.
7 Body systems – Muscular, Skeletal, Nervous, Digestive, Respiratory, Excretory, Circulatory.
7 Bodily functions – Respiration, Circulation, Assimilation, Excretion, Reproduction, Sensation, Reaction.
7 Levels in the Periodic Table of the Elements.
An introduction to the extraordinary metal-planet relationship experiments of Lili Kolisko, a significant scientific associate of Rudolf Steiner
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get pizzas. It would be even better if you helped out. Plus, you can't expense a night at the office.
(You do know that we're close to release on that Big Project, right?)
8. There is no silver bullet.
Back in 1986, Fred Brooks wrote his classic essay No Silver Bullet (PDF), warning against relying on any given piece of technology to improve quality and productivity. I’m sure you’ve read it. It's easy to be lured by the appeal of moving to a new language or platform, or allowing your people to work from home, or stopping them from working from home, or putting a fridge in the common area. Not one of them is going to have a lasting impact. Improvement has to come from all parts of the department, and it has to be sustained.
9. Technical debt is real.
“Technical debt” has been getting a lot of press in the past few years, and there's a good reason. It lets us put a name to what we've always understood: Doing a lesser job now only makes the next job cost more.
But “technical debt” is not a buzzword. The interest on the debt increases every day we stay on an outdated system, and every time we have to code around an unfixed bug in a library, and every time one of us has to go talk to another developer to get an explanation on how to do things because it's not in a manual.
10. Be glad we spend so much time on automated tests.
Yes, the team is spending a lot of time writing tests. Yes, it really is worth it. Test-first development saves us time in the long term, even if it appears to come at the expense of short-term wins that we can demonstrate to users. Assuming that the overall health of the project is more important than getting up-front visibility, then leave us to it.
More importantly, a solid test suite allows us to make the changes that you want made quickly. When we can turn around a project in a short period of time, it's because we are confident that the rest of the system isn't going to crap out because of an inadvertent bug introduced.
Or think of it this way: When we write tests, it's like we're hiring QA testers for whom you don't have to pay a salary.
11. Give us a reason to stay.
Any geek with a webpage, a LinkedIn profile, or a GitHub account gets contacted by headhunters regularly. For me, it's at least three per week. If we want another development job, we have no end of other employment opportunities.
Remember that for most geeks, money is not a motivator but a hygiene factor. A bump in salary probably isn't going to be enough to draw us away from a job we enjoy. What is? New tech, better projects, and better quality of life are at the top of the list. If we've got those things in our current position, chances are we'll tell the headhunter, "Thanks, but I'm happy where I am." If not....
12. Lead us.
The reason you're the CIO and we're not is that you want to deal with the big picture and we don't. You’re good at thinking strategically; we tend to focus on the tactics and the daily details. We developers want to do amazing work, but we need your guidance to make sure that the company is heading in the right direction in what we do with technology.
Show us where we're going. Share your vision for the future. It not only lets us make decisions that help steer toward the goal, but it also lets us have something to shoot for.
See also:
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[dfads params='groups=937&limit=1&orderby=random']Concordia International Corp. (Nsdaq: CXRX) stated that Concordia's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Thompson was notified earlier today of the sale of 505,000 of his shares as part of a margin call.
These shares were not granted to Mr. Thompson as compensation. The shares were pledged to secure loans made to Mr. Thompson, and the sales terms were agreed upon, prior to the Company's April 21, 2016 announcement that it had formed a Special Committee to evaluate strategic alternatives. The financial institution executed the share sale after Concordia's common shares declined below a certain market price. Mr. Thompson continues to hold 1,620,251 shares of Concordia.
"It is with great regret that I have been forced to sell shares in Concordia," said Mark Thompson, Chairman and Chief Executive Office of Concordia. "Since founding Concordia three years ago, I participated in the initial equity offering and two subsequent financings and invested further last fall. This sale in no way diminishes my confidence in Concordia's business and prospects."
Concordia's senior management team is currently in a blackout period until the conclusion of the review of strategic alternatives and cannot proactively sell or buy shares at this time.
Concordia also commented today on media reports that it had acquired Pernix Therapeutics (Nasdaq: PTX). Concordia has not made a bid for, nor acquired Pernix Therapeutics and is not involved in any discussions about any type of transaction with Pernix Therapeutics.Windows RT is a dog. We’ve been saying that from the beginning. We weren’t alone. It’s very hard to find a positive review of Windows RT, and more specifically, the nine-month-old Microsoft Surface with RT. And now Microsoft, in its latest earnings report, finally revealed that we were right.
The company took a massive $900M writedown last quarter because of unsold Surface RT’s. Even more telling is that Microsoft actually revealed this loss. It’s that big. The company had to tell investors why it didn’t meet Wall Street’s expectations.
Sadly, the Surface RT hardware is not at fault here. The tablet itself is actually a beautiful machine: sleek, solid and downright stunning. It’s hard to pick one up and not be impressed. The Surface RT’s designers and engineers should be proud of their creation. It’s not their fault.
Windows RT should not exist as a consumer-facing product. It’s a reactionary move against the iPad and the multitude of Android tablets flooding the market. It’s Microsoft punching down where it should have just walked away from the fight. While Intel is quickly bringing most of the advantages of ARM chips to its x86 line, Microsoft decided it couldn’t wait and built a product that ignored Windows’ main advantages of legacy software. The Surface RT was sadly part of the ecosystem that is predictably failing.
The Surface product line was a big risk for Microsoft. The company went all-in on a PC for the very first time. And in a way, it was successful. The Surface RT and Pro brought a lot of attention to Windows 8 tablets — much more attention than HP, Dell, or Samsung could have provided. The striking product line put a lot of consumer electronic companies on notice, especially since Microsoft — historically a software-first outfit — took on the task of creating their own first-rate hardware. These tablets are the standard for Windows 8 tablets even if it’s clear after today’s news that they failed to live up to Microsoft’s expectations.
Without the Surface Pro and RT, the Windows 8 tablet world would be as stale and lifeless as Windows 8 laptops.
All signs point to a new Surface line being announced in the coming weeks. And even with today’s news, it’s entirely possible that Microsoft will release a second generation Surface RT with a starting price point much lower. If anything, Microsoft is a company that does whatever the hell it wants even if no one is buying the products.Good evening! Here’s a look at AP’s general news coverage today in Pennsylvania. For questions about the state report, contact the Philadelphia bureau at 215-561-1133. Ron Todt is on the desk. Editor Larry Rosenthal can be reached at 215-446-6631 or [email protected].
A reminder this information is not for publication or broadcast, and these coverage plans are subject to change. Expected stories may not develop, or late-breaking and more newsworthy events may take precedence. Advisories, digests and digest advisories will keep you up to date.
Some TV and radio stations will receive shorter APNewsNow versions of the stories below, along with updates.
UPCOMING TOMORROW:
POLICE BARACKS AMBUSH
MILFORD, Pa. — A jury is expected to begin deliberations in the death penalty phase of the trial of a man convicted of fatally shooting a Pennsylvania state trooper in a sniper attack. By Michael Rubinkam. UPCOMING: NewsNow by 1 a.m. EDT, updating for final testimony, closing arguments, 500 words by 5 p.m. EST, photo.
TUESDAY’S TOP STORIES:
POLICE BARRACKS AMBUSH
MILFORD — His fate hanging in the balance, a gunman who ambushed two state police troopers at their barracks in 2014 decided Tuesday he would not take the witness stand to try to persuade jurors to spare his life. By Michael Rubinkam. SENT: About 770 words.
UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION
HARRISBURG State auditors said Tuesday that sloppy record keeping made it impossible to determine if the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry properly spent millions of dollars in recent years on an unemployment compensation system that melted down during a funding fight. By Mark Scolforo. SENT: About 530 words.
PA CORRUPTION SCANDAL
HARRISBURG — A former Pennsylvania state legislator and revenue secretary has been granted a new trial, nearly five years after being convicted of a scheme to use legislative staff to perform campaign work. By Mark Scolforo. SENT: About 470 words.
SANCTUARY CITIES
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge on Tuesday blocked any attempt by the Trump administration to withhold funding from “sanctuary cities” that do not cooperate with U.S. immigration authorities, saying the president has no authority to attach new conditions to federal spending.
MED–PREEMIES-ARTIFICIAL WOMB
WASHINGTON —Researchers are creating an artificial womb to improve care for extremely premature babies — and animal testing suggests the first-of-its-kind watery incubation so closely mimics mom that it just might work. By Lauran Neergaard. SENT: About 800 words.
MAGGOT-FILLED FOOT DEATH
BETHLEHEM — An eastern Pennsylvania woman has been sentenced to four to 10 years in state prison on convictions of improper treatment of a man with a congenital defect who died after his foot wounds became severely infected and filled with maggots. SENT: NewsNow. UPCOMING: About 260 words.
LAKE ERIE ALGAE
TOLEDO, Ohio —Several environmental groups in Ohio and Michigan are suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, saying the agency isn’t doing enough to protect Lake Erie from toxic algae. By John Seewer. SENT: About 390 words.
EXCHANGE:
EXCHANGE-DUCK PIN BOWLING
DONORA — Tom Nobili earned a dime per game as a boy in the 1960s while manually setting pins at a duckpin bowling alley in a Donora social club. If he was lucky, he went home with $3 in his pocket and without bruises from wayward bowling balls while managing a couple of lanes at the American Croatian Citizens Club that was built in 1951 and survives as a time capsule to an American midcentury modern pastime. Brian Charlton, curator of the Donora Historical Society’s archives, said the duckpin bowling alley that survives in Donora is an indication the club’s members wanted to have something American-inspired in their building. “They were doing what the elite people were doing,” he said. Scott Beveridge, (Washington) Observer-Reporter. SENT: About 870 words.
IN BRIEF:
DEATH IN HOTEL LOT — A Georgia trucker accused of striking and killing his wife with his truck in the parking lot of an eastern Pennsylvania hotel has been ordered to stand trial on homicide and aggravated assault charges.
SHOTS FIRED AT OFFICER-VIDEO — A man convicted of shooting at a central Pennsylvania police officer during a traffic stop captured on video has been sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison.
AUNT SLAIN — A man has been ordered to stand trial in the shooting death of his aunt in her northeast Philadelphia row home.
BOYFRIEND SLAIN-CHARGES — A central Pennsylvania woman jailed on charges she fatally shot her live-in boyfriend last month claims she did so in self-defense.
PAROLE VIOLATION-POLICE SHOOTING — Authorities in western Pennsylvania say a man shot by police after allegedly ramming a cruiser in a Pittsburgh suburb will face charges including aggravated assault.
SLAYING OUTSIDE SPEAKEASY — A central Pennsylvania man says he was acting in self-defense when he shot and killed another man outside an illegal speakeasy in Pennsylvania’s capital.
XGR–LIQUOR PRIVATIZATION — Pennsylvania consumers could soon have far more locations to buy bottles of booze under legislation that’s passed the state House.
XGR–GUN LAWS-NRA — The Pennsylvania Senate is reviving legislation that’s designed to make it easier for gun owners and organizations like the National Rifle Association to challenge cities’ firearms ordinances in court.
XGR–GRADUATION EXAMS — More bills are emerging in the Pennsylvania Legislature to end or loosen a requirement that students pass the Keystone Exams to graduate high school.
TEENAGER SLAIN — Authorities in western Pennsylvania say a 14-year-old boy was shot and killed in a Pittsburgh suburb.
DAY CARE DEATH — The owner of a now-closed Pennsylvania day care has been charged over the death of a 3-month-old baby who was found unresponsive last year on her first day at the facility.
ODD–TOY MOOSE-POLICE — Police in Ohio have received a stuffed toy given by a child to a Pennsylvania police officer to help keep him safe.
LEHIGH VALLLEY HEALTH-MOVE — Lehigh Valley Health Network is moving 500 employees from the suburbs to downtown Allentown, the eastern Pennsylvania city where one of its eight hospitals is located.
CIVIL WAR CANNONBALLS — Workers will start removing more than 30 Civil War-era cannonballs from a construction site in Pittsburgh.
CONGRESSIONAL AIDE-SEXUAL ASSAULT — A former congressional aide convicted of sexual assault in eastern Pennsylvania has been spared jail time but must register as a sexual offender for 15 years.
CHILD-BRAIN INJURY — A central Pennsylvania woman has been sentenced to 20 to 40 years on a third-degree murder conviction in the death of her stepson almost three years ago.
KOREAN VET-HOME ROBBERY — Philadelphia police are searching for a man who followed a Korean War veteran home and robbed him shortly after the victim left a store where he bought lottery tickets.
SOCCER COACH-PREGNANT GIRL — A soccer coach at a Philadelphia-owned playground who is jailed on charges he got a now-15-year-old girl pregnant is in the country illegally and faces deportation.
PITTSBURGH HIGHWAY-TANKER CRASH — A tanker truck crash has closed the inbound lanes of a major highway into Pittsburgh, creating rush-hour detours for thousands of morning commuters.
FIRE-THREE DEAD — A state police fire marshal has asked criminal investigators to help determine what caused a Pennsylvania house fire that killed three people and several pets.
POLICE SHOOT ELDERLY MAN — Four Pennsylvania state troopers are on administrative duty while internal investigators review the fatal shooting of an armed 79-year-old man who had a history of mental health issues.
UNION LEADER-EMBEZZLEMENT CHARGES — A former union leader in Pittsburgh accused of stealing $1.5 million says he will plead guilty to federal embezzlement charges.
MARIJUANA TRANSPORT OPERATION — Two men have been sentenced for their roles in a plot to deliver marijuana to Rutgers University.
PHILADELPHIA MAYOR-MARIJUANA — The mayor of Philadelphia says Pennsylvania should legalize marijuana so police don’t have to expend resources on busts like the one in his city over the weekend.
TEEN SHOT — Police say a Philadelphia teenager was accidentally shot in the face by a friend who was trying to wake him for school.
SCHOOL BOARD-DRUG CHARGES — The mayor of a Pennsylvania municipality says her son resigned from the school board for health reasons, not because of pending drug possession charges.
ODD-TOY MOOSE-POLICE — Police in Ohio have received a stuffed toy given by a child to a Pennsylvania police officer to help keep him safe. SENT: 144 words.
SPORTS:
HKN–PLAYOFFS-OVECHKIN’S MOUNTAIN
ARLINGTON, Va. — To get to their first Eastern Conference final in the past decade, Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals will have to go through the Sidney Crosby and Pittsburgh Penguins, who have quite simply had their number in the playoffs. It’s a lopsided rivalry so far with Crosby owning two Stanley Cups and a 2-0 series record, but Ovechkin and the Capitals feel they’re better off for their first-round series against Toronto. By Hockey Writer Stephen Whyno. SENT: About 780 words.
HKN–PLAYOFFS-WORKING OVERTIME
After a record 18 overtime games in the first round and at least one in every series, all that extra hockey will take its toll as the playoffs continue. For the Capitals and Senators who played almost another full game, it’s a much more pressing issue than teams like the Penguins, Predators and Ducks who coasted through and will be rested. By Hockey Writer Stephen Whyno. SENT: About 790 words.
HKN–PENGUINS-GO GO GUENTZEL
PITTSBURGH — The leading goal scorer in the first round of the playoffs for the Pittsburgh Penguins wasn’t Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin or Phil Kessel. It was a wiry 22-year-old rookie from Nebraska who uses smarts to make for what he lacks in size. Meet Jake Guenztel, who hardly seems intimidated by playoff stage. By Will Graves. SENT: About 930 words.
FBN–STEELERS-BRYANT REINSTATED
PITTSBURGH — Martavis Bryant’s yearlong suspension is over. The NFL conditionally reinstated the Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver on Tuesday, clearing the way for the talented but enigmatic Bryant to return to the team to prepare for the 2017 season. The league suspended Bryant in March 2016 for a second violation of its substance abuse policy. By Will Graves. SENT: About 510 words.
FBN–MOCK DRAFT
PHILADELPHIA — DE-FENSE, DE-FENSE. That’s going to be the area of concentration in this draft, in the first round and through much of the proceedings in Philadelphia. Indeed, the first half-dozen or so selections could come from that side of the ball. That’s often the fallout when there are no slam-dunk quarterbacks available. By Barry Wilner. SENT: About 1290 words.
BBN–CUBS-PIRATES
PITTSBURGH — The Chicago Cubs, winners of five of their last six, take on the Pittsburgh Pirates on Tuesday. Kyle Hendricks (1-1, 6.19) starts for Chicago against Gerrit Cole (1-2, 4.70). By Will Graves. UPCOMING: 700 words, photos. Game begins at 7:05 p.m. EDT.
BBN–MARLINS-PHILLIES
PHILADELPHIA — Vince Velasquez (0-2) seeks his first win since last July as the Phillies try to extend their four-game winning streak in the opener of a three-game series against the Marlins, who send Wei-Yin Chen (2-0) to the mound. UPCOMING: 650 words, photos. Starts 7:05 p.m. EDT.
___
If you have stories of regional or statewide interest, please email them to [email protected]. If you have photos of regional or statewide interest, please send them to the AP state photo center in New York, 888-273-6867. For access to AP Exchange and other technical issues, contact AP Customer Support at [email protected] or 877-836-9477.
MARKETPLACE: Calling your attention to the Marketplace in AP Exchange, where you can find member-contributed content from Pennsylvania and other states. The Marketplace is accessible on the left navigational pane of the AP Exchange home page, near the bottom. For both national and state, you can click “All” or search for content by topics such as education, politics and business.Melissa Santana speaks about a trip to Cuba that she led with students from Northern Arizona University in 2016. (YouTube/NAZ Today)
On the morning of Sept. 9, 2016, the inbox of the superintendent of the Flagstaff Interagency Hotshot Crew pinged with a new email. The subject line read: “Your Hotshot Crew Behavior.”
The superintendent, the head of an elite corp of firefighters deployed by the Forest Service and National Park Service to battle wild blazes across the country, had been alerted that morning his team was needed to help with the Soberanes Fire, which was eating through more than 130,000 acres in central California near Big Sur. But by the time the crew’s boss finished the email, according to details laid out in a recently filed criminal affidavit, the Flagstaff crew was grounded.
“I am disgusted by the behavior of your hotshot crew when they passed through my town,” the email read. “Several weeks ago your guys were on the way to a fire in Wyoming. I intercepted messages between your crew members and my UNDERAGE 15 year old daughter. She won’t tell me which website they met on but I did read that they invited her back to their hotel, gave her alcohol and had sex with her. This is statutory rape and I want these men charged.”
The woman, who identified herself as Cathy McCarthy, listed the names of three Flagstaff firefighters who she claimed assaulted her daughter. “I will contact your local papers if I don’t hear back,” she threatened.
The superintendent immediately contacted his superiors. The Flagstaff crew was taken off active service until the allegations were investigated. That same day, Sophia Fong, a special agent with the U.S. Forest Service, was assigned to the case and sent a message to McCarthy at the gmail address she used to contact the superintendent. Fong stressed the Forest Service took the allegations seriously.
When Fong did not hear a reply within three days, the investigator followed up with another email. This time, however, the message bounced back as undeliverable. The account was no longer working. There was no such user, Google confirmed.
And there was no “Cathy McCarthy,” Fong soon established. The allegations of the firefighters having sex with a 15-year-old in Wyoming were also phony, Fong determined. Instead, both the name and email were part of a bizarre skein of threats, fake names and social media accounts allegedly controlled by Melissa Ann Santana, a married, 36-year-old on the interior-design faculty at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Ariz., according to the criminal complaint.
The professor was arrested on Oct. 30 at the NAU campus on federal charges of stalking and making false statements. Federal prosecutors said Santana unleashed a merciless campaign of harassment and intimidation against at least six individuals, including three firefighters, their family members, and even a NAU student. She allegedly wielded as many as 19 fake social media accounts. The harassment reached such a fever pitch her alleged victims were not just deactivating their social media accounts but buying guns for protection and hiring extra security for a wedding.
Santana is in federal custody, and is scheduled to be arraigned on Nov. 29. “We will defend against these charges vigorously,” Santana’s attorney, Stephen Wallin, told The Washington Post on Sunday.
Santana had worked at NAU since August 2012. Last year, Santana led nine students on the school’s first study abroad trip to Cuba. “It’s really cool going into a building from the 1800s and it’s a restaurant or a hotel now,” Santana told the Arizona Daily Sun last year. “I love the concept of keeping old buildings with new uses. It keeps the cultural heritage with architecture.”
The Sun now reports she is no longer employed by the university.
During the investigation into the Sept. 29 allegations, the Forest Service investigator Fong stumbled upon three members of wildfire crews who had previous contact with Santana, an affidavit filed in federal court said. All are only identified by initials. All met her on Tinder, a dating app.
N.L., a member of the Flagstaff crew, admitted to recently ending a sexual relationship with Santana. The two were matched on Tinder in November 2015. Santana used the name”Ann” and stated she was “looking for friends for daytime fun.” They began exchanging messages and meeting up. N.L., however, “became increasingly uncomfortable with the relationship and ended it in June, 2016,” the affidavit said. Santana, however, “did not react well to the termination of the relationship,” and continued to message the firefighter.
That same month, N.L. was matched with another “Ann” on Twitter who was later determined to be Santana. She became insulting, telling N.L. “why not be like the granite mountain hotshots and go die in the fire, like the other dumba– losers there,” in reference to the 19 members of a firefighter crew killed in 2013.
N.L. also found, on separate occasions in August 2016, the back of his car spray-painted and an obscenity keyed into the a car door. In addition, someone posted his phone number to the Las Vegas Craigslist’s casual encounters section with a picture of a woman; N.L.’s phone was bombarded with 20 to 30 text messages and three to four calls from random “men looking to meet up for sex.” N.L. also continued to field angry messages from Santana, the affidavit said.
A second firefighter, S.M., also told Fong he was matched with a woman named “Amanda” via Tinder in September 2016, who made a big scene while he was eating with his crew at a restaurant. The woman, it turns out, was Santana, according to the affidavit.
Soon after, a supervisor on S.M.’s crew received a text message from a number he didn’t know, asking the supervisor to have S.M. contact her. “He won’t return my phone calls, I’m pregnant, it’s his,” the bogus message read. “He needs to take responsibility.” S.M. told his supervisor he did not know what the messenger was talking about. Fong traced the number back to Santana, according to court documents.
The investigator continued to find Santana’s online fingerprints on other harassing aliases and online personalities.
M.G., a Northern Arizona University student, told Fong he received “harassing calls from various unknown numbers, emails and posts on his personal Facebook page and on the Yelp website,” the federal complaint said. “Some of the of the cyber harassment includes a ‘smear campaign’ against him, such as posting falsely that he has STDs.” M.G. told the investigator he had met Santana in December 2014 and that the harassment “began about a week later.”
Like N.L. and S.M., a third crew member, K.T., was also match with an “Ann” in Flagstaff in August 2016. Before the two met, K.T. learned “Ann” was the same person harassing his co-worker, N.L., he broke off communication. But K.T. continued to receive harassing messages from users under different names, including: “Be a success like the granite guys and die at your next fire. “K.T.’s supervisor also received a random text from woman claiming she was pregnant with K.T.’s baby in September 2016.
A year later, K.T.’s fiance began getting Facebook messages from a woman claiming she was sleeping with K.T. That, too, was Santana, the affidavit said.
The investigator Fong also was contacted by the brother — C.S. — of a man who had connected with “Ann” on Tinder in January 2017. After the brother stood up his Tinder match on a date, she threatened to get revenge on the family. Sure enough, after C.S. and his wife lost a baby due to miscarriage, an unknown user posted on his wife’s Instagram account: “I’m so happy your wife’s disgusting body aborted that bastard child. You two are so superficial that you got exactly what you deserve. A dead baby.”
In the court affidavit, Forest Service investigator Fong described how through Facebook search warrants, comparing IP addresses, and pinging GPS coordinates, she was able to determine “all of the accounts” involved in the above situations “belong to Santana.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly noted the location of the Soberanes Fire. This post has been corrected.
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Along the U.S. border with Mexico, a gate briefly opened and a couple wed
After border agent is killed and partner injured in Texas, Trump renews call for wallAround midnight on Thursday night, the crowd swells at the Chennai Central railway stationmen, women and children, the young and the agedall waiting to catch the first train home. They clutch their belongings close, their kin closer.
They have come from all parts of south India. A huge number from Chennai and from Madurai, scores from Tiruppur and from Bangalore. It's an exodus by people mostly, though not exclusively, from Assam, frightened by incessant rumours about an imminent attack as retaliation for the clash between Bodos and Muslims in Assam last month.
Over the last few years, labourers from the Northeast have been vital cogs in the giant machine that is Chennai's service industry. They work as security personnel, manning ATMs, offices and residential complexes; cook at dozens of restaurants across Chennai and other cities; work in saloons or as labourers in big-ticket projects, including the multi-crore Chennai Metrorail; and do other skilled and semi-skilled work.
But that was yesterday. Now, rumours that warned of an attack on people from the Northeast have triggered panic among them, prompting many to undertake the gruelling journey of over 50 hours to reach their homes.
***
Platform No. 11 of Chennai Central is full. Several people had tried boarding trains from the nearby Chennai Egmore station but only a few succeeded. The rest had come over to Chennai Central.
The crowds have taken everybody at the station by surprise. Even experienced hands like Railway Protection Force Inspector S Jothi, who has been working with the railways for about a decade and a half, admits he has never seen anything like this. As the crowd swells, the officials grow nervous.
Barricades and ropes are put in place to prevent the impatient crowd from rushing to the train. RPF personnel, along with those from the state force, soon bring about some order. Women and children and those travelling as family are given priority and taken to the head of the line. After that, the single men are made to fall in a line.
But the wait continues as the train is nowhere in sight. It's a special train from Bangalore which was to reach Chennai Central by 2 a.m. Every now and then, the crowd jumps to its feet in anticipation. For every one person who gets up, at least two or three follow, only to be pushed back by the policemen. Every once in a while, the order threatens to break into a chaos.
Finally at 3 a.m., the Bangalore-Chennai-Guwahati Special pulls into the platform, crammed with people who had boarded from Bangalore. Two additional coaches are tagged on to the train, but that's not enough for the crowd on the platform. Which means, not everyone gets on to the first train. Officials say only about 700 people were allowed to board the train from Chennai.
***
Jaya is lucky to have got a seat on the train, but restlessly scans the crowded platform. Her 16-year-old son Biswajit was separated from her and was left behind with his friends at the station. "Do you know anyone in the next train or the one after that so that we can track him down," she asks. She can't reach him on his phone. "We are planning to get down at Guwahati and take a bus to my village. But I am afraid my son might get down with his friends at some other station after which it would be very difficult for him to reach us," she says.
The travails of the journey were clear even before the train left the station. After the women, children and families were taken on board, it was the turn of the young men to file in. The seats were filled first, then the top berth, then the floor, doorways and even the toilets. Some enterprising passengers even fashioned hammocks out of their bedsheets and slept in them.
A few minutes later, the train pulls out, leaving Chennai Central and several desperate faces behind on Platform No 11. The train doesn't halt at too many stations and when it does, only for a few minutes. There are no refreshments and the taps at stations are already running dry.
It's easy for crowds to turn chaotic, but these are unusual times. As they sit close to one another, they share an easy camaraderie. There are no arguments, and no displeasure felt or expressed even though one person's elbow ends where his neighbour's eye begins. Some among the younger ones listen to music and watch songs and films on their mobiles phones. They play games and click pictures. But most of them are too exhausted to keep their eyes open for long.
Babu Gogoi is from Assam's Bongaigaon district. He had been in Chennai for over a year after getting a job in the manufacturing facility of a multinational dental care company near Chennai. This is his first trip home, very unlike what he had imagined his first journey back home would be. "There was no problem in Chennai, but my family insisted that I return. They were worried about my safety. I will return after a month or so. At least that is the plan now," he says.
The passengers speak about the string of rumours about an imminent attack on Assamese people. "It started off in Bangalore over SMSes and rumours that spread fast, but now there are talks about possible attacks in Chennai and other parts of Tamil Nadu around Eid on Monday. We are confident about the situation in the state, but for our family members who live hundreds of kilometres away, any rumour causes great concern," says Mohan Bohra, an Assamese who works as a security guard at an IT company in Chennai.
Nishant Gogoi says that when he heard that a fellow Assamese in Bangalore had been attacked, he decided to pack his bags. "The construction company I work for and all the people I know in Chennai have assured me that I won't face any problem. But honestly, I feel no one can ensure my safety if something untoward were to break out in Chennai. It is better to return after the tensions have completely subsided," he says.
Dharam Singh, an assistant manager at a restaurant in Bangalore, says it's a dangerous situation since anyone who "looks Northeastern" can be targeted. Singh is a Nepali whose father served in the Indian Army and whose brother is now a commando with the Nepal Army. Last week, a Tibetan boy was killed in Mysore in an incident suspected to be related to the recent attacks.
"I have spent half my life in Bangalore and am not worried, but my family is. Every day, they would worry until I reached home from work, which is usually around midnight. So finally, I decided to leave my wife and children back at her home in Darjeeling. I'll bring them back when things stabilise a bit. I will drop them and probably return after a week or so," he says.
Not everyone is sure of when they will return. Jitender says he wants to work on his fields back home and Arup Deore who worked in Puducherry says he wants to stay back home for a while. But many others dream of returning to jobs that earn them anything between Rs 5,000 and Rs 11,000 a month.
As the train approaches various stations, the passengers grow anxious. Stories about Assamese being attacked in Andhra Pradesh do the rounds. Then the train pulls in at Visakhapatnam. There is much noise at the platform as cadres of the Sangh ParivarABVP, BMS, Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram and othersraise slogans in support of the passengers.
While the Parivar cadres were barred from crossing the barricade at Chennai Central, there is no such restriction at Visakhapatnam. Slogans, including Vande Mataram, rent the air while the saffron flag-bearing cadres distribute water and snacks amongst the passengers. Few others are tasked with pasting stickers that read, "We vow to protect our brethren of North East"; "North East brothers and sisters, we are with you in this difficult situation".
The welcome brings a brief cheer to many among the passengers, but the journey is not even half way done though it's been over 20 hours since the train left Bangalore station on Thursday at 8 p.m. The comforts of home and family are still hundreds of unforgiving miles away.
Please read our terms of use before posting comments6 years ago
(CNN) - Hours before President Barack Obama campaigns in Boulder, Colorado, a new survey indicates a very close contest between the president and Republican nominee Mitt Romney for the Centennial State's nine electoral votes.
According to a CNN/ORC International poll, 50% of likely voters in Colorado support Obama, with 48% backing the former Massachusetts governor. The president's two-point margin is well within the survey's sampling error.
- Follow the Ticker on Twitter: @PoliticalTicker
- Check out the CNN Electoral Map and Calculator and game out your own strategy for November.
The poll's Thursday release also came just two hours after Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP running mate, headlined a rally in Greeley, Colorado. The top line results of the CNN survey are very similar to an American Research Group poll conducted this past weekend which had Romney at 48% and Obama at 47%, and an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll conducted last week which suggested the race was tied up at 48%.
"If you didn't know why President Obama and Paul Ryan are here today, and Mitt Romney is coming Saturday, now you know," said CNN Chief National Correspondent John King, who was reporting Thursday from Colorado.
As in most swing states, there is a fairly big gender gap, with the CNN poll indicating
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the — you know, waiting for the police to pull people away like everyone else.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, in 1971 — you may remember this; in fact, you may have been there, but Howard Zinn and Daniel Ellsberg were both beaten by police in Boston at a protest against the Vietnam War. One day before the beating, Zinn spoke at a large rally on Boston Common. This is an excerpt from the documentary You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
HOWARD ZINN: A lot of people are troubled by civil disobedience. As soon as you talk about committing civil disobedience, they get a little upset. That’s exactly the purpose of civil disobedience: to upset people, to trouble them, to disturb them. We who commit civil disobedience are disturbed, too, and we mean to disturb those who are in charge of the war.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: He said at the end of his speech, I remember, he said, “Now let me address the secret police in this crowd.”
HOWARD ZINN: You agents of the FBI who are circulating in the crowd, hey, don’t you see that you’re violating the spirit of democracy by what you’re doing? Don’t you see that you’re behaving like the secret police of a totalitarian state?
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, that cost him a bit, I think, the next day when we were sitting in front of the Federal Building, I have a feeling, because, again, the police chose in the end to arrest almost no one. They didn’t want arrests. They didn’t want a trial. They didn’t want the publicity that would be associated with that. They only arrested a couple of ring leaders, and one of those was Howard.
HOWARD ZINN: And so, let the spirit of disobedience spread to the war factories, to the battlefield, to the halls of Congress, to every town and city, until the killing stops, until we can hold up our heads again before the world. And our children deserve a world without war, and we ought to try to give them that.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: And at that point, the batons were raised, and they began clubbing us very heavily. Howard was pulled up, as I say. His shirt was ripped apart. He was taken away. And I saw blood coming down his chest as he left.
AMY GOODMAN: That was an excerpt of the documentary You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, was also the title of Howard Zinn’s autobiography.
Noam, we just have a minute left in this segment, but talk about that activism.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that case is very similar to what Howard described about his bombing attack. I mean, the police were actually sympathetic, the individual policemen. They were coming over to demonstrators, you know, speaking supportively. And in fact, when they were given the order to move forward, they were actually telling people, Howard and others, “Look, please move, because we don’t want to do this.” But then, when the order came, they did it. I don’t know who. But it’s much like he said: when you’re in uniform, under arms, an automaton following orders, you do it.
And as Dan pointed out, they went right after Howard, probably in reaction to his comments the day before. And he was dragged away and beaten.
But he was constantly involved with civil disobedience. I was many times with him, as Dan Ellsberg was and others. And he was just — he was fearless. He was simple. He was straightforward. He said the right things, said them eloquently, and inspired others to move forward in ways they wouldn’t have done, and changed their minds. They changed their minds by their actions and by hearing him. He was a really — both in his life and in his work, he was a remarkable person, just irreplaceable.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, you were personal friends with Howard, too. You and Carol, Howard and Roz spent summers near each other on the Cape.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, we were personal friends, close personal friends for many years, over forty years. So it’s, of course, a personal loss. But it’s beyond — even beyond his close friends and family, it’s just a tragic loss to the millions of people — who knows how many endless numbers? — whose lives he touched and changed and helped them become much better people.
The one good thing is that he understood and recognized them, sure, especially in those last remarkable, vibrant years of his life, how much his incredible contributions were welcomed, admired, how much he was loved and admired, and he could look back on a very satisfying life of real unusual achievement.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Noam Chomsky, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Noam is a linguist, a world-renowned dissident and a close friend of Howard Zinn. And Alice Walker, thanks, as well, for joining us from Mexico, former student and friend of Howard Zinn.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll hear more of Howard in his own words, and we’ll be joined by Anthony Arnove, his co-editor and colleague. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN:
We’ll be joined by Anthony Arnove and Naomi Klein, but on this sad day, the day after the news of Howard Zinn’s death, I want to turn to one of the last interviews we did with him. It was May 2009. He came to New York to promote his latest book.
AMY GOODMAN: You write in the introduction to A Young People’s History of the United States, “Over the years, some people have asked me: ‘Do you think that your history, which is radically different than the usual histories of the United States, is suitable for young people? Won’t it create disillusionment with our country? Is it right to be so critical of the government’s policies? Is it right to take down the traditional heroes of the nation, like Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt?’” HOWARD ZINN: Yeah, it’s true that people have asked that question again and again. You know, should we tell kids that Columbus, whom they have been told was a great hero, that Columbus mutilated Indians and kidnapped them and killed them in pursuit of gold? Should we tell people that Theodore Roosevelt, who is held up as one of our great presidents, was really a warmonger who loved military exploits and who congratulated an American general who committed a massacre in the Philippines? Should we tell young people that? And I think the answer is: we should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country. And we should be not only taking down the traditional heroes like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, but we should be giving young people an alternate set of heroes.
Instead of Theodore Roosevelt, tell them about Mark Twain. Mark Twain — well, Mark Twain, everybody learns about as the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but when we go to school, we don’t learn about Mark Twain as the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. We aren’t told that Mark Twain denounced Theodore Roosevelt for approving this massacre in the Philippines. No.
We want to give young people ideal figures like Helen Keller. And I remember learning about Helen Keller. Everybody learns about Helen Keller, you know, a disabled person who overcame her handicaps and became famous. But people don’t learn in school and young people don’t learn in school what we want them to learn when we do books like A Young People’s History of the United States, that Helen Keller was a socialist. She was a labor organizer. She refused to cross a picket line that was picketing a theater showing a play about her.
And so, there are these alternate heroes in American history. There’s Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses. They’re the heroes of the civil rights movement. There are a lot of people who are obscure, who are not known. We have in this Young People’s History, we have a young hero who was sitting on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to leave the front of the bus. And that was before Rosa Parks. I mean, Rosa Parks is justifiably famous for refusing to leave her seat, and she got arrested, and that was the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and really the beginning of a great movement in the South. But this fifteen-year-old girl did it first. And so, we have a lot of — we are trying to bring a lot of these obscure people back into the forefront of our attention and inspire young people to say, “This is the way to live.”
AMY GOODMAN:
Yes, that was Howard Zinn. We’re joined now by Anthony Arnove in New York, by Naomi Klein here at Sundance, where Howard Zinn was last year, premiering The People Speak. He was here with Anthony Arnove, who’s co-author of Voices of a People’s History of the United States with Anthony.
Anthony, we just have a few minutes, but share your reflections on the latest work of Howard Zinn. I know this is a tremendous personal loss for you, as well as for everyone.
ANTHONY ARNOVE:
Well, you know, Howard never rested. He had such an energy. And over the last few years, he continued to write, continued to speak, and he brought to life this history that he spoke about in that segment that you just aired. He wanted to bring a new generation of people into contact with the voices of dissent, the voices of protest, that they don’t get in their school textbooks, that we don’t get in our establishment media, and to remind them of the power of their own voice, remind them of the power of dissent, the power of protest. And he wanted to leave a legacy of crystallizing those voices, synthesizing those voices.
And he actively worked to bring together this remarkable documentary, The People Speak, which he narrated. He worked so tirelessly to bring that about. And, you know, I just felt so privileged to have had the opportunity to work with him at all, let alone on this project, and to see that realized.
But, you know, Alice Walker talked about his humor, his sense of joy in life, and that was infectious. He really conveyed to everyone he came into contact with that there was no more meaningful action than to be involved in struggle, no more fulfilling or important way of living one’s life than in struggle fighting for justice. And so many people, myself included, but, you know, millions of people around the world, countless number of people, they changed their lives by encountering Howard Zinn — Howard changed their lives — reading A People’s History of the United States, hearing one of his lectures, meeting him, hearing him on the radio, reading an article he wrote. He really inspired people to create the kinds of movements that brought about whatever rights, whatever freedoms, whatever liberties we have in this country. And that really is the legacy that it’s incumbent upon all of us to extend and keep alive and keep vibrant.
AMY GOODMAN:
Anthony, I wanted to bring Naomi Klein back into this discussion. I think it’s very touching we’re here at Sundance, where you were with Howard Zinn last year, as he premiered People Speak. But last night, after Howard died, we saw the New York Times put up the AP, the Associated Press, obit. The Times has something like 1,200 obits already prepared for people. They didn’t have one prepared for Howard Zinn. And this Associated Press obit very quickly went to a quote of Arthur Schlesinger, the historian, who once said, “I know” — he’s talking about Howard Zinn — “I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.” Naomi Klein, your response?
NAOMI KLEIN:
I don’t think that would have bothered Howard Zinn at all. He never was surprised when power protected itself. And he really was a people’s historian, so he didn’t look to the elites for validation.
I’m just so happy that Anthony and the incredible team from People Speak gave Howard this incredible gift at the end of his life. I was at Lincoln Center at the premiere of People Speak and was there when just the mention of Howard’s name led thousands of people to leap to their feet and give him the standing ovation that he deserved. So I don’t think he needed the New York Times. I don’t think he needed the official historians. He was everybody’s favorite teacher, the teacher that changed your life, but he was that for millions and millions of people. And so, you know, that’s what happened. We just lost our favorite teacher.
But the thing about Howard is that the history that he taught was not just about losing the official illusions about nationalism, about the heroic figures. It was about telling people to believe in themselves and their power to change the world. So, like any wonderful teacher, he left all of these lessons behind. And I think we should all just resolve to be a little bit more like Howard today.
AMY GOODMAN:
Well, let’s end with Howard Zinn in his own words, from one of his last speeches. He spoke at Boston University just two months ago in November.
HOWARD ZINN: No matter what we’re told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place, it’s not that we’re going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we’ll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably — inevitably — the indiscriminant massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.
So it’s not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. Anyway, all this — all this was simply to make us think again about war and to think, you know, we’re at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we’re sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that. We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that’s how movements start. That’s how the movement against the Vietnam War started. It started with handfuls of people who thought they were helpless, thought they were powerless. But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power. When workers go on strike, huge corporations lose their power. When consumers boycott, huge business establishments have to give in. When soldiers refuse to fight, as so many soldiers did in Vietnam, so many deserters, so many fraggings, acts of violence by enlisted men against officers in Vietnam, B-52 pilots refusing to fly bombing missions anymore, war can’t go on. When enough soldiers refuse, the government has to decide we can’t continue. So, yes, people have the power. If they begin to organize, if they protest, if they create a strong enough movement, they can change things. That’s all I want to say. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN:
Yes, that was Howard Zinn. As we wrap up today, Naomi Klein, your final words?
NAOMI KLEIN:
Well, we are in the midst of a Howard Zinn revival. I mean, this was happening anyway. And it’s so extraordinary for somebody at the end of their life to be having films made about them and played on television, and his books are back on the bestseller list. And it’s because the particular message that Howard relayed his whole life, devoted his whole life to, is so relevant for this moment. I mean, even thinking about it the day after the State of the Union address, Howard’s message was don’t believe in great men; believe in yourself; history comes from the bottom up.
And that — we have forgotten how change happens in this country. We think that you can just vote and that change will happen for us. And Howard was just relentlessly reminding us, no, you make the change that you want. And that message was so relevant for this moment. And I just feel so grateful to Anthony and, once again, the whole team that facilitated this revival, because we need Howard’s voice more than ever right now.
AMY GOODMAN:
And, of course, that last work, The People Speak, appeared on the History Channel, oh, just in the last weeks, really a culmination of Howard Zinn’s work.The federal government has been closely tracking the Black Lives Matter movement for the past year, the Intercept exclusively reported. Documents recently released under a Freedom of Information Act request showed that the Office of Operations Coordination under the Department of Homeland Security repeatedly used social media to gather information and watch demonstrations in places like New York City, Philadelphia and Ferguson, Missouri.
The Black Lives Matter movement started in 2012 after Florida neighborhood watch leader George Zimmerman was acquitted of charges relating to his fatal shooting of black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. According to its website, the coalition works for “a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”
The group rose to prominence after white police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot black 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson last August. That’s also when the DHS reportedly began monitoring the group's movements.
“It is concerning that the government would be diverting resources towards surveilling citizens who are assembling and expressing their First Amendment rights,” protest coordinator Maurice Mitchell told the Intercept. “The fact that our government is doing this — I can only assume to disrupt us — is pretty alarming.”
The documents reveal that the DHS checked Twitter and Vine to keep an eye on the riots that broke out last summer in Ferguson as well as anti-police violence rallies by the Philly Coalition for Real Justice and Black Lives Matter in Baltimore, among others. The agency circulated internal memos with maps ahead of the protests and in some cases emailed minute-by-minute updates of their progress.
Intercept publishes hundreds of docs detailing DHS monitoring of police brutality protests: https://t.co/JZZZsH69d6 pic.twitter.com/mmFGiFMazx — Dustin Slaughter (@DustinSlaughter) July 24, 2015
Many of these reports were produced despite DHS determinations that the protests would likely be peaceful. Some detailed actions the DHS took at unrelated community events in black neighborhoods, like the Funk Parade in Washington, D.C.
DHS spokesman S.Y. Lee told the Intercept that the agency only provides situational awareness of such events. “The Department of Homeland Security fully supports the right of individuals to exercise their First Amendment rights and does not provide resources to monitor any specific planned or spontaneous protest, rally or public gathering,” he wrote in an email.
Regardless, this wouldn’t be the first time the government has monitored civil rights groups, Fusion reported. In the 1960s and 1970s, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told staffers in the Cointelpro program to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists.” Cointelpro shut down in 1971.
Read the documents in full here.OTTAWA/MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Canada and Mexico will seek World Trade Organization authorization to impose over $3 billion in sanctions against U.S. exports in retaliation against contentious meat-labeling laws, the two nations said on Thursday.
Cattle are pictured on a ranch near Airdrie, Alberta, September 30, 2012. REUTERS/Todd Korol
U.S. legislators have signaled they plan to repeal the 2009 laws, which Canada and Mexico says makes their meat products more expensive.
In May, the WTO upheld an earlier ruling that country-of-origin labeling (COOL) rules illegally discriminate against imported livestock from Canada and Mexico, rejecting a U.S. appeal.
The decision formally allowed the two countries to impose trade sanctions against the United States, which must be approved by the WTO.
The United States saw the annual values as “substantially inflated” and would seek WTO arbitration at the appropriate time, a spokesman for the U.S. Trade Representative said.
Mexico and Canada are therefore seeking an extraordinary session of the WTO’s dispute settlement body on June 17 to authorize the punitive measures.
“Despite the WTO’s final ruling that U.S. country of origin labeling measures are discriminatory, the United States continues to avoid its international trade obligations,” Canadian Trade Minister Ed Fast said in a statement.
Canada said it wanted to impose just over C$3 billion ($2.4 billion) in sanctions while Mexico is looking for $653 million worth of punitive measures.
Ottawa is likely to target beef, pork, California wines, mattresses, cherries and office furniture, Farm Minister Gerry Ritz said on Tuesday.
“The governments of Mexico and Canada will keep working closely to resolve this important commercial dispute with the United States, with an aim to defend our farmers and breeders and maintain jobs and economic prosperity in all of North America,” the Mexican economy ministry said in a statement.
In 2009, the United States required that retail outlets use labels such as “Born in Mexico, Raised and Slaughtered in the United States” to give consumers more information about the safety and origin of their food.
Consumer groups and some U.S. lawmakers say the rules provide essential information about products for shoppers.
($1=$1.25 Canadian)Mormon church completes huge buy of land – now owns 2 percent of Florida land
The megapurchase of most of the timberland holdings of real-estate developer St. Joe Co. was announced in November. That property combined with Deseret Ranches in Central Florida leaves the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with 678,000 acres in Florida.
The Mormon church through its subsidiaries now owns nearly 2 percent of Florida with the completion Thursday of a $562 million purchase of more than 382,000 acres in North Florida's Panhandle region.
AgReserves Inc., a taxpaying company of the church, said when the deal was first made public that it will continue to use the North Florida land for timber and agriculture.
Deseret Ranches has more than 40,000 cattle and is one of the nation's largest producers of calves, and stands to become a key player in Central Florida's development patterns, water consumption and transportation corridors.
The closing of the land deal was announced by CBC Saunders Real Estate in Lakeland, which confirmed that terms remained the same as when first disclosed.
[email protected] or 407-420-5062This season will be one of change for the Detroit Red Wings, from their ownership structure to the arena they will play in to perhaps an adjustment of philosophy.
NHL.com is providing in-depth roster, prospect and fantasy analysis for each of its 31 teams throughout August. Today, the Detroit Red Wings.
For the first time since 1982, the Red Wings will begin a season without Mike Ilitch as their owner. After Ilitch's death Feb. 10 at 87, the Red Wings are being run by his son Christopher, the CEO of Ilitch Holdings.
The Red Wings will start the season in a new home, Little Caesars Arena. They played their final game at Joe Louis Arena, their home since 1979, on April 9.
[RED WINGS 31 IN 31: Top prospects | 3 Questions | Fantasy breakdown | Behind the numbers]
And for the first time since 1990, Detroit will start a season having not qualified for the playoffs the previous season, their 25-season run ending in 2016-17.
The Red Wings may start a rebuilding process that could take a few seasons of pain for some long-term gain, or they may try to assemble a more veteran group that could start a new postseason streak immediately.
Each path is difficult, and made tougher by the limits of the NHL salary cap. Detroit is nearly $4 million over the $75 million cap for this season, according to CapFriendly.com; teams are allowed to exceed the cap by 10 percent during the offseason.
Forwards Henrik Zetterberg, who turns 37 on Oct. 9 ($6.083 million), Frans Nielsen, 33 ($5.25 million), Justin Abdelkader, 30 ($4.25 million), and defensemen Niklas Kronwall, 36 ($4.75 million), and Jonathan Ericsson, 33 ($4.25 million) are five of Detroit's nine top-paid players, and all are signed through at least the 2019-20 season. The Red Wings also have forward Johan Franzen, who last played Oct. 10, 2015, because of concussion-related issues, counting $3.9 million against the salary cap for three more seasons.
Video: 31 in 31: Detroit Red Wings 2017-18 season preview
Detroit's only significant free agent acquisition was defenseman Trevor Daley, who signed a three-year contract reportedly worth $9.5 million (average annual value of $3.167 million) on July 1. Daley, who turns 34 on Oct. 9, joins a top-six group that is expected to include four players 31 or older, along with Kronwall, Ericsson and Mike Green, 31.
There isn't much room for newcomers among the forwards. Martin Frk, who turns 24 on Oct. 5, Tyler Bertuzzi, 22, and Evgeny Svechnikov, 20, are expected to compete for one spot, but the other 11 forward positions are occupied by veterans under contract.
The Red Wings left goaltender Petr Mrazek unprotected in the NHL Expansion Draft, but the Vegas Golden Knights instead selected forward Tomas Nosek.
That means Mrazek, who will count $4 million against the salary cap this season, likely will start the season as the backup to Jimmy Howard. Mrazek will compete for the spot with Jared Coreau, 25, who had a 3.46 goals-against average in 14 games for the Red Wings and then helped Grand Rapids of the American Hockey League win the Calder Cup.
The Red Wings chose center Michael Rasmussen of Tri-City of the Western Hockey League with the No. 9 pick of the 2017 NHL Draft, but he is expected to spend at least one more season in juniors.Republicans and Democrats react to the announcement that Hillary Clinton's campaign plans to join a vote recount in Wisconsin initiated by former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
President-elect Donald Trump unleashed a tweetstorm on Sunday morning about plans by Hillary Clinton's campaign to join in the election recount in Wisconsin initiated by Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
His sentiments were soon echoed by Kellyanne Conway, his senior adviser and former campaign manager, who went so far on Sunday as to criticize the Clinton campaign for making the decision after Trump had been "magnanimous" in backing off his promise to prosecute the former secretary of state -- even though the two issues are unrelated.
[Kellyanne Conway: Mitt Romney ‘went out of his way to hurt Donald Trump’]
Trump had already begun sounding off against the recount efforts late Saturday, when he called them a “scam” by the Green Party to “fill up their coffers.” He also criticized the Democrats for joining the effort.
Just after 7 a.m. Sunday, Trump resumed his criticism, saying that Clinton had conceded the election in her phone call to him before his victory speech Nov. 9 and that nothing would change.
Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the victory speech and after the results were in. Nothing will change — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
Trump then spent five tweets quoting parts of Clinton's responses at the third presidential debate, during which she blasted Trump for telling moderator Chris Wallace that he would “keep you in suspense” rather than outright promise to accept the election results.
At the debate, Clinton had called Trump's answer “horrifying” and “a direct threat to our democracy.”
Hillary's debate answer on delay: "That is horrifying. That is not the way our democracy works. Been around for 240 years. We've had free -- — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
and fair elections. We've accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a - — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
during a general election. I, for one, am appalled that somebody that is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind -- — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
of position." Then, separately she stated, "He said something truly horrifying... he refused to say that he would respect the results of -- — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
this election. That is a direct threat to our democracy." She then said, "We have to accept the results and look to the future, Donald -- — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
(For the record, Trump's tweets capture the essence of Clinton's debate responses but do not quote the full exchange faithfully. An annotated transcript of the third presidential debate is available here.)
Trump capped it all off by quoting Clinton's concession speech and then his signature adjective: “So much time and money will be spent — same result! Sad”
Trump is going to be our President. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead." So much time and money will be spent - same result! Sad — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
On the Sunday political-show circuit, Conway also derided plans by Clinton's campaign to participate in an election recount effort.
On "State of the Union," Conway said Trump was not focused on prosecuting Clinton but wouldn't rule it out — which she said indicated that Trump was being "incredibly gracious and magnanimous" to Clinton.
Though the two issues are neither related nor causal, Conway tried to link Trump's latest public comments about not pursuing a prosecution of Clinton to the Clinton campaign's decision to join the recount effort.
"But this is how the president-elect feels at this moment about Hillary Clinton," Conway told Raddatz. "I would say, in response that, I guess her attitude toward that is to have her counsel, Mark Elias, go and join this ridiculously fantastical recount that Jill Stein is engaging in Wisconsin and perhaps elsewhere. So you've got the President-elect Donald Trump being quite magnanimous to Hillary Clinton and you've got her responding with joining into this recount."
Conway told Raddatz that she was confident the recount would not change the election results in Wisconsin, where Stein received 33,000 votes.
"33,000 votes is like the number of people who tailgate at a Packers game," Conway said. "It is not a serious effort to change the election results."
On "Meet the Press" Sunday, Conway said Trump and President Barack Obama have had several conversations, including a recent one that lasted 45 minutes.
“There is a respect there. And there is a respect for the process," Conway said. "Which is why this recount by Jill Stein and Hillary Clinton is ridiculous. They have to decide whether they’re going to interfere [in the last eight weeks of Obama’s presidency] or whether they’re going to be a bunch of crybabies."
Clinton’s presidential campaign has been quietly exploring whether there was any “outside interference” in the election. A Clinton campaign attorney revealed Saturday that the campaign would participate in the election recount in Wisconsin initiated by Stein.
In a Medium post, lawyer Marc Elias said that the Clinton campaign had received “hundreds of messages, emails, and calls urging us to do something, anything, to investigate claims that the election results were hacked and altered in a way to disadvantage Secretary Clinton,” especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where the “combined margin of victory for Donald Trump was merely 107,000 votes.”Dutch soldiers take part in large NATO troop exercises in Estonia in May 2016. Troops from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Britain, Germany, Holland and other European countries also participated. (Dmitri Beliakov/The Washington Post)
Since the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum in June, European leaders have been working to reinvigorate the notion of European defense integration, while taking care to avoid Madeleine Albright’s famous three D’s with regard to NATO: duplication (of NATO efforts), decoupling (the United States from Europe) and discrimination (against non-European Union member states in NATO).
The election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president has added urgency to this effort, perhaps reflected in the E.U.’s plan to implement its new Global Strategy.
As a candidate, Donald Trump complained about the U.S.’ “disproportionate share” of transatlantic security costs. It’s not a new gripe: President Obama lamented Europe’s “free riders,” while Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2011 warned of a “dim if not dismal” future if alliance members didn’t pick up their share of the tab.
[Trump’s national security adviser wants to water down U.S. NATO commitments. Here’s what that means.]
President John F. Kennedy was as direct in private as Trump has been in public, telling his National Security Council in 1963 that “NATO states are not paying for their fair share and living off the ‘fat of the land.’ ”
Allies boost NATO spending
But lost in the 2016 campaign rhetoric is the reality that NATO defense spending appears to have “turned a corner.” At the Wales Summit in September 2014, Alliance leaders pledged, for the first time publicly, to “reverse the trend of declining defense budgets.” Each NATO member committed to move toward spending 2 percent of GDP on defense — and 20 percent of defense budgets on equipment modernization. Our research shows a positive shift in burden-sharing (see Figures 1 and 2).
[Is there a role for NATO in Ukraine?]
Since the Wales Pledge, 22 allies have increased real defense spending, and 20 have increased defense spending as a share of GDP. The number of allies spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense has risen from three to five since 2014, and the number of allies allocating at least 20 percent of defense spending to equipment modernization has risen from eight to 10 over that period. The U.S. stands to benefit from this shift, with no need for the new U.S. administration to talk of leaving European allies to defend themselves.
Figure 1: Annual change in NATO allies’ defense spending, 2010-2016. NATO members (excluding the United States) showed a 3 percent combined increase in defense spending in 2016, reversing a multiyear decline. ( Data source: NATO
Figure 2: Annual change in NATO allies’ equipment spending, 2010-2016. Also in line with public commitments made at the 2014 Wales Summit, the rest of NATO increased equipment spending by nearly 5 percent in 2015 and over 10 percent in 2016, reversing a multiyear decline. ( Data source: NATO
These trends suggest that NATO offers a platform to support collective action to boost burden-sharing on defense. Other research shows that NATO allies do not engage in “free-riding” any more than E.U. members who are not part of NATO. For example, neutral Sweden appears to free-ride (measured by negative correlation between its defense spending and that of the United States) as much (if not more) than its neighbor Norway, a NATO member.
Our research on strategy and strategic culture finds that the language in key strategic documents affects how states allocate resources. We looked at 95 national security strategy documents to gauge how states viewed the defense of Europe, specifically looking at the language in these documents.
We used “Wordscores” content analysis to score each document from 0 (minimally Atlanticist) to 100 (maximally Atlanticist). The more documents reflected an “Atlanticist” approach — a view that the U.S. plays a central role in European security — the more countries tended to engage in the kind of burden-sharing behavior that the U.S. has preferred (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Atlanticism and Operations Expenditures. “Europeanist” nations like France are more likely to seek a Europe-centered security strategy, while “Atlanticist” nations like the U.K. see a clear role for the U.S. in maintaining the security of Europe. During 1995-2012, the more Atlanticist states spent more on operations and maintenance (O&M), which we focused on as a “primary way of funding readiness,” and an important indicator of functional alliance solidarity during this time frame, when the United States encouraged allies to participate in joint training along with combat operations outside of allied territory. (Data source: NATO)
Encouraging NATO allies to incorporate the commitments made at the Wales Summit into national security strategies will be an ongoing challenge. A less Atlanticist Europe that feels itself adrift from the U.S. may spend more on defense because it feels more threatened — but that spending is unlikely to align with U.S. interests.
Atlanticism is therefore worth tending to by continuing to demonstrate transatlantic solidarity, particularly after allies agreed publicly in Wales to greater burden-sharing. A continued sense of transatlantic solidarity improves the odds that European allies engage in the kind of burden-sharing behavior the U.S. has sought.
Allies can influence the development of other NATO members’ national strategic approaches both bilaterally and multilaterally. NATO’s Defense Planning Process, for example, seeks to harmonize national strategic and defense planning among allies.
Checking in on NATO commitments
NATO member documents reveal that both the Czech Republic and U.K. security plans explicitly transmit the Wales pledge into national security planning. France’s 2015 update to its Loi de Programmation Militaire is somewhat less explicit on this point. Italy’s Defense White Paper acknowledges the need to increase defense investment.
While Denmark’s current Defense Agreement makes significant increases unlikely before 2018, the recent Review of Denmark’s Foreign and Security Policy argued that “Denmark should halt the downward trend in defense expenditure, and — in the course of the next defense agreement period of 2017-2022 — increase the defense budget as a share of GDP in accordance with Denmark’s NATO commitments.” Germany’s White Paper on defense is more ambitious than previous editions as well, as is Norway’s recent Long-Term Defense Plan. Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania all adapted national fiscal and defense legislation in line with commitments made at Wales.
[Trump may put 5 former military brass in his administration
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The Amazing Spider-Man 2 sequel arrives on December 5th next week, and it's likely Sony is waiting until that lands to debut this online. In the meantime, a fan has taken a few photos of a brand new promo banner on display at a movie theater ("in Red Rock casino in Vegas") showing Spidey (Andrew Garfield) and what looks like three villains: Electro, Green Goblin ( aka Harry Osborn) and Rhino in some kind of mech suit. Take a look!
Update #2! Here is the full high res banner as found by ComingSoon - click for a HQ version of the image:
Here's the original photos taken by Jeser Piedra, @arkhamhc, of the new Amazing Spider-Man 2 banner:
Update! We've added yet another photo of this three-poster banner, tweeted out by @crimsong19 today:
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is directed by Marc Webb and written by Jeff Pinker, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) finds, life is busy between taking out the bad guys as Spider-Man and spending time with the person he loves, Gwen (Emma Stone), high school graduation can't come quickly enough. Peter hasn't forgotten the promise he made to Gwen's father to protect her by staying away, but that's a promise he just can't keep. Things will change for Peter when a new villain, Electro (Jamie Foxx), emerges, an old friend, Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan), returns, and Peter uncovers new clues about his past. Sony will release Amazing Spider-Man 2 in theaters next summer on May 2nd. Trailer next week.
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Sorry, no commenting is allowed at this time.It’s the last call for St. Paul’s only 3.2 bar, and the owner is ready to turn out the lights.
“I’m 75. It’s too late for me,” said John Weber, taking a break from mowing grass at the Beehive Tavern in the Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood. “There is no money in it anymore.”
The Beehive once was among dozens of Twin Cities bars serving the low-alcohol beer. But sales of 3.2 beer are as flat as a week-old opened bottle of Pabst, and Minnesota is one of only five states that still sells it.
That means the future of 3.2 bars like the Beehive is bleak. The low-alcohol beer is also sold in gas stations and supermarkets, where sales have been hurt by the recent addition of Sunday liquor sales. And tastes have changed, making 3.2 Minnesota’s most endangered brew.
“I have seen people come in here and then turn around and walk out,” said Beehive bartender Michael, who didn’t want his last name published.
The fact that such a weak beer even exists requires some explaining.
During Prohibition, the U.S. Congress tried to weasel out of a complete ban on alcohol. It declared that any drink with 3.2 percent alcohol or less could not be called an “alcoholic beverage” by law.
Overnight, bars selling 3.2 beer spread across the country. “It was the first step in repealing Prohibition,” said Mike Madigan, president and legal counsel of the Minnesota Beer Wholesalers Association.
When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, states had the power to make their own rules.
State by state and even county by county, new rules were set. They banned sales to minors, forbade Sunday sales, limited sales only to bars, and eliminated late-night hours for taverns.
Out of the five states selling 3.2 beer today, Colorado and Oklahoma are scheduled to phase it out in the next two years. That will leave Utah, Kansas and Minnesota as the last holdouts.
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Chai Lee, Kris Fredson among 17 members chosen for Met Council The association’s Madigan said 3.2 beer is only “in the single digits” as a percentage of Minnesota beer sales. Half of the national 3.2 beer market is in Oklahoma, and another 20 percent in Colorado.
This has led to speculation that big beer-brewers might suspend the brewing of 3.2-beer.
But Madigan doesn’t think so. The market is shrinking, but in Minnesota it’s not going to disappear because of sales at resorts. The resorts have found that 3.2 licenses are easier to get, and those in isolated areas don’t have to worry about competition from bars that serve stronger beer.
But in the metro area, low-alcohol beer seems like a relic. The hottest trend in brewing today is craft beers, with alcohol content typically between 5 percent and 10 percent — up to triple the wallop of the so-called “baby beers.”
At the Beehive Tavern, it feels like the end of an era, with no one there to see it.
On Tuesday afternoon there were no customers to serve, so owner Weber talked about how the place was established in 1889, converted to a 3.2 bar during Prohibition, and never converted back.
It can sell only 3.2 beer and wine that’s diluted to reach the 3.2 percent level.
Weber said his business got hit when the state in 2007 banned smoking in public places. “That hurt us. Smoking and beer go together,” he said.
Then, in July the state lifted the ban on Sunday liquor sales. Until then, 3.2 bars were the only place to buy a beer on Sunday. “Sunday used to be a good day for us,” said Weber.
“It’s been one thing after another.”
The future of the bar is as dim as the beehive Christmas lights behind the bar. Weber is selling the place, and said that one prospective buyer would turn it into a food store.
He wistfully recalled the days when the Beehive was busy with community events and meetings. “We don’t have any busy times anymore,” he said.Even as President Donald Trump’s team tries to undermine the various probes, special counsel Robert Mueller has been widely praised by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, complicating the White House’s messaging effort. | J. Scott Apllewhite/AP Photo White House Trump team’s attacks on Mueller rattle Washington The president and his allies have ramped up their warnings against the special counsel in recent days.
The White House is rapidly ratcheting up its public threats against special counsel Robert Mueller and his team, raising concerns among Democrats and Republicans alike across Washington.
President Donald Trump continues to deride Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election as a “witch hunt,” and warned the longtime prosecutor in a Wednesday interview with the New York Times to stay away from investigating his family’s finances, saying it would be a “violation.”
Story Continued Below
The president also pushed the notion that some members of Mueller’s team, who have previously donated to Democratic campaigns, are ethically compromised. His surrogates have pushed similar talking points, while White House deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders reiterated Thursday that Trump retains the right to remove Mueller.
The prospect of Trump firing the special counsel sends shivers across Capitol Hill, with one senior Republican congressional aide telling POLITICO on Friday that the only reason he could think of for such a move would be “trying to obstruct justice.”
“He is a revered figure on the Hill, he is someone who has a sterling reputation,” the aide said of Mueller. “No one really questions his integrity.”
Trump’s allies defended the various tactics on Friday.
“People should know what folks’ pasts and their motivations and their political motivations are. These weren't minor donations,” Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House aide, told Fox News on Friday about Mueller’s team. “Now, whether that prejudices them one way or the other in the investigation remains to be seen. But it is relevant information for people to have.”
“If you’re going to be sued or are sued, you’re always going to look for conflicts with the judge, with prosecutors, with witnesses,” said Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), an early Trump supporter, in an interview with CNN. “I think this is nothing more than standard practice when you’re involved in litigation or potential litigation.”
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The Trump team’s defense of the Mueller attacks come after a flurry of reports emerged Thursday evening that the president’s lawyers and aides were stockpiling information against Mueller and his team to discredit the probe and possibly lay the groundwork for firing him.
The intensified effort also comes before two highly anticipated congressional appearances next week – Trump son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner is due to testify behind closed doors to the Senate Intelligence Committee, while former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. are scheduled to testify publicly before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
But even as Trump’s team tries to undermine the various probes, Mueller has been widely praised by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, complicating the White House’s messaging effort.
“I understand where they’re going, they’re moving toward trying to discredit Mueller,” the GOP aide said, and called the tactic “ridiculous.”
Trump’s allies have also enthusiastically embraced Trump’s warning that Mueller must limit the scope of his investigation and avoid looking at the Trump family’s financial dealings.
“The scope is going to have to stay within his mandate,” Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s outside lawyers, told the Washington Post on Thursday. “If there’s drifting, we’re going to object.”
Sanders had also tried to drive that point home to reporters on Thursday during the daily briefing, which has been held off camera since June 29.
“The point [Trump]'s trying to make is that the clear purpose of the Russia investigation is to review Russia's meddling in the election, and that that should be the focus of the investigation. Nothing beyond that,” Sanders said. “The President is making it clear that the special counsel should not move outside the scope of the investigation.”
And Collins backed up that position on Friday. “I would hope that Mueller doesn't cross the line into tax returns,” Collins said on CNN. “And he should let go of some of the business things.”
The laying of the groundwork for attacks on Mueller is not the only thing raising concern on Capitol Hill as Trump continues to obsess over the Russia investigation. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Trump’s legal team is exploring the limits of the president’s pardon power, including whether or not he could potentially pardon himself, as well as his aides and family members.
That prospect immediately raised protests from Democrats, with Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, calling on Trump to “rule out categorically” the prospect of pardons.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, said pardons at this point would be “crossing a fundamental line.”
Louis Nelson, Diamond Naga Siu and Austin Wright contributed reporting.The Daily’s newest correspondent is Elena Passarello, who will be writing about famous animals from history. This week’s beast is the silent-film star Tony the Wonder Horse.
Tom Mix and Tony at their best! Rip snortin’ action!—break neck horsemanship! A thrill for everybody! —Destry Rides Again promo poster, 1932. When they were about to do a difficult scene, Tom would pat Tony on his nose and say, “Now, look, Tony, here’s the way we’re going to do this.” And then that was the way they did it. —Olive Mix, 1957. Tom once told a newspaperman that I liked to show off. Well, I’ll tell you something. He likes to show off too. Do you think he would do all those difficult and dangerous tricks if he thought nobody would see them? —“Tony’s Story Told By Tony Himself,” 1923.
Name: Tony the Wonder Horse
Years Active: October 1918 (Fame and Fortune) through November 1932 (Rustler’s Roundup)
Distinguishing Marks: Two white “sox” on back legs, diamond-shaped blaze fading into a narrow stripe that runs from forehead to nostrils
Skills: Galloping into fire, chasing trains, jumping through trick-glass windows, untying the hero’s hands, nudging the hero into the arms of his sweetheart for a grand-finale kiss
Habitat: Mixville Studios, on location at the Grand Canyon, a custom-made Packard motor trailer with rubber seats and a built-in water trough
Additional Notes:
One could argue that American cinema began with the image of a horse at full gallop, when Eadweard Muybridge laid twenty-four trip wires attached to twenty-four cameras along a track in Palo Alto and a dark mare called Sallie Gardner ran over all of them. Those two-dozen captured images, when strung together, set into motion the gorgeous pump and reach of Sallie’s shiny black body and the split-second of her stride when all four legs left the ground.
So, though Tony might have been film’s original Wonder Horse—the first in a long line of celluloid steeds like Champion, Silver, and Trigger—he was forty years too late to cut any kind of original figure in film. Tony wasn’t even the first horse ridden onscreen by his costar Tom Mix—“the King of the Cowboys,” famous for his dark features, gigantic white Stetson, and a rodeo fearlessness derived from both an unshakable trust in horses and an industry untroubled by safety rules.
Mix had a series of rides in the 1910s, first in single-reel shorts then in hour-long “oaters”—hastily made silent Westerns of the teens and twenties. When his first longtime horse, Old Blue, died in 1918, on the set of Treat ’em Rough, Mix auditioned a few replacements and finally cast Tony, a compact sorrel that Mix’s trainer had noticed pulling a chicken wagon down Glendale Avenue.
Tom Mix had an ideal mug for silent film—his thick black eyebrows and large features registered well on the cameras, and he looked aces in his gaudy cowboy duds. Likewise, Tony stood out thanks to his signature white blaze and perky ears, which were often pricked forward. Tony was small enough that when Mix stood next to him, the two could gaze straight into each other’s eyes like Valentino and a velvety starlet.
Mix trained Tony as a showman, ready to dance, buck, rear, swim, roll down cliffs, and take off galloping at the smallest signal. He found Tony hilariously adept at interior scene work; the horse could pace around an indoor set like a butler in a drawing room comedy. Directors learned they could give Tony close-ups, reaction shots, and punch lines; in an oft-repeated gag, Tony filched Mix’s ten-gallon hat with his teeth. Mix would leap onto Tony’s back from great heights and burning buildings, and Tony leapt, too—on and off moving trains, down rocky crags, and into hotel swimming pools. Mix’s films took early stabs at the grandiose sweep of Westerns, and Tony looked gorgeous galloping over an acre in a wide shot.
The Fox Films press machine fed countless stories to movie rags about the special romance between horse and cowboy. They spun rumors that Mix refused to let anyone else sit on Tony’s back and gleefully reported a disastrous shooting day in which an ill-timed dynamite blast sent the pair flying, leaving them concussed and bleeding. Tony, the papers said, would not give in to his pain until he made sure Mix was still alive—once he saw his partner breathing, Tony blacked out.
The two often teamed up for interviews; Mix had trained Tony to answer yes or no when he squeezed Tony’s sides with his knee. They met president Coolidge, dined in style at the hotel Astor (though Mix only let Tony eat celery), and sailed to Europe, where so many admirers reached out to pet Tony that Mix feared his fur would rub off. In 1927, after his title roles in Just Tony, Tony Goes Wild, and Oh! You Tony, Tony became the eighth film star to partake in the new Hollywood tradition of dipping his feet in wet cement outside Sid Grauman’s movie house—the same year as Gloria Swanson and two years before Joan Crawford.
Sadly, we have more press about the Tony pictures than we have actual movies, thanks to the volatility of nitrate film. A 1937 warehouse fire incinerated the entire careers of some silent stars, and about ninety percent of Mix’s three-hundred-plus pictures went up in those flames. Among the lost films is 1923’s Three Jumps Ahead, which featured the pair’s famed twenty-foot canyon leap. A lobby card photo of the jump, taken from a distance, shows a tiny horse-and-rider ninety feet above the rocks of a canyon.
The reviews of the jump were breathless: “The crashing climax—Tony’s very remarkable jump across a yawning abyss with Tom Mix on his back—is startling in its realism. There’s no fake to this scene. No possible way it could be faked. And besides, faking scenes is beneath the dignity of Tom and Tony.”
The jump is totally fake, of course; the figures were obviously shrunk to make the distance of the leap look more daring. And though Tom Mix swore to the press it was the two of them who performed the trick (and that they did it five times), a couple movie stuntmen have since laid claim to it. Besides, Tony had become too much of an insurance risk to be taxed with dangerous action; it’s bad business for a wonder horse to go around doing things that might kill him. So Tony had body doubles for the more physical work of his late career, and was used more often in tighter shots and comic lazzis. By the thirties, doubles covered even those scenes, many of them with painted-on blazes and white sox.
Tony retired in 1932. Mix replaced him with an ebony gelding that he first passed off as Tony but later renamed Tony Jr. Then came Tony II, a Palomino that Mix rode in the circus after the talkies talked him out of a job. But the original Tony lived for a decade after his own retirement. He even outlived Mix, who died not on horseback but behind the wheel of a 1937 Cord Phaeton on a road outside of Tucson, when he came upon an unexpectedly out bridge and couldn’t make the jump.
Near the site of that crash, on what is now Highway 79, stands a monument to the King of the Cowboys. At the top of a stone base is an iron-cast silhouette of a riderless Tony. The statue has been stolen again and again, each time quietly replaced. The iron figure stands in black, feet firmly planted on a swatch of grass. His tail droops between his legs and his back seems burdened by the weight of an empty saddle. Though his ears are still pricked forward, his head hangs low, as if to say that Tony, upon hearing of the fate of Tom Mix, wept.
Elena Passarello is a Whiting Award winner and the author of Let Me Clear My Throat and Animals Strike Curious Poses, which will be released by Sarabande Books in February. She is one of the Daily’s correspondents.What an awesome SS I have this year. He was about to whip me something up from scratch, but apparently his computer broke that same day. Lucky me.
I don't know what he's crafting in his (no-doubt impressive) mad scientist's lair, but what he set me up with to tide me over until the new year has made me deliriously happy and has been extremely fun to play with.
It is...
drumroll
The Eat'N Tool! Finally, man doesn't have to trade-off the ability to open bottles, screw screws, and spork tasty comestibles ever again, it can do it all. It also clips handily to my belt loops and gets stern looks at airport security.
In short: greatest thing ever. I don't know if I mentioned liking it in a comment or not (probably not on reddit even... good stalking SS!) but I've had my eye on it for a long while as an item I'd like to have. It's awesome.
Thanks a ton! And I'm excited for the mysterious custom-made thing coming in 2011 too (though, really, you've done plenty!)Gen Shooshtari was deputy commander of the ground force Several top commanders in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards have been killed in a suicide bombing in the volatile south-east of the country. Iranian state television said 31 people died in the attack, in the Pishin region of Sistan-Baluchistan, and more than 25 were injured. Shia and Sunni tribal leaders were also killed. A Sunni resistance group, Jundullah, said they carried it out. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the criminals would be punished. "The criminals will soon get the response for their anti-human crimes," Irna quoted him as saying. SISTAN-BALUCHISTAN ATTACKS May 2009 A bomb explodes at a mosque in the provincial capital Zahedan, killing 19 and injuring 60. February 2007 Suspected militants killed 11, including Iranian Revolutionary Guards, in a bomb attack in the provincial capital Zahedan. March 2006 Gunmen posing as police kill 22 people, many government employees, after closing the Zabol-Zahedan road. A top Guards officer has also vowed to deliver a "crushing" response to those behind the attack, according to Agence France Presse. Sistan-Baluchistan is mainly made up of the Baluchi ethnic group, who belong to the Sunni Muslim minority of Shia-ruled Iran. Jundallah has previously been accused by Iran of terrorist activities in the province. Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said "US action" contributed to the attack - an accusation dismissed by the US. According to state media, one or more suicide bombers targeted the group of Revolutionary Guards leaders who had arranged to meet with tribal leaders. One report said there were two bombs - one inside the meeting and one aimed at a convoy of guards just arriving. 'Terrorist' attack ANALYSIS Jon Leyne, BBC Tehran correspondent Jundallah, or Army of God, has been involved in a long-running insurgency in Sistan-Baluchistan. Some experts believe they may have ties with the Taliban or al-Qaeda, operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That is disputed, and another possibility is that Jundallah maintains more informal links with ethnic Baluchis in the neighbouring countries. Jundallah is also believed to have ties with drugs smugglers, who race across the border in heavily armed convoys, taking drugs on the lucrative smuggling route from Afghanistan through to Western Europe. Diplomats on official visits to see progress in Iran's war on the drugs trade are always heavily guarded. In May Iran hanged several members for a major attack on a mosque in the provincial capital Zahedan. The brother of the group's leader, Abdolmalek Rigi, was due to be executed, but remains in prison for further questioning. The deputy commander of the Guards' ground force, General Noor Ali Shooshtari, and the Guards' chief provincial commander, Rajab Ali Mohammadzadeh, were among at least six officers killed, state news agency reported. Mr Larijani, speaking at an open session of parliament which was broadcast live on state radio, said: "We express our condolences for their martyrdom. "The intention of the terrorists was definitely to disrupt security in Sistan-Baluchistan Province." "We consider the recent terrorist attack to be the result of US action. This is a sign of America's animosity against our country," Mr Larijani said, quoted by AFP. "Mr Obama has said he will extend his hand towards Iran, but with this terrorist action he has burned his hand," he said, referring to US President Barack Obama. The US condemned the attack, with a state department spokesman adding: "Reports of alleged US involvement are completely false." Earlier reports on Iranian TV quoted what it called "informed sources" as saying that Britain was directly involved. A Foreign Office spokesman said: "The British government condemns the terrorist attack... and the sad loss of life which it caused." The Iranian government has previously accused both countries of supporting the militants. REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS Officially the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), or Pasdaran Formed after 1979 revolution Loyal to clerics and counter to regular military Estimated 125,000 troops Includes ground forces, navy, air force, intelligence and special forces Commander-in-chief: Mohammad Ali Jafari Iran President Ahmadinejad is a former member
Profile: Iran's Revolutionary Guards Iran: Who holds the power? Sistan-Baluchistan province, which borders both Pakistan and Afghanistan, has long been affected by smuggling, drug trafficking, banditry and kidnapping. Jundallah, also known as the Popular Resistance Movement of Iran, says it is fighting against the political and religious oppression of the country's Sunni minority. In May, three men were executed for their role in a bombing of a mosque during evening prayers which killed at least 19 people in the south-east city of Zahedan in Sistan-Baluchistan. The hangings came two days after the attack and the men were in custody on other charges at the time of the bombing. Revolutionary Guards were among 11 people killed in an attack in 2007 in Zahedan. Are you in the area? Did you witness the attack? Send us your comments using the form below. You can also send us your pictures and videos to [email protected] or text them to +44 7725 100 100. If you have a large file you can upload here. Read the terms and conditions At no time should you endanger yourself or others, take any unnecessary risks or infringe any laws. A selection of your comments may be published, displaying your name and location unless you state otherwise in the box below. Name
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionA former top editor of Vogue Australia magazine has written a book exposing what she says are some of the secrets of the modeling world, including how some models at tissue paper and starved themselves for days on end in order to maintain their slender figures.
Kirstie Clements, whose book, "The Vogue Factor," is an account of her time in the industry, was fired from her editor-in-chief job at Vogue Australia in May of 2012.
Speaking Wednesday to "Entertainment Tonight" about her book and the industry, Clements recalled one season when she said models were particularly thin.
"I was having dinner with a New York agent who said to me that a few of the girls had resorted to eating tissues," she said. "I'd never heard of such a thing. I said 'Oh, what did that do?' And, apparently, they swelled in your stomach and made you feel full, and I definitely heard that some girls were unwell and starving themselves and were on drips. Over time, I did hear that."
She also told "ET" that already-slender models who aspired to becoming catwalk models in Paris were often expected to lose " a great deal of weight" so they could fit into the sample sizes.
Runway models were typically thinner than the models who would appear in the magazine, Clements added.
Cynthia Bailey, a model, star of Bravo's "Real Housewives of Atlanta" and CEO of the Bailey Agency in Atlanta, says she has seen models go through "real extremes" to avoid gaining weight but is surprised to see the measures made so public.
"I am a little surprised that a Vogue editor is speaking out about it because usually these are things that we just know about but we never talk about," Bailey said.
Clements stressed that not every model lost weight in an unhealthy way, but said models faced tremendous pressure from within the industry, and some of them engaged in "dangerous" diets in order to achieve the expected look.
She added that she "felt complicit" in the problem, and said she believed the fashion industry was complicit as well.
Clements told "ET" that her book was not a "bitter" expose, but rather told the truth about what happens in the fashion publishing world.
"It's honest and honesty. It's not bitterness," she said.
The newest editor-in-chief of Vogue Australia, Edwina McCann, told ABC News that she can only speak for the magazine as it stands today.
"We are vocal ambassadors for the message of healthy body images," she said.Have your say
BUDGET flights to Boston and other United States cities will be launched from Edinburgh next spring, Norwegian Air has announced.
Other destinations could include New York, San Francisco and Washington DC, with return fares starting from around £200.
Low cost flights to the US may be taking off soon. Picture: Scott Taylor
The news came as Delta prepares to launch Edinburgh-New York flights tomorrow in competition with American and United.
Norwegian already flies to six Scandinavian and Spanish destinations from Edinburgh, and launched transatlantic flights from Gatwick two years ago.
Passengers are charged extra for check-in baggage, food and drink, and to reserve seats.
• READ MORE - Prestwick is central to changes for US-bound flights
Chief executive Bjorn Kjos, speaking in Edinburgh yesterday, said: “We will set up a base at Edinburgh Airport and start to fly to the US from the spring of next year.
“It’s obvious people want to go there. We will start with a range of routes.
“We will definitely fly to Boston, and San Francisco and New York could be others.”
The airline said it had carried one million passengers from Edinburgh since launching flights to Oslo seven years ago
It has since added Copenhagen, Stockholm, Barcelona, Malaga and Tenerife. Mr Kjos said he plans more European routes from the capital.
However, he has no plans to fly from Glasgow – which has no routes to Scandinavia apart from Iceland – because Norwegian regards Edinburgh and Glasgow as “one area”.
• READ MORE - What are Scotland’s newest flight routes?
Mr Kjos said its six Edinburgh routes were “only the beginning of our plans for expansion”.
He said: “Edinburgh will play an important role in our future UK growth and our long-term ambition is to deliver new, direct long-haul flights from Edinburgh.”
The airline chief said Norwegian might also launch Edinburgh-Gatwick flights to feed passengers to its other long-haul routes from the London airport if it won a second runway.
Aviation analyst John Strickland said Norwegian had successfully launched long-haul flights from Gatwick, but any plans to operate them year-round from Edinburgh could be tricky.
Mr Strickland, of JLS Consulting, said: “They may take passengers away from other airlines, including those flying indirectly via hubs like Heathrow and Amsterdam.
“But with low prices, Norwegian will grow the market by attracting more people to fly.
“The acid test will be if its flights operate year-round when demand is lower.”
• More transport news from The ScotsmanI was hacking around with a program that needed tree-structured data, and I wanted to generate all possible trees of a certain size. I searched around and found nothing useful. After a few experiments involving Python generators, postfix expressions, and recursive trees, I’ve got some code to enumerate binary trees.
I started with postfix expressions because they are easy to work with, and are equivalent to trees, in that trees are like infix notation expressions, and they are equivalent to postfix. After some puzzling on it, I saw the recursive light, and came up with this to generate all possible postfix expressions:
# Enumerate postfix expressions
def _exprs ( expr, stack_depth, vals, ops ):
""" Generate postfix expressions recursively.
`expr` is the expression so far, a list of values and operators.
`stack_depth` is the depth of the stack created by expr.
`vals` is a list of values remaining to add to the expression.
`ops` is a list of possible operators to choose from.
"""
if stack_depth == 1 and not vals :
# This is a valid expression.
yield expr
if stack_depth > 1 :
# Try using an operator
for o in ops :
for e in _exprs ( expr + [ o ], stack_depth - 1, vals, ops ):
yield e
if vals :
# Vals are available, push one on the stack
for e in _exprs ( expr + [ vals [ 0 ]], stack_depth + 1, vals [ 1 :], ops ):
yield e
def exprs ( vals, ops ):
""" Generate postfix expressions created from `vals`, the list of values
to use, and `ops`, the possible operators to combine them with.
"""
return _exprs ([], 0, vals, ops )
def all_exprs ( n, ops = '+' ):
vals = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" [: n ]
return [ " ". join ( e ) for e in exprs ( vals, ops ) ]
print "
". join ( all_exprs ( 4, '+*' ))
for i in range ( 2, 15 ):
ndyck = len ( all_exprs ( i ))
print " %2d : %7d expressions" % ( i, ndyck )
The nice thing here is the generator is a pretty clear expression of the enumeration technique: as you are building an expression:
if the stack has one item, and there are no more values to squeeze in, you have a valid expression.
if the stack is two or more deep, then you can add to expression by using an operator to combine those top two values, and the stack is now one shallower.
if you have more values to use, you can append the next one to the expression, and the stack is now one deeper.
The nature of recursive generators requires the for/yield structure:
# When recurring in generators, you have to loop to pull the values,
# and yield each one:
for v in _recursive_generator ( blah ):
yield v
# Wouldn't it be cool if you could do this instead:
yield _recursive_generator ( blah )
# but that would yield a generator, a style of recursion I can't quite wrap
# my head around!
Running the code shows all the expressions of two operators on five values, and the counts of expressions of one operator over varying numbers of values:
A B + C + D +
A B + C + D *
A B + C * D +
A B + C * D *
A B + C D + +
A B + C D + *
A B + C D * +
A B + C D * *
A B * C + D +
A B * C + D *
A B * C * D +
A B * C * D *
A B * C D + +
A B * C D + *
A B * C D * +
A B * C D * *
A B C + + D +
A B C + + D *
A B C + * D +
A B C + * D *
A B C + D + +
A B C + D + *
A B C + D * +
A B C + D * *
A B C * + D +
A B C * + D *
A B C * * D +
A B C * * D *
A B C * D + +
A B C * D + *
A B C * D * +
A B C * D * *
A B C D + + +
A B C D + + *
A B C D + * +
A B C D + * *
A B C D * + +
A B C D * + *
A B C D * * +
A B C D * * *
2: 1 expressions
3: 2 expressions
4: 5 expressions
5: 14 expressions
6: 42 expressions
7:
|
Muslims, including personal information such as bank account statements, passport details and records of their movements. The leak also showed that police had at times planted cameras inside mosques and used undercover agents to infiltrate Islamic nonprofit organizations and halal grocers and restaurants.
The leaked documents, which were made available unredacted online and included the personal profiles of dozens of Muslims, were downloaded more than 10,000 times in the first few weeks.
A detailed breakdown of Qureshi’s life was among the documents, but he says he wasn’t surprised. He had known he was being followed for a long time.
“They follow me many times, I would always see them. After the London bombings in 2005 it got worse,” Qureshi says. “I found them surrounding my house for three days. For two days I waited, and on the third day I went out and shouted, ‘What are you looking for?’ Only then, they left.”
Qureshi says the leak has had a profound impact on the Muslim community and has soured its relationship with broader Japanese society. He says the leak led to several divorces between foreign Muslims and their Japanese spouses, usually due to the Japanese families’ concerns about the authorities’ spying.
“We have nothing to hide; we aren’t doing anything wrong,” Qureshi says. “Personally I don’t care (about being spied on), but for others it’s not good. Some Japanese people convert to Islam and come here to the mosque, but then the intelligence (services) follow them so much, at their home, their office, and they are so scared that they stop coming.”
Top court gives nod to profiling
Junko Hayashi, 37, is a Japanese Muslim who converted to Islam in 2001. Roughly 10 percent of Muslims in Japan are local converts, the rest are foreign nationals. Last year Hayashi became the country’s first female Muslim lawyer.
Along with a team of fellow lawyers, she recently took the national and Tokyo governments — the bodies responsible for the National Police Agency and Metropolitan Police Department, respectively — to Japan’s highest court to challenge the profiling and surveillance program.
After the 2010 leak, 17 of the Muslims named in the documents sued the government and police in a bid to have the widespread spying ruled illegal. In 2014, the Tokyo District Court agreed that the leak had violated the plaintiffs’ right to privacy and awarded them ¥90 million in compensation, but it also ruled that the intelligence-gathering was “necessary and inevitable.” The court sidestepped the issue of blanket profiling by religion, as did the Tokyo High Court in an appeal the following year.
Earlier this year, the group asked the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of the lower court’s decision.
The leaked documents refer to all those profiled as “suspects.” Their lawyers argued that spying solely on the basis of faith, rather than any suspicious activity, breached their plaintiffs’ rights to privacy, equality and freedom of religion. The Supreme Court dismissed the case on May 31.
“If somebody did something wrong, did something suspicious, then the police have a good reason to watch them. But when you are just being Muslims — acting like a Muslim — it doesn’t make sense,” argues Hayashi. “Everybody is a suspect.”
She says that while the leak uncovered the spying taking place in 2010, the Supreme Court ruling effectively gave the police a green light to continue surveillance of Japan’s Muslims. And this, she and other Muslim residents believe, is exactly what they are doing.
“It is definitely still happening,” Hayashi says. “We see the police all the time at the mosques. It is also clear the police are watching the children, treating them like potential homegrown terrorists. They will grow up feeling isolated and excluded.”
Among the 72,000 Muslims cited in the leaked documents were 1,600 children attending public schools in Tokyo.
‘No domestic threat in Japan’
A National Police Agency representative told a human rights committee hearing on the matter at the United Nations in 2014 that they couldn’t provide details on counterterrorism “information-gathering activities,” but that surveillance was always carried out in accordance with the law. Otherwise, the police have been largely silent on the issue.
Sebastian Maslow, assistant professor at the Tohoku University School of Law, questions the value of the surveillance program.
“Islamic terrorism represents no domestic threat in Japan today, and never has in the past,” he says. “Advocates for the surveillance would argue it is the reason for the absence of terrorist attacks, but the large-scale profiling of Japan’s Islamic population does not correspond to the scale of the domestic risk.”
Maslow says that since coming to power, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has used the specter of the “war on terror” that was declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. as a catalyst to enable Japan to become more assertive on the global stage.
“Islamic terrorism has served as a narrative to emphasize the need for a change in national security posture in the context of the Japan-U.S. alliance,” Maslow says. “As a result of this discourse, Japan’s Islamic population has suffered prejudice and unfounded concerns.”
Robert Dujarric, director of Temple University’s Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies, agrees that the threat of a domestic terrorist attack in Japan is very low, while stressing that there is never zero risk.
In Japan, Dujarric says, “For organizations like the Islamic State, there is just not a lot to gain by launching an attack. It’s also very tough to organize. In the United States you have the easy access to weapons, and in Europe there are a lot of Muslim supporters; in Japan you have neither.”
Japan’s domestic intelligence agencies, Dujarric argues, were striving to stay relevant, but he questions whether they even had the necessary skills and resources to analyze the data they were collecting from their surveillance of the Muslim community.
“Government is trying to show it is doing something, but I doubt the Japanese police have any capability to understand who is radical, who is not,” he says. “Japanese domestic intelligence has long been focused on North Korea and on the Chinese, and they just don’t understand this at all.
“How many Japanese police officers can translate Arabic in the Syrian dialect?” asks Dujarric. “How many can analyze an Urdu document? Even in the U.S. there is a shortage of these skills”.
While there is limited propaganda value for Islamic extremists in launching an attack at the moment, Dujarric believes the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will present a challenge for Japanese authorities as they try to balance the influx of foreign tourists with the real threat of an attack during the games.
Temple University professor and Japan Times columnist Jeff Kingston says that although Japan has the advantage of being an island nation with strict border controls, the risk of terrorist attacks involving Japanese abroad will continue to rise.
Last week Reuters reported that the government intends to increase spending aimed at preventing terrorist attacks abroad by tens of billions of yen in the wake of the massacre by Islamist militants of 20 hostages at a cafe in Dhaka, including seven Japanese.
Kingston argues that the increased threat facing Japanese workers overseas is partly due to Abe’s more active involvement in the Middle East. What’s more, he says, the recent use of overseas development assistance funds for security purposes means that aid workers are now more likely to be targeted, as they were in Bangladesh.
“Japan’s quiet diplomacy, its quite low-key posture, had kept it out of the way for a long time. Abe certainly raised the country above the parapet,” Kingston says.
And while stressing that the government spying on Muslims in Japan was over the top, Kingston says he wasn’t surprised by the Supreme Court’s ruling, as the security forces have never had a negative ruling go against them.
“The government needs to strike a balance,” Kingston says, between security and freedom from surveillance. “At the moment, the balance is in favor of the security forces.”
‘Sowing the seeds of suspicion’
Taro, a Japanese convert to Islam, who asked that his real name not be used, says that when intelligence officers started regularly visiting him shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he was courteous.
“They would come to me at home or at the mosque,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to be misunderstood, for them to think I am against them, so I always gave them my time. They always asked me very simple questions about Islam, and eventually I told them they were just wasting time.
“There are better ways to use the citizens’ tax money,” he adds with a laugh.
Taro, who was among those listed in the leaked documents, was one of the 17 Muslims who took the government to court over the spying.
“I was always answering the authorities’ questions. We were trying to be good to them, but all they did is call us suspects,” he says. “So it’s a betrayal on their side.”
Taro is worried that anti-Muslim sentiment in Japan is increasing in the wake of high-profile terrorist attacks against Japanese abroad, and he is deeply troubled by the government’s profiling of all young Muslims as potential homegrown threats.
“After the beheading of the Japanese hostages last year by Islamic State, my kids at school were asked by other kids if they were one of them,” he says. “The government is sowing the seeds of hatred and doubt and suspicion, and it makes me full of sadness and pity.”
Taro has found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that his government considered him and his family to be terrorist suspects. The Muslim community, he says, is doing everything it can to dispel the negative perceptions of their faith.
“I consider myself a patriot. I love Japan, I love my country,” Taro says. “But it’s a very cynical and bitter feeling. You love someone but that someone betrays you.”
Jarni Blakkarly is a freelance journalist. Twitter: @jarniblakkarly. Your comments and ideas: [email protected]
Converts make up 10% of growing community
NAOMI SCHANEN
STAFF WRITER
Although a primarily Buddhist and Shinto country, Japan has seen a surge in its Muslim population over the past few decades.
Officially at least, the government does not collect information on the religion of its residents, out of concern for religious freedom, making it difficult to pin down exact numbers. Estimates, however, suggest there are around 100,000 Muslims in Japan, 90 percent of whom are foreign nationals. Around 36,000 Indonesians, 11,000 Bangladeshis and 13,000 Pakistanis reside in Japan, the vast majority of whom are Muslim. These three groups alone account for over half of the country’s Muslim population.
Built in 1935, Kobe Mosque is Japan’s oldest Islamic place of worship, but the Tokyo Camii, which is modeled on Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, is the country’s largest. Today, over 80 mosques dot the country, and most of these are in major cities with big expat populations such as Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Yokohama.
Japan has seen an increase in people converting to Islam. The majority of Japanese converts are believed to enter the faith upon marriage to foreign Muslim spouses. Shigeru Shimoyama, a spokesman for the Tokyo Camii and a convert himself, estimated in an interview with Nippon News in 2013 that around five Japanese enter the Islamic faith every month.
Japanese wrestling icon Antonio Inoki famously converted to Islam in the 1990s, changing his name officially to Muhammad Hussain Inoki, a decision he revealed publicly only recently. Besides becoming an emblem of religious tolerance, Inoki continues to make his mark as an ambassador for world peace on the global stage.Robert Snodgrass scored a dramatic late equaliser as Norwich consigned 10-man Tottenham to their worst start to a Premier League season for four years.
Mousa Dembele had put the hosts on course for their first league win of the season with a goal on debut.
But, with time running out, the Norwich midfielder found the space to unleash a low left-foot shoot that flashed beyond Spurs goalkeeper Brad Friedel.
Substitute Tom Huddlestone was shown a straight red card in the 90th minute.
Analysis "Spurs have thrown away a lead for the second week running which hasn't gone down well with the fans. Goalkeeper Brad Friedel made a real statement here to Hugo Lloris, who they bought yesterday, and but for him Norwich might have had all three points."
Boos echoed around White Hart Lane at the final whistle, with Andre Villas-Boas still without a competitive win as Tottenham manager.
There could be little dispute about the result, however. It was just reward for Chris Hughton's powers of organisation on an emotional day for the Norwich manager as he returned to the club where he had spent 28 years, as a player and then a coach.
Villa-Boas could not afford to accommodate such sentiment. Having been beaten by Newcastle on the opening day and frustrated by West Brom last weekend, the pressing need for points and for that elusive first win was at the forefront in his mind. The wait goes on.
This was a performance that epitomised Spurs' faltering progress so far this season: style but no substance, beauty but no brawn, panache but no penetration. Dembele's goal apart, Villa-Boas's side lacked confidence, cohesion and sustained threat.
Media playback is not supported on this device Norwich could have won - Hughton
In contrast Norwich pushed and probed, frustrated and confounded their more celebrated opponents and their uncomplicated, direct approach put Spurs under serious duress. For a period during the second half it appeared Spurs might snatch victory thanks to Dembele's heroics but Snodgrass found the net with five minutes remaining.
Norwich might have stolen all three points but for the brilliance of goalkeeper Brad Friedel.
Twice during the first half the 41-year-old showed his apparent replacement, that he will have to be at his very best to displace him, first tipping Russell Martin's thundering header onto the crossbar before throwing himself to his right to prevent Snodgrass's clever header.
Tactically smart, Norwich's work-rate was also admirable, their players often doubling up on Tottenham's main threats like Gareth Bale and Aaron Lennon. Jermain Defoe also found he had unwelcome, unstinting company.
Norwich maintained their momentum after the interval as first Grant Holt headed over from six yards, before winger Anthony Pilkington drew another important save from Friedel.
Media playback is not supported on this device Spurs must improve - Villas-Boas
The introduction of the and Emmanuel Adebayor shortly after the interval did alter the game, however. The former Fulham midfielder burst forward after 67 minutes, exchanging passes with Defoe and spinning beyond his defender before thumping a low shot across Norwich goalkeeper John Ruddy into the net.
Aware that his team surrendered a 1-0 lead in injury-time last weekend, Villas-Boas brought Huddlestone on for his first game in just over a year but the visitors kept coming.
They were denied a penalty when Benoit Assou-Ekotto appeared to pull substitute Steve Morison's shirt in the box with time running out but when Pilkington found Snodgrass in the penalty area with five minutes left, the former Leeds midfielder thundered home through a crowded penalty area to empty salt into an already raw wound.
There was more disappointment for Spurs when Huddlestone was given a straight red for a mistimed tackle on Jonny Howson, while Bradley Johnson almost won it in injury time, only for Friedel to deny him again.
Live text commentaryZoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world.
Sylvia Cremer
Species: Cardiocondyla genus ants
Habitat: Mainly open arid habitats around the world
Paint a target on his back. Instead of dispatching their young competitors directly, adult male ants smear them with bodily fluids, leaving the youths with a bulls-eye marking them for assassination by worker ants.
“They let the workers do the dirty job of finishing off all the rivals,” says Jürgen Heinze at the University of Regensburg in Germany.
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Insects that live in colonies – such as ants, bees and wasps – generally operate as a superorganism. The entire group benefits when each member supports and safeguards their collective society.
“To some extent, they all have the same interest,” says Sara Helms Cahan at the University of Vermont in Burlington. “But not completely.” That’s because some resources are in short supply.
Unlike most ants, which seek out mates in swarms of eligible insects from many colonies, ants in the genus Cardiocondyla breed within their nests. By staying home, those males pit themselves against one another in order to reproduce with their nest’s queen or queens.
Formidable mandibles
Researchers already knew that males of some species of Cardiocondyla use their formidable mandibles to pierce or crush the soft bodies of young adversaries. And some daub other adults with gut secretions that lure worker ants into killing the marked individual.
But scientists hadn’t previously seen adult males targeting young ants – recently emerged from a pupa – with their kiss of death.
Heinze and his team collected 10 colonies of a single Cardiocondyla species from Queensland, Australia, ranging in size from about 10 to 80 individuals, then brought them back to the lab for observation. Each group contained up to several dozen ants, but at most only a single adult male, presumably because other males were killed as soon as they emerged. After finding the dismembered corpses of 11 young males in the nests, the researchers scanned colonies by eye and video camera, hoping to catch the culprits in the act.
The scientists witnessed four assaults. Adult ants clutched victims in their mandibles, then dabbed the juvenile with a combination of faeces and other substances from the gut. In three of the cases, this attracted worker ants, which bit the besmeared individual and pulled it apart. The fourth youngster was ignored by the workers, allowing him to mount a counter-attack against the older male: he painted a target on him, prompting workers to kill the elder ant.
“We know that in other species, older males sometimes fail to kill rivals and then they will be overthrown,” says Heinze. “So obviously age is important here.”
Chemical warfare
It’s not unusual for ants to perpetrate the kind of chemical warfare seen in Cardiocondyla, but in most cases it’s females competing against one another, says Helms Cahan, since males typically don’t have a reason to fight with their nest-mates.
“This is a really unusual male-centric version of what lots of different kinds of social insects do to manipulate others and destroy their competition,” she says.
The researchers aren’t sure why the male ants don’t just slay their adolescent adversaries themselves – as other Cardiocondyla species do – but Heinze speculates that it may be because this species has shorter mandibles or weaker muscles.
The study is based on only a few observations from a small number of colonies, says Helms Cahan. That makes it difficult to know how rare this kind of lethal “kick me” sign is within the species. Heinze and his team hope to remedy this problem by testing more populations in Queensland and Papua New Guinea.
Journal reference: Entomological Science, DOI: 10.1111/ens.12194
Read more: Lazy ants sit around doing nothing while their nest mates workThe Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 48.38 points, or 0.38 percent, to end at 12,836.89, led by Hewlett-Packard, after trading in a tight 60-point range all day. DuPont led the blue-chip laggards.
The S&P 500 added 3.22 points, or 0.23 percent, to close at 1,391.03. The Nasdaq gained 9.87 points, or 0.34 percent, to finish at 2,926.55. Both the S&P and Nasdaq ended higher for the fourth-straight session.
The CBOE Volatility Index, widely considered the best gauge of fear in the market, ended above 15.
Most key S&P sectors ended in positive territory, led by telecoms and energy.
Egypt announced a cease-fire agreement to end fighting between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. The cease-fire took effect at 2pm ET. Oil prices closed off their highs following the news.
Stocks finished largely unchanged in the previous session as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's negative comments on the looming "fiscal cliff" added to ongoing worries. (Read More: Is Bernanke Right About the 'Fiscal Cliff'?)
Policymakers are not expected to return to negotiations until next week.
"We have this vacuum on the 'fiscal cliff'—that's a mild positive under the market. Then Congress comes back next week so there might be some untoward comments," said Art Cashin, director of floor operations at UBS Financial Services. "There's a mild upward historic bias to today and also the abbreviated session on Friday."A heartfelt plea has gone out to the callous thieves who stole watches left by a dying father for his two young sons “to give them back.”
A heartfelt plea has gone out to the callous thieves who stole watches left by a dying father for his two young sons “to give them back.”
The Omega watches have no resale value whatsoever because they were specially engraved by Stephen Carroll (38) for his sons the week before he died.
“They are the only tangible gift Stephen left for his eldest sons and they are just heart-broken that they have been stolen,” said Stephen’s sister in law Kerrie Carroll.
His family has appealed to the thieves to “just give them back. Drop them to a church, to the gardai or leave them somewhere they will be found but just give them back. There will be no questions asked.”
Stephen and his wife Breffnie (39) have three sons, Seenan (10), Keelan (8) and Roan (4) and the watches were given to Stephen for his 21st and 30th birthdays.
Stephen discovered 18 months ago that he was seriously ill with kidney cancer and spent a lot of time thinking about what special momentos to leave for his beloved children.
“He wanted to leave something for the boys to have and they were to each be given a watch when they too reach 21,” explained Kerrie.
Stephen passed away last November but, “He lived long enough to see the engraving, it was what he wanted. He wanted to have the engraving done and he thought a long time about it” said Kerrie.
She revealed that the engraving was, to Stephen’s delight, done the week before he passed away last November.
Stephen and his family run the well known Carroll newsagents and Hallmark shops in Dundalk, Drogheda, Monaghan and Navan.
He is from Blackrock, county Louth and the watches were being kept by his parents Ian and Anita in their family home in Blackrock.
They were away from the house and sometime last Friday thieves forced their way in and amongst items they stole were the watches in their presentation boxes.
“We are all devastated that this has happened. The watches have no resale value at all because of the unique engravings on them. To us they have sentimental value that we could not put a price on. This is very hard on all of the family especially coming so soon after Stephen’s death,” added Kerrie.
One is an Omega Constellation model which is engraved on the back with 'To Keelan love Daddy x' while the other is an Omega Seamaster and is engraved 'To Senan love Daddy x'.
She said, “we are hoping that someone, somewhere has a conscience and returns these watches to an utterly devastated family. These were the only tangible memories we have of him.”
In their efforts to locate and return the watches the family is using the media, including social media, to highlight details of the watches in case they are offered for sale somewhere.
Gardai in Blackrock are investigating the theft. Gda Sgt Vinnie O’Connell said, “we would appeal for information from anybody who saw anything suspicious in the Wallace’s road area of Blackrock, near the junction with the Ard na Mara estate, between 11 o clock on Friday morning and 5 o’ clock on Saturday to contact us.”
“Hopefully whoever did this will show some sort of remorse and leave them back for them somewhere,” he added.
Anyone with information is asked to contact gardai in Dundalk on 042-9335577.
- Elaine Keogh
Online EditorsNot so suddenly, there’s an elderly quartet at the Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg just turned eighty-one, and she’s followed closely in age by Antonin Scalia, seventy-eight; Anthony Kennedy, seventy-seven; and Stephen Breyer, seventy-five. None of these Justices has signalled a desire to leave the Court anytime soon, but time catches up with everyone.
If President Obama has another chance to fill another vacancy (or more) on the Court, he will be in a very different position than he was when he nominated Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in the first and second years of his Presidency. Presidents generally pick Justices who were appointed to the federal appellate courts by Presidents of their own party; given enough time, they can pick federal judges whom they appointed themselves. Now, unlike in 2009 and 2010, Obama has his own farm team of appellate judges. According to Obama Administration insiders (and knowledgeable outsiders), here is a preliminary list of possibilities.
Sri Srinivasan, age forty-seven, D.C. Circuit. As I’ve noted before, Srinivasan is the front-runner. Like Sotomayor, Srinivasan has a great (and marketable) American story. The child of immigrants from India, Srinivasan grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, earned a J.D./M.B.A. from Stanford, and clerked for a pair of Republican judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson III and Sandra Day O’Connor. As Obama’s deputy solicitor general, he argued twenty-five cases before the high court and then won confirmation to the D.C. Circuit last year by a vote of 97–0. Even in the malignant political atmosphere of the contemporary Senate, that margin might make him a safe pick for the Supreme Court. Would Obama nominate a man to replace Ginsburg, and reduce the number of women on the Court to two? Making history with the first Indian-American Justice might tempt him.
Paul Watford, age forty-six, Ninth Circuit. Watford, a former law clerk to Alex Kozinski (the well-regarded Republican chief judge of the Ninth Circuit) and to Ginsburg herself, served as a federal prosecutor and corporate lawyer in Los Angeles before his appointment to the Ninth Circuit, in 2012. Again, there is the potential problem of naming a man to replace Ginsburg (if she leaves), but choosing Watford, who is African-American and a Ginsburg clerk, might make the decision easier.
David Barron, age forty-six, nominated to the First Circuit. Barron served as acting assistant attorney general during the first two years of the Obama Administration and is now a professor at Harvard Law School. His clerkships were with Stephen Reinhardt (a liberal favorite on the Ninth Circuit) and Justice John Paul Stevens; he has many fans in the White House, though the appointment of a white male would offer few political benefits. Barron’s nomination to the First Circuit has been approved by the Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote, and he has apparently been promised a vote in the full Senate before the mid-term elections. The invocation of the nuclear option—confirmation via a simple majority rather than the three-fifths vote formerly required to overcome a filibuster—should guarantee his appointment, which is obligatory if he is to be a Supreme Court nominee down the line.
The next two prospective nominees are more likely if Republicans take control of the Senate in the 2014 elections. To the extent that it’s possible to determine, they have a more moderate political profile than those listed above, and so, perhaps, a better chance of being confirmed.
Jane Kelly, age forty-nine, Eighth Circuit. A 1991 graduate of Harvard Law School, i.e., Obama’s class, Kelly has an unusual and welcome background for a Supreme Court Justice. She’s a career public defender who has practiced almost entirely in Iowa. Most important for confirmation purposes, she has an enthusiastic fan in Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who may well be chairman of the Judiciary Committee if the G.O.P. takes control. Last year, she was confirmed 96–0 for her seat on the Eighth Circuit.
Patricia Ann Millett, age fifty, D.C. Circuit. A former lawyer in the Solicitor General’s office with thirty-two Supreme Court arguments to her credit, Millett was the least controversial of the three judges recently confirmed, thanks to the nuclear option, for the D.C. Circuit. The wife of a Navy reservist, Millett has been an advocate for military families, which is a confirmation-friendly activity.
Most of the names on this list would probably carry over to a Democratic President elected in 2016—say, Hillary Clinton. If a Republican wins, there is an alternative farm team already in place, which certainly includes Paul Clement, the former solicitor general under President George W. Bush; Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the D.C. Circuit (and a principal author of the Starr report); and Diane Sykes, a judge on the Seventh Circuit.
Politicians like Kamala Harris, the attorney general of California, and Amy Klobuchar, the senior senator from Minnesota, are often mentioned for Supreme Court vacancies—and the Court could use some occupational diversity. Mike Lee, the forty-two-year-old senator from Utah, who clerked for Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court, and Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, are Republican alternatives in the same vein. Still, the nods tend to go to judges or law professors (or, like Scalia, Ginsburg, and Breyer, those who are both). That’s one reason why circuit-court appointments and confirmations are so important. The circuits are the fields where Supreme Court Justices grow.
Above: Patricia Ann Millett, a judge on the D.C. Circuit. Photograph by Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty.In an auditorium built for just 385 people, the crowd that came to see Green Party Candidate Jill Stein still remained far below capacity. In a room of around 100 people and one crying baby, most of whom were not Penn State students, the presidential hopeful gave her speech on immigration, climate change, civil rights and the economy.
Kicking off the rally was YahNé Ndgo, a former “Bernie or Bust” supporter discussed what Stein has done for the environment.
“It is hard for a candidate to say trees should be honored,” Ndgo said. “There are people standing in the line of these machines, and she is one of them.”
After Ndgo spoke, Stein came to the stage and began her speech with what her climate policy would be, as well as what should have been done differently to prevent the current state of climate change.
Stein said it is a time to be brave in the face of large corporations that are harming the environment. There should have been arrest warrants issued from the people in charge of the Dakota Pipeline, who Stein described as “vandals.”
Stein also called for an end to genetically modified organisms in food, and said there are just a handful of companies that control all of the food in the United States.
Stein’s platform calls for an ending of fossil fuel use.
“We call for an immediate ban on all fossil fuel infrastructure,” Stein said. “Our goal is 100 percent clean, renewable energy- wind, water and solar only.”
The Green New Deal would create 20 million new jobs, and it would pay for itself in health benefits alone, Stein said.
“We have the power right now. We have the power to stand up and say no,” Stein said. “We need to be mobilized and become the modes of change.”
Stein then transitioned into her views on social rights issues, specifically the Black Lives Matter movement. Stein also referenced the recent police killings of two black men that she said were, “murdered in broad daylight with impunity”.
After this, Stein moved her speech to problems that immigrants in America are facing, saying it is time to stop the immigration crisis in the U.S. and to repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Stein also referenced Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s positions and potential policies regarding immigration.
“We don’t need your friggin’ wall, we just need to stop invading other countries,” Stein said.
Stein then talked about the need to help students who are in a lot of debt because of higher education.
If the government found a way to bail out the people of Wall Street, then they should be able to bail out students, whose debt is far lower than the Wall Street stimulus package, Stein said.
“We rely on young people to remake the economy,” she said. “This is the stimulus package of their dreams.”
Stein also said it is time to have free public higher education throughout the country, and said it would pay for itself.
Later, Stein talked at length about running for president as a third party candidate. She reminded the now smaller audience that there are more than two “deadly” choices, and they can stand up to demand what they deserve.
“It is important to wake the people up and remind them that Donald Trump is horrible and despicable, but Hillary Clinton has a terrible record,” she said.
Stein also spoke about the fact that her campaign has not been getting the same amount of media attention that the other two main candidates are getting. Most people agree with her message, but they just don’t know about her campaign, Stein said.
Though Stein pointed out that you don’t have to vote for the “lesser of two evils,” it is unclear if that message is resonating with potential voters, or if they are still seeing it as voting for a third party candidate means potentially putting Clinton or Trump in the White House.
“I believe in fighting for third party recognition, but this is a big election, and I might have to vote for one of the other two to ensure the other does not win,” Richard Spicer (senior-community environment development) said.
The final thing that Stein spoke about was the fact that she and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson will not be included in the first presidential debate because they failed to meet the 15 percent polling threshold. Stein is polling at three percent nationally, and Johnson is polling at 8.6 percent nationally, according to the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate.
“Seventy-six percent of the public want to hold an open debate between all four presidential candidates,” Stein said. “Otherwise it is a scam, not a debate."
This speech was seen as a big moment for Stein’s campaign by Penn State Green Party chair, Tim Gleason. They were happy to see Stein was providing scientific backings to some of the claims they have made and that it may have given her more credibility, Gleason said.
“The sort of things she said are all scientifically normative, good ideas,” Gleason said.home
Title: The Complete SW Discography Date: 17 May 2015 Version: 10th Edition Size: >1.150 entries, 564 pages, 13 MB ==> "The Complete SW Discography" (13 MB) <== Anmerkungen / Notes: Auf dieser Seite könnt ihr mein Dokument "The Complete SW Discography" im PDF Format herunterladen. Die Diskografie wird ständig überarbeitet und erweitert, allerdings benötige ich hierfür Eure Mitarbeit. Falls Ihr also ein Album kennt, an dem SW mitgearbeitet hat, welches nicht in meiner SW Diskografie auftaucht, schickt mir doch bitte die zugehörigen Infos und evtl. einen Scan des Covers. Ausserdem freue ich mich über jeden Kommentar, Vorschläge oder sonstige Tips. On this page you can download my document "The Complete SW Discography" (PDF file). The discography will be constantly extended and updated, but therefore I need your contribution: If you know a record with contributions from SW, which is not listed in my SW discography, please send me all relevant infos and, if it is possible, a scan of the cover. Also any comments, suggestions and other tips are welcome. homeA human being, the proponents of the hypothesis argue, is not really an individual. Instead, each person is a “superorganism,” a large creature subsuming many billions of smaller ones, most of them intestinal microbes. Thriving in the colon, these “old friends” that have been with us since time immemorial are as important to our health as a limb or an organ. Altering their numbers, whether with sanitary measures, antibiotics or deworming pills, is analogous to fooling around with the liver or the spleen.
And that doesn’t just mean that antibiotics may cause ruinous diarrhea. The microbes in the intestine, the hypothesis holds, educate the immune cells that travel all over the body, and any major alteration in the intestine sends some wild and crazy cells out there to wreak havoc unpoliced.
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The genetic and immunologic details behind these assertions are immensely complex, but enough experimental confirmation exists to keep scientists at prestigious institutions around the world deeply engaged in sorting it out.
Other data are equally intriguing. Among them: Allergic and autoimmune conditions are far more frequent in rich countries than poor ones, even among genetically identical populations (West Germany far outpaced East Germany in their frequency, as does Finland compared with an impoverished adjacent territory under Russian control). Societies where intestinal parasites are the rule seem to lack them completely.
A misfiring immune response has long been known to explain conditions like multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestine. But some preliminary observations extend the immune connection to illnesses usually considered to be unrelated, obesity and depression among them.
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“Is fecotherapy the wave of the future?” Mr. Velasquez-Manoff asks. Does our path to good health lie in breathing microbe-rich dust and regaining the fecal content of our ancestors (while avoiding, of course, the disabling chronic illness that often went along)?
Scientists are now beginning to treat various illnesses with probiotics, various combinations of “good” intestinal bacteria. So far results are mixed: some good, some inconclusive.
Enthusiastic patients, however, enabled by the usual cast of shady entrepreneurs, have predictably skipped the long, dull validation process and are busily infecting themselves with a variety of intestinal worms.
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Mr. Velasquez
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crucial," Kingham said.
The next reactor in construction - the ST40 - would produce plasma temperatures of 15 million degrees Celsius - hotter than the centre of the Sun - this year. The ST40 is currently being built at Tokamak Energy's facility at Milton Park in Oxfordshire.
"The ST40 is designed to achieve 100 million degrees C and get within a factor of ten of energy break-even conditions. To get even closer to break-even point, the plasma density, temperature and confinement time then need to be fine-tuned," Kingham said.
"The next step is to build a reactor that takes this knowledge and uses it to demonstrate first electricity from fusion by 2025. This will then form the basis of a power plant module that will deliver electricity into the grid by 2030," he added.
This huge challenge requires, he said, "massive investment, many important collaborations, an excellent supply chain, many dedicated and creative engineers and scientists - and, no doubt, some good luck and good management" in order to succeed.
Tokamak Energy has raised private investment of £20 million ($25 million) from Oxford Instruments, L&G Capital, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and others. It has a "valuable dialogue", Kingham said, with Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory on spherical tokamaks, and with the Plasma Science and Fusion Centre at MIT on HTS magnets. Both institutions are "leading laboratories that share our vision", he said.
Elsewhere private ventures can be seen "tackling challenges previously assumed to be the realm of governments" - Virgin Galactic and Space X being two examples, he said.
"Even Lord Rees of Ludlow, ex-president of the Royal Society, said in 2015 that the private sector now has greater appetite for risk in scientific projects than Western governments. This is good news for fusion, which over previous decades has become large, political and cumbersome.
"Private investment is allowing smaller, agile companies to try different approaches and make new inroads into an old problem. We are treating the pursuit of fusion energy as an engineering challenge and a business, rather than a 'big science' project," he said.
Commissioning this Spring
In an interview with World Nuclear News (WNN) on 26 January, a day after his meeting with the Paris-based IEA, Kingham said the ST40 is due to be completed and start commissioning this Spring.
"This signals a defining moment for Tokamak Energy, as the ST40 will be the most powerful compact spherical tokamak in the world that will aim to produce plasma temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun well before the end of the year," he said.
The IEA has a Fusion Power Coordinating Committee (FPCC), which provides a forum to co-ordinate international science and research with regard to fusion - device-specific research (tokamaks and alternate concepts) and cross-cutting research (materials, safety and technologies). The FPCC also oversees eight IEA Technology Collaboration Programs in fusion.
"The IEA fosters international collaboration and coordination to help close the existing gaps in physics, technology and regulation and move forward in developing the peaceful use of fusion energy," Kingham said. Its activities in this field cover, among others, plasma physics and fusion power, technologies and material, both for magnetic and inertial fusion.
Tokamak Energy is "unique among nimble, privately funded fusion energy ventures", he said, in the way that the majority of them are looking for alternative and quicker routes to fusion energy, in comparison to large publicly funded companies, which often make slow progress but do sometimes produce new scientific breakthroughs. Tokamak Energy is unique amongst privately funded fusion energy ventures, he added, as it is aiming to accelerate the development of fusion energy based on the tokamak.
Other "routes to fusion" are being taken by, for example, General Fusion and Tri-Alpha Energy, he noted. General Fusion is taking the approach of Magnetised Target Fusion, with the aid of modern electronics, materials, and advances in plasma physics. Tri-Alpha Energy is utilising proprietary advanced beam-driven field reversed configuration technology to create a superheated plasma environment. Tri Alpha Energy has operated a national lab-scale machine, which in many aspects resembles a future power plant, in which hydrogen and boron would fuse generating helium and energy.
The tokamak as a class of device has had "unprecedented global support backed up by scientific consensus", Kingham said. More than 200 tokamaks have been built in laboratories worldwide, he noted, and there has been a €20 billion ($21 billion) international agreement to build Iter, a huge tokamak, in France.
The Iter fusion reactor is widely seen as being JET's successor on the route to developing commercial fusion power. Iter is currently scheduled to produce its first plasma in 2025 and start deuterium-tritium operations in 2035. Like JET, Iter will not demonstrate the use of nuclear fusion to produce electricity. That will be the objective of Iter's successor, the Demonstration Fusion Power Reactor, or DEMO, which will aim to demonstrate the continuous output of energy, supplying electricity to the grid. According to EUROfusion, DEMO is expected to follow Iter by 2050.
The most recent and largest investment Tokamak Energy has received in a single round to date was announced at the end of last year, when Legal & General Capital, British billionaire David Harding and other private individuals invested over £10 million. This was "a signal of our ambitions within the fusion energy industry and a vindication of our approach", Kingham told WNN. This investment boost brought the total investment Tokamak Energy has received to almost £20 million. Previous rounds of investment came from investors in the engineering and corporate sectors, including Oxford Instruments, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and Rainbow Seed Fund.
Other developers, like General Fusion, Tri-Alpha Energy, Helion Energy and First Light Fusion have had recent investment rounds, he added.
Tokamak Energy was originally established in 2009, with the objective of designing and developing compact fusion reactors and small spherical tokamaks for a variety of applications. Its strategy has evolved significantly since 2012, Kingham said, and moved towards prioritising the development of a pilot plant to exceed fusion energy breakeven. The company is primarily focused on compact spherical tokamaks due to their efficiency; these devices can achieve a much higher plasma pressure for a given magnetic field than conventional tokamaks, he added.
"Today, we hold the world record for running our tokamak with magnets of high temperature superconductors for 29 hours. The previous record was five hours, indicating the progress being made at Tokamak Energy towards achieving the goal of fusion energy,” he told WNN. "We've made progress backed by scientific evidence and acknowledged by globally recognised bodies. For example, we were announced as a Technology Pioneer of the World Economic Forum in August 2015. Papers by Tokamak Energy scientists including Dr Alan Costley, occupy the top three places in the'most read' charts of the Nuclear Fusion Journal," he added.
The "economical size" of a tokamak device is crucial, he said.
"Historically, the school of thought has been that as far as the tokamak based approach goes, the bigger the better. However, Tokamak Energy's scientifically backed approach (the use of high temperature superconducting magnets) shrinks the reactor down into a much more compact and therefore economical size, more easily rolled out on a larger scale.
"The ST40 will be the most powerful compact spherical tokamak in the world as it will aim to produce the highest temperature and pressure ever reached by a spherical tokamak. The device aims to reach plasma temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun before the end of this year. The ultimate milestone we'd like to achieve is to demonstrate that fusion temperatures of 100 million degrees can be achieved in a dense plasma in a small tokamak," he said.
The ST40 has not yet produced a plasma, but forerunner device, the ST25, achieved a maximum plasma temperature of 1 million degrees. The timeline for the ST40 is to achieve "first plasma" in March this year, to be fully commissioned over the next six months, culminating in demonstration of a 15 million degree plasma in September, he said.
JET, Iter and DEMO are all conventional, high aspect ratio, tokamaks, Kingham noted.
"JET at Culham in the UK is the basis of a centre of fusion expertise in the UK. Locating Tokamak Energy near to Culham is no mistake," he said. "The expertise fostered by JET (and other devices like START and MAST - spherical tokamaks - at Culham) has helped us to get to where we are today. Large government projects like JET and Iter further the understanding of the fusion process so that businesses such as ours can prosper and get closer to the fusion goal."
According to the World Nuclear Association, fusion power presents scientific and engineering challenges, one of which is a concern of the possible release of tritium into the environment. Asked about this, Kingham said fusion will initially use tritium and deuterium as fuel, and the tritium will be bred from lithium within the tokamak device.
"Great care will be taken to avoid any risk of leakage of tritium," he said. "In the long term we may work out how to use a deuterium-deuterium fusion process that would not require tritium."
Asked how things have changed from seeing fusion as science fiction rather than science - in the absence of definite details, such as budgets or working prototypes - Kingham said the answer lies with private ventures.
"Fusion projects in government laboratories have become increasingly expensive and slow. For example, Iter is now planning to start full power operations in 2035. However, now there is a new way forward with fusion, based on rapid development of new technologies by private ventures. Being a privately funded commercial entity with the necessary expertise and team, we feel that we can make fusion a reality and have stated a clear timeline to do so, i.e. putting fusion electricity into the grid by 2030," he said.
"What is different is our approach - we are aiming to accelerate the development of fusion energy taking the tokamak route. More specifically, we aim to do this through combining two emerging technologies: spherical tokamaks and high-temperature superconductors; and by aiming to keep our devices as small as possible."
On the relationship between the fusion and fission industries, Kingham said nuclear fission innovators have also realised the benefits of compact reactors and the benefits of faster technological development and rapid deployment they bring.
"Therefore, we do not consider the fission industry as competitors, but instead consider our relationship with them as one that is mutually beneficial, involving the exchange of ideas. There is an interesting overlap of technologies between small modular fission reactors and the equivalent small modular fusion reactors of the type we are developing.
"We are creating a way for small, modular fusion energy to become a reliable source of clean energy for the world. Our business model is based on agility and 'open innovation'," he said. "We believe that machines that are able to generate net energy gain for a sustained period need to be built; these machines must be economical to build, run and decommission."
Tokamak Energy's schedule is, he said: build a small prototype tokamak to demonstrate the concept; build a tokamak with all magnetics of high temperature superconductor (achieved in 2015); reach fusion temperatures in a compact tokamak (aiming for 100 million degrees in 2018); achieve close to energy breakeven conditions by 2019; produce electricity for the first time by 2025; put fusion electricity into the grid by 2030.
Researched and written
by World Nuclear News
Related topicsCLEVELAND -- As I take a step back on the bye weekend and reflect on the first half of the Browns' season, I find myself extremely optimistic about the team for the first time in a long time. Who knows? Maybe I'm still fired up from Michael Irvin's motivational speech. Irvin was so captivating that I, too, am strutting around like a champion this bye weekend. Even my three teenagers are treating me with the utmost respect. (Not).
Regardless, here are four things rattling around my brain on this off weekend.
1. The Browns are currently the best team in the AFC North.
No, I haven't been hitting the Christmas Ale. With Jason Campbell at the helm, Jordan Cameron tearing up the league, Josh Gordon striking fear in defensive backs and the defense crushing quarterbacks, I think the Browns (4-5) are better than the Bengals (6-3), and Ravens (3-5) right now. The Browns have the best record in the AFC North at 2-1, with the Bengals at 1-1 and the Ravens 1-2. The Browns have already knocked off the Ravens and Bengals, and gave Cincinnati one of their toughest battles of the season.
What's more, the Bengals are more banged up than the Browns right now, with All-Pro tackle Geno Atkins on injured reserve with a torn ACL, cornerback Leon Hall on IR with a torn Achilles and safety Taylor Mays on the shelf with a dislocated shoulder. Linebacker Rey Maualuga is out a few weeks with a concussion and knee injury and might not be back for the Browns next week, and running back Giovani Bernard is questionable for the Ravens on Sunday with his rib injury.
I think Campbell (2-1) stacks up with Andy Dalton, Gordon matches A.J. Green and Cameron tops Cincinnati tight end Jermaine Gresham. Browns cornerback Joe Haden gave Green all he could handle in a 17-6 victory over the Bengals in Week 3, limiting him to his third-lowest yardage total of the season (51). On five occasions, Green has topped 100 yards this season, which amplifies Haden's performance.
Defensively, the Browns are allowing an NFL-low 4.51 yards per play, are second only to Kansas City with 31 sacks better and are ranked one spot higher than Cincinnati at No. 4.
Had Campbell or Hoyer started a few more games this season, the Browns might be tied atop the AFC North with the Bengals right now.
2. Jason Campbell is an elite NFL quarterback.
The 20th quarterback to start an NFL game for the Browns since 1999 is one of the best I've seen in a long time. He puts sensational spin on the ball, he's accurate, he's mobile, he gets the ball out quickly and he makes good decisions. He hasn't thrown an interception in his 75 attempts this season, and he's pushed his streak to 90 attempts without a pick. His current 106.6 rating would be third only to Peyton Manning (119.4) and Aaron Rodgers (108.0) if he had enough snaps to qualify.
So why hasn't Campbell been considered elite yet in his nine-year career? Because he hasn't had the continuity of systems that a Peyton Manning, a Tom Brady or an Aaron Rodgers has had. He's had numerous head coaches and offensive coordinators, and he's on his fourth team. But he's currently in an offense similar to one he's run before -- the downfield Air Coryell scheme -- and he's flourishing in it. I'm not suggesting he's a superstar like a Manning or a Brady, but he's an elite NFL quarterback capable of taking a team to the playoffs and possibly a Super Bowl.
What's more, he's mentoring the young guys such as Gordon and Greg Little, and letting everyone feast at the reception table. He showed tremendous faith in Davone Bess after Bess' dropfest in Kansas City, and got him back on track for the home stretch. Campbell should continue to improve as the season goes alone and he gets more reps with the starters.
3. Joe Banner hit a home run with head coach Rob Chudzinski.
Chudzinski wasn't Banner's first choice. Nor was he necessarily his second or third choice. But he's proving to be the best possible selection for the Cleveland Browns. Chudzinski is the ninth Browns head coach I've covered, and he's quickly climbing to the top of the list. Here are some of the reasons why:
• He can handle a quarterback competition: He told it like it was during the off-season and camp. He never made any promises about Brandon Weeden starting and made it clear that the best man would win. When Weeden faltered, he let on that he might bench him. When the competition between Weeden and Campbell was close, he characterized it as such. He hasn't coddled any of the quarterbacks and wasn't afraid to evaluate them on a week-by-week basis.
• He's a players' coach: He reassured Gordon he was wanted, and kept his star receiver's head in the game through trade rumors. He listened to Greg Little when he said he was choked by James Ihedigbo and didn't fine him for conduct detrimental to the team. He enjoys his players yet can discipline them. He held the squad together in the aftermath of the Trent Richardson trade.
• He's a motivator: He chewed out the defense at half-time of the Chiefs game and helped turn things around on that side of the ball. He had Hall of Famer Jim Brown speak before the season and Hall of Famer Michael Irvin at the bye. He has this group thinking like champions, and he's on a mission.
• It's personal for him: Chudzinski bleeds orange and brown, has munched on dog biscuits and loves this team as much as any Browns fan ever has. He feels your hatred for Pittsburgh and your resentment of the Ravens. He knows how much this means to you, because it means that much to him. Any Browns fan that came out to camp and woofed it up with the coach knows this is a labor of love for him. And he's committed to delivering a championship.
• He can call a football game: His aggressive mentality is refreshing. He's 10-for-19 on fourth-down conversions, both league-highs. He's also pulled out all the stops, running the wildcat, end-around, flea-flickers, the read-option and more. He doesn't get proper credit for it, but he brought the modern read-option into the NFL with Cam Newton in Carolina. And he'll keep pushing the envelope here.
4. Take it Away.
There's a lot to love about Ray Horton's defense. It's second with 31 sacks, first with 4.51 yards per play, and is fourth overall in total yards allowed. It's also one of only two teams not to have allowed a 100-yard rusher or a 300-yard passer. The defense has 11 sacks in the past two games and is allowing only 3.6 yards per rush for fourth in the league. But the Browns have only 11 takeaways this season, which is tied for No. 22 in the NFL. For comparison's sake, the undefeated Chiefs have 23 takeaways. One of the hallmarks of an elite defense is the ability to force turnovers and get the ball back for the offense. The Browns are tied for 17th in turnover differential at minus-1, and playoff teams don't usually reside on the minus side of the turnover stat. It's also one place where the Browns can gain ground on the Bengals (minus-4) in the home stretch. The Browns are also 31st in the league in third down defense. If they can improve in those two categories, they'll truly be considered a top-tier unit."Vimont conveyed that the French president will express his frustration that Washington has backed away from its proposed bilateral intelligence cooperation agreement and Sarkozy intends to continue to push for closure," the report said. "As Vimont and Levitte understand it, the main sticking point is the US desire to continue spying on France."
In one intelligence summary dated March 10, 2010, the NSA describes intercepted communications between Pierre Vimont, the French ambassador to the US, and Sarkozy's diplomatic advisor Jean-David Levitte ahead of a meeting between Sarkozy and President Barack Obama in Washington later that month.
According to the documents, the NSA intercepted telephone conversations and other communications of former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as current leader Francois Hollande as they discussed the Greek debt crisis, appointments at the UN, the Middle East peace process, and even American espionage against France. The WikiLeaks release, titled Espionnage Élysée, also includes a "target list" that contains a cell number identified as "FR PRES CELL."
WikiLeaks unveiled a bombshell series of purportedly classified National Security Agency (NSA) reports on Tuesday that, if legitimate, indicate the US eavesdropped on the communications of France's last three presidents, as well as the country's ambassador to Washington and several cabinet ministers.
Read more
WikiLeaks unveiled a bombshell series of purportedly classified National Security Agency (NSA) reports on Tuesday that, if legitimate, indicate the US eavesdropped on the communications of France's last three presidents, as well as the country's ambassador to Washington and several cabinet ministers.
According to the documents, the NSA intercepted telephone conversations and other communications of former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, as well as current leader Francois Hollande as they discussed the Greek debt crisis, appointments at the UN, the Middle East peace process, and even American espionage against France. The WikiLeaks release, titled Espionnage Élysée, also includes a "target list" that contains a cell number identified as "FR PRES CELL."
In one intelligence summary dated March 10, 2010, the NSA describes intercepted communications between Pierre Vimont, the French ambassador to the US, and Sarkozy's diplomatic advisor Jean-David Levitte ahead of a meeting between Sarkozy and President Barack Obama in Washington later that month.
"Vimont conveyed that the French president will express his frustration that Washington has backed away from its proposed bilateral intelligence cooperation agreement and Sarkozy intends to continue to push for closure," the report said. "As Vimont and Levitte understand it, the main sticking point is the US desire to continue spying on France."
Related: Saudi Arabia Warns Citizens Not to Read Diplomatic Cables Released by WikiLeaks
VICE News could not immediately verify the authenticity of the documents, which WikiLeaks published in cooperation with French newspaper Liberation and online investigative outlet Mediapart. In a statement accompanying the release, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said, "the French people have a right to know that their elected government is subject to hostile surveillance from a supposed ally." Assange also indicated that WikiLeaks would release further materials "in the near future."
A June 10, 2011 summary of an intercepted communication from Sarkozy discusses the president's reported "determination of [sic] go forward with an initiative to restart direct Mideast peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians."
"The president was giving thought to appealing to Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev for a possible joint initiative without the United States or, as another option, issuing an ultimatum to the US President regarding Palestinian statehood," the intelligence summary said.
In response to Tuesday's revelation, Hollande called an emergency meeting of his defense council, the Associated Press reported, citing a presidential aide. France's parliament is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a bill that would authorize broad surveillance powers, specifically against terrorism suspects.
Ned Price, a spokesperson for the National Security Council in Washington, said he would not comment on the documents, but added that, "as a general matter, we do not conduct any foreign intelligence surveillance activities unless there is a specific and validated national security purpose. This applies to ordinary citizens and world leaders alike."
It was not clear how WikiLeaks obtained the reports, though numerous other NSA documents have emerged since whistleblower Edward Snowden first leaked information on the agency's spying programs in 2013. In October of that year, the German magazine Der Spiegel, citing Snowden's archives, reported that the NSA had established a "spy hub" in Berlin, where the agency reportedly listened in on the cellphone conversations of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Snowden also revealed spying on other countries, including Brazil.
Related: Cables Released by WikiLeaks Show Saudi Money Flowed to Newspapers in Canada
Though Western leaders and diplomats privately admit they assume some degree of spying among allies, the latest round of evidence will likely reopen wounds that Obama has attempted to suture with European leaders over the past two years.
The oldest intelligence summaries released Tuesday date back to 2006 and describe intercepted discussions between Chirac and then French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy concerning matters at the United Nations, including high-level appointments. In a comment, the NSA noted that Chirac's "detailed" instructions to Douste-Blazy "may be in a response to the foreign minister's propensity, amply demonstrated in the past and the impetus behind a number of presidential reprimands, for making ill-timed or inaccurate remarks." Douste-Blazy, for his part, reportedly argued that the division of the UN's peacekeeping department into two parts — which did take place the following year — would be "a catastrophe."
Other summaries deal with 2012 "secret meetings" on the Eurozone financial crisis. Four years earlier, the NSA titled one summary, "Sarkozy Sees Himself as Only One Who Can Resolve World Financial Crisis."
"The President blamed many of the current economic problems on mistakes made by the US Government, but believes that Washington is now heeding some of his advice," the NSA wrote in 2008.
Follow Samuel Oakford on Twitter: @samueloakfordKHARTOUM (Reuters) - A Sudanese woman, believed to be around 20, has been sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery, and is being held near Khartoum, shackled in prison with her baby son, rights groups and lawyers said on Thursday.
Campaigners condemned the ruling, saying it violated international standards and raised concerns that Sudan might start applying sharia, or Islamic law, more strictly following the secession of mostly non-Muslim South Sudan last year.
The woman, Intisar Sharif Abdalla, was sentenced by the Ombada criminal court on April 22, court documents seen by Reuters showed.
Two lawyers assigned to her case, who declined to be named, said they were launching an appeal adding Abdalla appeared to be under severe psychological strain.
“She’s in dire need of a psychiatrist because she appears to be in a state of shock from the social and family pressures she’s under,” one lawyer said.
Abdalla was illiterate and did not have a lawyer or interpreter in the courtroom, although Arabic is not her native language, the lawyers and activists added.
Arabic is the main language in the overwhelmingly Muslim nation, though a wide range of smaller languages are also spoken, particularly in tribal areas. It was unclear where Abdalla came from.
Officials in Sudan’s justice and information ministries said they could not immediately comment on the case when Reuters contacted them by phone.
Abdalla’s exact age has not been confirmed, but activists said she was believed to be around 20, although some reports indicated she could be younger.
“The case certainly raises concerns about how judges are interpreting and applying the laws of Sudan,” Jehanne Henry, a senior research at advocacy group Human Rights Watch, said.
ISLAMIC LAW
Floggings are a common punishment in Sudan for crimes like drinking alcohol and adultery. But sentences of stoning are rare.
Following a 1989 coup, Sudan introduced laws that took sharia as their main source and hosted militants including Osama bin Laden.
While the government has since sought to improve its image internationally by distancing itself from radical Islamists, it is still one of only a few countries to list death by stoning in its statutes.
In 2010, Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said the country would adopt a fully Islamic constitution following the secession of the south, agreed under a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war.
Most people in South Sudan are Christian or follow traditional African beliefs.
The Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA), a network of civil society groups, said Abdalla was still in danger despite the appeal.
“Although this appeal is in process, Intisar ostensibly remains at risk of being stoned and in real terms, her life is still very much on the line,” it said in a statement.
In 2010, the case of Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese U.N. official, sparked international furor when she was sentenced to flogging for wearing trousers.
Fahima Hashim, a women’s rights activist following Abdalla’s case, said sentences were often inconsistent in Sudan because the legal system gave authority to judges to decide punishments. Previous stoning sentences had not been carried out, she said.
Hashim called for the reform of articles in Sudan’s criminal code which she said harm women’s rights, including one used in Abdalla’s case.
As long as this articles remained unchanged, execution by stoning would not be out of the question, she said. “It’s a threat. It could happen.”Free-to-play games supported by micro-transactions on Xbox 360 are "inevitable", according to one developer.
Hi-Rez Studios boss Todd Harris, who is making free-to-play game Tribes: Ascend for PC and Xbox 360, told Eurogamer Microsoft plans to relax its rules regarding Xbox Live because of industry trends.
Last month a Develop report revealed Microsoft was talking with developers to discuss free-to-play game deals.
The idea is that games can either be monetised by in-game items or premium upgrade costs. Xbox 360 will incorporate a micro-transactions service using Microsoft Points, the report claimed.
As of now, the Xbox 360 version of Tribes: Ascend is on the back burner until Microsoft sorts its free-to-play Xbox Live policy out.
Discussions revolve around how free-to-play games will be updated through Xbox Live and how gamers will be able to play without spending any money.
"It's really just the degree to which the free-to-play model and, even more specifically, constant updates are at - kind of what level of support there is for Xbox, or even PlayStation at this point," Harris explained.
"So the ability to patch frequently, the ability to have it be free-to-play so users can get a taste without any fee. At least from our conversations, both Sony and Microsoft are moving there strategically but there are still some things to be worked out on both the business side and the technical side and the certification side regarding frequency of patches.
"And those issues just need further advancement before we would be comfortable putting a release timeframe on a console version. It's not the case of 'never', but we know all those things we can handle on the PC, so that's why PC is first."
Xbox Live has so far been a closed system, preventing massively multiplayer games, for example, from finding a home on the service.
Final Fantasy XIV Online creator and director Hiromichi Tanaka told Eurogamer last year that a "closed" Xbox Live blocked the game from appearing on Xbox 360.
And PlayStation 3 exclusive MMO shooter Dust 514 is in a similar situation. Developer CCP told Eurogamer at E3 last month that it went with Sony because "at least they have policies that allow us to build the game the way we want".
"They're [Microsoft] seeing where the industry is going," Harris continued. "It's inevitable that Microsoft will move towards that because the industry is moving towards that, and once that groundwork has been laid we would be in a better position to consider Tribes: Ascend for Xbox."
Eurogamer put the free-to-play on Xbox 360 story to Xbox senior product manager David Dennis, who told us Microsoft is looking at "a lot of different models for distribution".
"We're always looking at different models and different ways we can work with partners to bring content out," Dennis said.
"If you look, for example, at the stuff Kudo [Tsunoda, Kinect creative director] showed onstage at E3 – Kinect Fun Labs – that's an ad-supported model. Those titles are sponsored. There are different ways you can deploy or distribute games using different types of business models and we're always open to talking to partners.
"The strength we have in the business right now and the momentum we have allows us to experiment and try different things like that and see what consumers like and what they don't like," Dennis continued.
"If there are experiences that they like and want to download because it's ad-supported versus what are they willing to pay for it… you'll see us continue in the future to look for a lot of different models for distribution like that."Residents of Vancouver's "Ten Year Tent City" packed up their belongings and began setting up camp at a new location Tuesday evening.
The move followed an injunction granted earlier this week by a B.C. Supreme Court justice, who ordered the campers to abandon the site at 950 Main Street by Wednesday at noon.
About 50 residents packed their belongings in a U-Haul truck and marched behind it to their new encampment, in an empty lot near Franklin Street and Glen Drive.
"They're trying to put us in shelters and we don't want that," resident Crystal Cardinal explained.
"We just want to stay as a group…. If we do separate then nobody's going to be able to look after the other person. We don't want to just end up on the street again because it's not safe."
Vancouver tent city resident Crystal Cardinal said residents don't want to be separated. (CBC News)
The campers had been living at the Main Street tent city since April in protest of the city's ongoing housing crisis, taking their name from a previous tent city on the same site in 2007.
Justice Joel Groves issued the injunction Monday in favour of Lu'ma Native Housing, a group that holds a lease from the city and plans to build a 26-unit building on the site for low-income Indigenous tenants.
Vancouver had previously sought a similar injunction, but that was denied in May.Computer-generated DJ set of own material. This is a liveset of recent tracks which could be seen as a return by Ronin back to his uptempo roots, showing that there may be some life left in the old nag yet. Many of the tracks are mastered and not in fully re-arrangeable liveset format, so this could be considered a DJ set with loadsa FX. Some of these tracks also feature on the forthcoming album release by Ronin entitled Divided by Zero. Note: The calypso flavoured breakcore track in this set is also now available as the A side on the new Frogs Records 10th release on vinyl. The flip side features a track by label head Freddy Frogs and is available from all good stockists as of now. http://roninaudio.net & http://soundcloud.com/ronin - 2012-06-07 Play DownloadBy Jordan Press
OTTAWA — The government’s omnibus crime bill was being pushed through its final test in the Senate for no good reason, Liberal senators charged Thursday.
Their words, however, were unable to change the trajectory of the bill’s path to becoming law, as the Conservatives used their majority in the Senate to give final approval — by a vote of 48 to 37 — to the bill before it returns to the House of Commons.
Once in the Commons, MPs would have to approve the six changes Conservative senators made to the bill that more clearly define terrorism activities and how victims of terrorism can sue groups or states that support terrorism.
Bill C-10, the Safe Streets and Communities Act, passed its final vote in the Senate at about midnight Friday.
[np-related]
The Conservatives used their majority to limit debate on the bill to six hours, much to the chagrin of the opposition Liberals. Only one Conservative voted against limiting debate: Sen. Pierre Nolin. Mr. Nolin was also expected to vote against final passage of the bill.
The government promised to pass the omnibus crime bill within 100 days of taking office, and limiting debate was done to ensure the government could keep its promise, said Conservative Sen. Claude Carignan.
“Canadians are expecting us to (pass) this,” Mr. Carignan said.
“Vending machines usually dispense junk food. We should aim for something higher when we dispense justice to Canadians.”
“The best way to ensure the population is not jaded when it comes to politics is to keep our promises.”
The Liberals, however, said there was still enough opposition to the package of nine bills that every senator deserved the right to speak to the bill, especially the seven newest senators who may not have had the chance to review every transcript and piece of evidence a Senate committee heard about the bill, including critiques of the mandatory minimum sentences outlined in C-10.
“It is not a one-size-fits-all justice system. Criminal justice is not a vending machine, where you press a button — A1, B5 or B6 — and out pops a sentence,” said Sen. James Cowan, the Liberal leader in the Senate.
“Vending machines usually dispense junk food. We should aim for something higher when we dispense justice to Canadians.”
During 2 1/2 hours of arguments on the proposal to limit debate to six hours — the least number of hours required when the Senate approves time limits — Liberal senators called the rush to make C-10 law an affront to democracy and a hindrance to the Senate’s ability to act as the “chamber of sober second thought.”
“There is no excuse for what this chamber is about to do. We should be ashamed of ourselves,” said Liberal Sen. Joan Fraser.Abstract
In mammals, hypoxia-triggered erythropoietin release increases red blood cell mass to meet tissue oxygen demands. Using male Wistar rats, we unmask a previously unrecognized regulatory pathway of erythropoiesis involving suppressor control by the NO metabolite and ubiquitous dietary component nitrate. We find that circulating hemoglobin levels are modulated by nitrate at concentrations achievable by dietary intervention under normoxic and hypoxic conditions; a moderate dose of nitrate administered via the drinking water (7 mg NaNO 3 /kg body weight/d) lowered hemoglobin concentration and hematocrit after 6 d compared with nonsupplemented/NaCl-supplemented controls. The underlying mechanism is suppression of hepatic erythropoietin expression associated with the downregulation of tissue hypoxia markers, suggesting increased pO 2. At higher nitrate doses, however, a partial reversal of this effect occurred; this was accompanied by increased renal erythropoietin expression and stabilization of hypoxia-inducible factors, likely brought about by the relative anemia. Thus, hepatic and renal hypoxia-sensing pathways act in concert to modulate hemoglobin in response to nitrate, converging at an optimal minimal hemoglobin concentration appropriate to the environmental/physiologic situation. Suppression of hepatic erythropoietin expression by nitrate may thus act to decrease blood viscosity while matching oxygen supply to demand, whereas renal oxygen sensing could act as a brake, averting a potentially detrimental fall in hematocrit.—Ashmore, T., Fernandez, B. O., Evans, C. E., Huang, Y., Branco-Price, C., Griffin, J. L., Johnson, R. S., Feelisch, M., Murray, A. J. Suppression of erythropoiesis by dietary nitrate.
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good through their mid-30s was no assurance that they’d continue playing well past that point, however. At age 36, for example this group — which averaged four wins per season from age 33 through 35 — recorded just a 1.7 WAR, declining to a 115 wRC+.
That’s not to say there’s a call for total pessimism. Because it’s a pretty small group, Sammy Sosa’s collapse hurts the overall figures quite a bit. Plus, Bagwell, Molitor, and Ordonez all put up above-average seasons, so it’s not as if Bautista doesn’t have a decent chance at a good season. Unfortunately, time isn’t very forgiving. The group averaged just 3.3 WAR from age 36 through age 38, and only Molitor’s 9.2 WAR during that span keeps the average that high. Jeff Bagwell’s (at 3.6 WAR) is the only other player to have exceeded three wins. The overall numbers are also hurt due to some players failing to reach their age-38 season. Playing into the late 30s is hardly a guarantee, even for players still performing at a high level a few years before.
We can take a different look by tossing out Bautista’s 2016 season and pretending it is some weird anomaly due to injuries that won’t affect him in the future. The outlook still isn’t helped much. I ran another set of comps, this time only looking for players similar to Bautista from age 32 through age 34, when Bautista was performing at a high level. The nine players who fit that criteria put up a 124 wRC+ and 2.1 WAR at age 36. That’s a little bit better than the comps above, but from age 36 through age 38, they averaged just 3.9 WAR, nowhere near justifying a $75 million deal. And those nine players averaged a 126 wRC+ and 3.4 WAR at age 35, exceeding Bautista at that age.
It’s possible that Bautista goes through an Ortiz-like renaissance, but the odds are stacked against him simply due to his age. To be worth a $75 million contract, Bautista would need to exceed eight wins over the next three years, and this century, only 10 players have done that. (That group of 10, in order of WAR: Barry Bonds, Moises Alou, Chipper Jones, Rafael Palmeiro, Adrian Beltre, Edgar Martinez, Manny Ramirez, Jeff Kent, Steve Finley, and David Ortiz.) Only 25 players have even been worth five wins at that age since 2000. It’s not fun going around telling everyone not to sign players, but this is the free-agent class we were dealt. Bautista might come back and have a great year, but the odds are against him.The most difficult sudoku in the world
Sudoku is the most easily recognized and played puzzle game in the world. In 2012 mathematician Arto Inkala said he created the most difficult to solve Sudoku. You can try it yourself and see if this is actually true.
What is the figure in place of red question? Register on your website and write the answer as a comment below the post.
For those of you who do not know how to solve a Sudoku, the goal is to fill all the squares with numbers from 1 to 9 and there are 3 simple rules:
In each 3×3 square must have the numbers 1 to 9 without repeating any. In any line of the large square may have the numbers 1 to 9 without repeating. In each column of the large square can may have the numbers 1 to 9 without repeating.
Pleasant conundrum :).It is understood that the sergeant died following a shot with an official issue handgun in the early hours of this morning at Ballyshannon garda station where he was based.
The dead officer who has not been officially named was in his 40’s and married with three young children.
Sources say that the weapon had been taken from a store room in the station.
The Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) has launched an investigation into the incident which has been described as a dreadful tragedy.
It is understood that gardai will also conduct an investigation and counselling will be offered to the officer’s colleagues who are said to be traumatised by the incident.
Said a source: “This is a dreadful tragedy and our thoughts are with our colleague’s wife and children. This has left his family and colleagues heartbroken and traumatised.”
Online EditorsMajor broadcast station CBS could disconnect its freely available broadcast signal in favor of becoming a cable channel, according to recent comments made by CBS chief exec Leslie Moonves.
Right now all the major broadcast stations are currently up in arms about new TV startup Aereo’s recent court win allowing them to continue operating as a lawful company. Aereo’s service allows people to pay a fee to watch all the freely broadcasted television content from a website or mobile device, which they’ve been able to do using tiny antennas for each individual subscriber. Obviously, broadcasters hate this idea because it makes it much easier for consumers to cut out expensive cable or satellite TV subscriptions without missing out on that broadcasted content.
At the National Association of Broadcasters trade show yesterday, Moonves sympathized with News Corp exec Chase Carey, who previously said Fox could become a cable channel as a way to prevent Aereo from “stealing” broadcasted content. However, federal judges in New York have already decided that Aereo wasn’t actually stealing anything, but rather providing a service to people.
“For now, we’re talking about the New York-Connecticut area,” Moonves told the New York Times in reference to making CBS a cable channel. Aereo currently operates exclusively on the east coast, with plans to expand beyond New York City.
But as I previously discussed, transforming a broadcast station into a cable network wouldn’t exactly be an easy task. Broadcast stations receive millions of dollars from local affiliates that provide local news and community programming to their audiences. If CBS did decide to yank itself off the air, it would also face lower viewership on its own programming, which means its advertising would likely take a hit.
For now, both CBS and News Corp. are only threatening to make this happen. We’ll have to wait and see how Aereo does in the future before finding out how serious those broadcast stations are about going off the air.
TV image via ShutterstockThis year has already seen Google take some big steps forward in its expansion from a company that provides information services to a company that also provides access to such services. We had already seen what it could do as an ISP with Google Fiber, and now with Project Fi it’s moving into the wireless communication game. Now a Google-created startup is getting involved with another project along those lines, acquiring a couple of the firms working on the LinkNYC effort to bring free high-speed WiFi to the streets of New York City.
LinkNYC intends to blanket the city in WiFi served out of APs installed where old payphones are now. Two of the companies behind the initiative, Titan and Control Group, are being snatched-up by a group of investors led by Sidewalk Labs, a Google-funded company created last month to spur on urban technological innovation.
While that puts Google proper a couple steps removed from the action, it’s clear that the company sees this sort of municipal WiFi project as a smart investment, offering (among other things) lots of new advertising potential – and the Google of today is very much an advertising company.
Look for the first LinkNYC WiFi APs to deploy sometime in September.
Source: Bloomberg
Via: The VergeThe Doomsday Clock has been advanced to 2.5 minutes to midnight—a setting closer to humanity’s extinction than any year since 1953. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand forward by 30 seconds due to increasing existential threats from nuclear war, climate change, cyberwarfare, and potentially harmful innovations in biotechnology. The scientists stated the rise of terrorism and Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States increased the risk.
Trump’s presidency has ignited public concern over many social, political, and economic dangers, including global warming, xenophobia, and misogyny. These grievances are of vital importance, but the most catastrophic disaster that could occur during the next four years is much greater than any singular issue: Total nuclear annihilation.
A war that could lead to the extinction of humanity may sound extreme, but as two Nobel Prize-winning nuclear experts who advised both Reagan and Gorbachev during the Cold War, we have seen how very close humanity has been to nuclear war in the past—and we believe the global level of nuclear threat has once again been brought to its brink.
Yet as unlikely as it may seem, Donald Trump, the very man who has reinstalled this base fear, could also be the very person to lead the world toward nuclear disarmament.
The fact that a leader as inexperienced as Trump has access to nuclear launch codes that could destroy whole nations instantaneously has publicly reignited the issue of nuclear proliferation. However, the fundamental problem is not that Trump has access to the nuclear codes—it’s that they exist in the first place.
These grievances are of vital importance, but the most catastrophic disaster that could occur during the next four years is much greater than any singular issue: Total nuclear annihilation.
The lack of public concern about nuclear threat over the past two decades comes from a period of calm that followed the end of the Cold War, and the peculiar place that nuclear threat occupies in the human psyche. The problem is so horrible, and so beyond individual control, that it is suppressed. And what is suppressed cannot be countered.
Getting people to sit up and recognize that there is an unacceptable level of nuclear threat is an essential step to global nuclear disarmament; governments will not budge without public support. If anything, Trump’s presidency has re-alerted the world to the notion of nuclear annihilation and led to an awakening in social activism in younger generations.
We began our work against nuclear threat over four decades ago. As we are now in our seventies, we’re not going to solve this problem—you are. But before you can do your part, you first need to understand how we got here in the first place.
A brief history of the end of the world
The Doomsday Clock was first introduced in 1947, two years after the US detonated small nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. By 1949, the Soviet Union had developed its own nuclear weapons, sending the two countries into a nuclear arms race. In a policy called “Mutually Assured Destruction,” or MAD, both sides threatened to annihilate the other if attacked. Children of our generation grew up in hiding under school desks as weekly air-raid sirens were tested.
The arms race continued throughout the 1970s and reached its peak under US president Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Both sides began to speak of a disarming first strike, which was a sudden attack to destroy the nuclear forces of the opponent. Each country therefore placed their weapons on “high alert,” so that they could fire them in less than 30 minutes and avoid being disarmed.
During this time, the public sensed an unacceptable level of danger. Young couples spoke of reluctance to bring a child into a world moving inexorably toward nuclear annihilation. Surveys of school children revealed widespread fear of a nuclear death.
IPPNW The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War recieving their Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. Dr. Muller is pictured second from the left and Dr. Pastore is on the far left.
By 1983, Reagan, aware of public opposition to the weapons, changed tactics by saying, “that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” He and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev even discussed the goal of complete abolition of nuclear weapons. The number of nuclear weapons in the world began to decrease from an absurd total of over 60,000 toward the current level of 15,000. Since a single nuclear weapon can destroy Manhattan or Moscow, the warheads that have been kept still far exceed the number required for deterrence. (In a little known story, much of the radioactive material in the decommissioned Russian warheads was sent to American nuclear-power plants. In 2009 it was estimated that 10% of the electricity consumed in the United States was produced with the use of salvaged bomb material.)
As the immediate threat of nuclear war decreased in the 1990s after the Cold War ended, we have had no reason to prioritize nuclear threat in the past 25 years. Other threats to human survival, such as global warming, have become the logical focus.
But the favorable progress made in the 1990s toward a world less at risk of nuclear annihilation has been reversed by three developments in the 21st century: first, the rise of terrorism as exemplified by 9/11; second, the proliferation of nuclear weapons from two to nine countries; and third, the re-emergence of a Cold War-style conflict between Russia and the US.
At the close of the 20th century, many rejoiced that the nuclear beast had been wrestled to the ground, but it has now arisen with renewed ferocity. Only the radical step of abolishing all nuclear weapons will slay it.
Where we stand now (but maybe not for much longer)
The US and Russia maintain an estimated 700 high-alert nuclear weapons each. This increases the risk of a hasty decision that could lead to nuclear war. The high-alert status is a remnant of the concern about a pre-emptive disarming first strike, but it is no longer needed for deterrence. (This is because adequate destructive force can now be delivered by nuclear weapons carried by submarines, which are not as vulnerable to an attack.) This therefore abolishes the need for the 30-minute high-alert status.
Though the US and Russia hold roughly 90% of the world’s 15,000 warheads, the weapons have now proliferated to a total of nine nations, including North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Terrorists have indicated a desire to obtain these weapons, and criminals have been apprehended selling the enriched uranium necessary to build a nuclear bomb.
We have had no reason to prioritize nuclear threat in the past 25 years. Other threats to human survival, such as global warming, have become the logical focus.
The nuclear threat was increasing prior to Trump’s victory. While the advancement of the clock from 3 to 2.5 minutes to midnight after Trump’s election has been widely noted, a greater advancement of the clock in 2015 from 5 to 3 minutes to midnight during Barack Obama’s presidency received little attention. The scientists at that time cited increased risk due to continued proliferation, a $1 trillion modernization program approved by the US government, and a halt of arms-control progress.
Also during the Obama administration, the United States refused to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons, and the Senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The United States also opposed the UN resolution in support of a 2017 conference to abolish nuclear weapons, which was signed by 123 nations, including North Korea. All of this occurred as relations between the US and Russia deteriorated.
The US government’s most recent failures to take steps toward nuclear safety occurred during Obama’s leadership. Despite being a president dedicated to nuclear abolition and reduction of the nuclear threat, his efforts to reach those goals were hampered by an oppositional Congress, the nuclear-weapons portion of the military-industrial complex, a lack of public awareness of the problem, and hence, a lack of public support for the needed actions.
Trump’s stance on nuclear weapons
After his briefing on the nuclear codes, the new president himself said, “It’s very, very, very scary.”
It is, indeed, very scary.
While nuclear warfare was but a blip on the public’s radar during Obama’s years in office, the new Republican administration has immediately alerted the public to the presence of nuclear threat. Many are now terrified that Trump has his finger on a button that can launch over 700 nuclear weapons within 30 minutes, and a total of 1,300 other warheads that are ready to launch, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
Because of the high-alert status of the nuclear arsenal, there is no requirement for president Trump to consult anyone before deciding to launch a nuclear weapon. The Congress, which was granted the power to declare war by the Constitution, does not need to be consulted; the Supreme Court would also have no say. Once Trump decides to launch a missile, the order would travel through the military chain of command, which is composed of individuals who are committed to the security of the country—and trained to follow orders. Once launched, a missile cannot be recalled.
There is a distinction between the need to launch a nuclear weapon rapidly in response to a real sign of an incoming nuclear attack versus the deliberate decision to introduce nuclear weapons into a non-nuclear conflict. The latter is described as the “first use” of nuclear weapons, such as occurred in Hiroshima. Recently, Massachusetts senator Edward Markey and California representative Ted Lieu have proposed legislation to prohibit any president from introducing nuclear weapons into a conflict without a declaration of war from Congress. However, it is very unlikely that this proposal will ever reach the Republican-led Congress.
While there is great concern that president Trump’s finger is on the button (for either first use or retaliation), it is madness that humans, with great intelligence and industry, have created a system to so easily destroy the world—and then give control of the vast destructive force to any single person.
We still don’t entirely know what Trump thinks of nuclear weapons—but his words are surprisingly mostly positive. In 1987, he stated in an interview with a nuclear expert that he was working with governmental officials to reduce nuclear threat, citing the influence of his uncle John Trump, an MIT physicist. “Because I’ve become convinced that Trump’s involvement [in nuclear non-proliferation] is, well, serious,” Ron Rosenbaum wrote in 1987, “I have to abandon all the easy jokes and wisecracks I could have made if I thought it was some weird ego trip by an overambitious real estate promoter eager to thrust himself into the national arena.”
But what about in 2017? While running for office, Trump stated that “the single greatest problem the world has is nuclear”—but then in December 2016, then president-elect Trump sent an ambiguous tweet about the nuclear threat.
Many interpreted this as a call to expand nuclear weaponry, perhaps in response to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s statement earlier in the day that Russia needed to “strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces.” A Trump spokesperson later said that “strengthen” referred to the need to work against proliferation to rogue nations. But was that truly his intention? After all, he also supposedly remarked, “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” to MSNBC co-host Mika Brzezinski when asked about the tweet. This is comment is similar to those made by president Reagan early in his presidency, before he changed his tune toward abolition.
If Trump is truly in favor of nuclear disarmament, he may be the best-positioned world leader in recent history to move this effort forward.
If Trump is truly in favor of nuclear disarmament, he may be the best-positioned world leader in recent history to move this effort forward. The fear he has incited has had the unintended byproduct of increasing public awareness of this topic for the first time in decades. Then there are his close connections with Russia: He places a high priority on improving relations with the other country most deeply embroiled in the problem, and the selection of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state adds the strength of an individual experienced in working with Russia. He has also met with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has recommended “Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any new global equilibrium, not primarily as a threat to the United States.” Add to this the fact that the Democrats likewise do not wish for Trump to be anywhere near “the big red button,” so proposals he puts forward in Congress toward nuclear abolition should be met with some degree of bi-partisan support.
Oddly enough, nuclear non-proliferation might be about to have its moment.
How do we solve the world’s nuclear-weapon problems?
There are three actions Trump could take with Russia to decrease the nuclear threat:
First, as advocated by president Reagan, establish the goal “that nuclear weapons be banished from the face of the Earth.” A concrete step toward this goal would be for the US to reverse its opposition to the UN Nuclear Abolition Conference in March 2017 to negotiate a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons.
Second, remove all weapons from high-alert status. There are many ways to decrease readiness to launch: The launch codes could me made less available, and for deeper safety, the warheads could be stored separately from the missiles that launch them.
Third, enhance efforts between the United States and Russia against nuclear terrorism. The former Soviet Union produced vast amounts of uranium and plutonium, which are the main ingredients for nuclear weapons. These fissile materials are not yet adequately protected from terrorists. Joint work has been done in the past and should be accelerated.
The fundamental problem is not that Trump has access to the nuclear codes—it’s that they exist in the first place.
Bold actions to reduce global nuclear threat require public support for what is a new mode of thinking. Our silent generation born in the mid-20th century huddled under desks as air-raid sirens screeched, and doubted we would survive. Later in the 1980s, humanity found its voice, and demanded a reversal of the arms race with a million-person march in New York City.
In 2017, public support for nuclear disarmament appears to be growing. Many, especially the young, have used electronic media and social networks to support the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), Global Zero, and the International Coalition to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
And now, it is your turn.
Movement toward safety is urgently needed. We have an iconoclastic president determined to change the status quo. Support for positive actions by president Trump on the nuclear issue is the best way for an individual to tip the balance from a march to extinction toward a path to safety.
This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.Abstract
Objective: To preliminarily assess the safety and efficacy of transdermal nicotine therapy on cognitive performance and clinical status in subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
Methods: Nonsmoking subjects with amnestic MCI were randomized to transdermal nicotine (15 mg per day or placebo) for 6 months. Primary outcome variables were attentional improvement assessed with Connors Continuous Performance Test (CPT), clinical improvement as measured by clinical global impression, and safety measures. Secondary measures included computerized cognitive testing and patient and observer ratings.
Results: Of 74 subjects enrolled, 39 were randomized to nicotine and 35 to placebo. 67 subjects completed (34 nicotine, 33 placebo). The primary cognitive outcome measure (CPT) showed a significant nicotine-induced improvement. There was no statistically significant effect on clinician-rated global improvement. The secondary outcome measures showed significant nicotine-associated improvements in attention, memory, and psychomotor speed, and improvements were seen in patient/informant ratings of cognitive impairment. Safety and tolerability for transdermal nicotine were excellent.
Conclusion: This study demonstrated that transdermal nicotine can be safely administered to nonsmoking subjects with MCI over 6 months with improvement in primary and secondary cognitive measures of attention, memory, and mental processing, but not in ratings of clinician-rated global impression. We conclude that this initial study provides evidence for nicotine-induced cognitive improvement in subjects with MCI; however, whether these effects are clinically important will require larger studies.MUMBAI: Two investment companies of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group--Cyrus Investments and Sterling Investment Corp--have in a legal petition directly linked Tata Sons and Ratan Tata with the Rs 22 crore fraudulent transactions alleged to have been carried out in the conglomerate's joint venture airline AirAsia India.The petition, filed with the National Company Law Tribunal, has also accused that as part of the transactions, the salt-to-software conglomerate at the behest of Tata, had dealings with Hamid Reza Malakotipour, an alleged sanctioned global terrorist.On both allegations, they have cited the report by Deloitte which conducted a forensic investigation on AirAsia India. ET first reported findings of the report on November 5 and Malakotipour's name on December 4."Hence, acting upon the instructions of respondent 2 (Ratan Tata), the Tata group in its dealings with AirAsia have indirectly been financers of terrorism and respondent 2 (Tata), by his acts has caused irreparable harm to the age old image of the Tata group in addition to breaching the trust of not only the shareholders of the Tata group but also its employees," the petitioners said.A spokesperson for Tata Sons said the allegations referred to in the petition against Tata and Tata Sons "are completely baseless, and each one of them will be responded to and proved incorrect,".He added that "AirAsia India has already put it in the public domain, as early as October 31, that there is an ongoing investigation against certain former personnel of AirAsia India involving irregular personal expense claims and certain company charges,""It has subsequently said that it has filed a private complaint with the Bangalore police against certain allegedly erring officials,"Tata Sons and Malaysian carrier AirAsia Berhad each own 49% in the airline. The remaining 2% is owned by chairman Ramadorai and Director R Venkataramanan.Ratan Tata is interim chairman of Tata Sons, appointed to the post after Cyrus Mistry was ousted on October 24. Subsequent to his ousting, Mistry had in a letter to shareholders referred to the transactions at AirAsia.The Deloitte report has alleged that the airline's former CEO Mittu Chandilya had instructed company payments totalling Rs 22 crore to to a Singapore-based entity where no service was rendered, and to an Indian firm which doesn’t even exist in government records.The report said Malakotipur had been a co-shareholder of Rajendra Dubey, said to be Chandilya's close aide in lobbying for the airline in government circles. Malakotipour was the former regional manager for Iranian carrier Mahan Air and Dubey, the country head of Globe Air Cargo India, a cargo general sales and services agent (GSSA) and part of the ECS Group.Malakotipour has been identified by the US Department of Treasury as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist", the Deloitte report has said. It has cited other allegations against him including "supply of equipment to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qud Force, an Iran-based special operations force, designated as a supporter of terrorism by the United States since 2007".On June 2, 2014, the US Department of the Treasury in a press release, mentioned Malakotipour's name in a list of "entities and individuals located around the world for evading US sanctions against Iran, aiding Iranian nuclear and missile proliferation, and supporting terrorism".Pre-Tornado The Joplin, Missouri neighborhood where the author grew up. Google Maps
The tornado that destroyed my hometown was born in an otherwise unremarkable atmospheric collision over the American Central Plains. On May 22, 2011, a geostationary satellite 22,300 miles overhead recorded a large collection of cloud lines drifting over southeastern Kansas. At around 2 p.m, one of the cloud lines exploded, like a cartographic-scale dry-ice bomb. Dense white vapors poured from nothing, and over the next five hours the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitored the growing supercell thunderstorm as it drifted toward a three-letter abbreviation on the map: "JLN." Just after 5 p.m., two storm chasers driving toward the western edge of Joplin, Missouri, spotted a translucent set of tendrils reaching down from the storm's low black thunderhead. Almost as quickly as they formed, the tendrils disappeared. And then things took a turn. A dark blob half a mile wide congealed and dropped from the clouds. As it touched the ground, it filled with sparks from ruptured power lines, like a jar of fireflies. At 5:41, the National Weather Service office in Springfield, Missouri, issued this alert: NUMEROUS REPORTS OF TORNADO ON THE GROUND WEST OF JOPLIN AND POWER FLASHES. "The tornado, as if it had been fueled by manmade structures and was now depleted, vanished."The tornado intensified as it strafed the roofs and treetops of Joplin's western suburbs. By the time it reached the city limits, where 49,000 people lived, it had evolved into an EF-5, the most destructive type of tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale. Unlike EF-4s, which are merely "devastating," EF-5s produce "incredible" damage. An EF-4 is powerful enough to scrape civilization off the planet in a matter of minutes. An EF-5 is more powerful still. When the storm hit Joplin, the winds inside the funnel were spinning faster than 200 mph—yet the whole column was crawling forward at less than 10 mph, giving it time to wood-chip everything beneath it. The tornado produced a good deal of incredible, EF-5-worthy damage in the office park that surrounded St. John's Hospital, one of the region's major medical centers. In 45 seconds, it shifted the nine-story structure four inches off its foundation. By then, the tornado was three quarters of a mile wide. As it tacked slightly to the north, it flattened a downtrodden swath of old Main Street. After gnawing through half a dozen intervening residential blocks, the tornado hit Joplin High School, a recently refurbished brick complex at the town's middle-class core. Security cameras intended to monitor lunch-hour skippers now recorded surges of water that rendered the parking lot indistinguishable from a harbor in a hurricane. Inside, chairs and papers swarmed as the walls began to collapse.
May 23, 2011 The exact same neighborhood, pictured the day after the deadliest single tornado in modern history. Most of the damaged areas were unrecognizable even to lifelong residents. Aaron Fuhrman/Flickr Editorial/Getty Images
The tornado churned on to the east, tagging its path with bizarre signatures—wood piercing asphalt, rubber piercing wood. It shaved away the neighborhood just east of the high school, including the little white one-story house where I spent my teenage years. It continued toward the main thoroughfare, Range Line Road, and destroyed a Home Depot, an Academy Sports & Outdoors, a Wal-Mart and a Pizza Hut, shotgunning shoppers with glass and metal and wood, burying some beneath cinder blocks, and needling others with blades of grass. Meteorologists watching radar screens at a safe remove now saw a white-pink blob representing the tornado's swirl of debris swing through the rest of the city like a wrecking ball. But when it reached the open pasture at Joplin's eastern edge, the tornado—as if it had been fueled by manmade structures and was now depleted—delivered a few dying spasms and vanished. * * * My wife and I were eating dinner at home in Brooklyn when we heard the news. Her sister called: There had been a tornado, and it sounded bad. Growing up in Joplin means growing up with tornado warnings, so I was certain this was yet another false alarm. Still, we moved to the couch and turned on the Weather Channel. Mike Bettes, one of the network's on-camera meteorologists, was standing in a field of debris, talking to dazed Joplinites whose homes had just been leveled. At first we thought the crew was filming outside of town, in the country. A couple of houses down? Not so bad for late May in southwest Missouri. Then the camera turned and landed on St. John's Hospital. Windows blasted out, every surrounding structure demolished, it looked like the backdrop from a high-budget zombie movie. The hospital is in the middle of town. It's also about half a mile from my dad's house. On camera, Bettes choked up, turned his head, and broke into tears.That's when we freaked out. We started calling, texting, posting urgent Facebook messages asking family and friends for information. I haven't lived in Joplin since I left for college, but my parents, grandparents, and plenty of aunts, uncles, cousins and old friends still live in the area. Same goes for my wife, another Joplin native. No phone calls were getting through, but our parents texted back quickly: They were fine, and so were their homes. Throughout the evening it became obvious that the storm was extraordinarily severe. Nonetheless, it wasn't until the morning that we realized that the damage reports that had been streaming in over Facebook weren't isolated. One continuous stream of demolition connected them all. The tornado destroyed 20 percent of the property in Joplin, killed 161 people, and injured 1,150 more, all in a town with just 49,000 residents. That doesn't quite make it the deadliest tornado in history. The worst was the Tri-State tornado of March 18, 1925, which in three and a half hours killed 695 people in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. But because the Tri-State tornado (and the other five storms responsible for more deaths than the Joplin tornado) happened before the invention of modern weather-monitoring instruments, it's unclear whether they involved single funnel clouds or entire swarms. As a result, the Joplin tornado is the deadliest single tornado on record. Click here to view this article on a single page, or continue to page two below.
No Shelter The tornado that swept through Joplin last year destroyed 6,954 houses and killed 161 people, in 32 minutes. NOAA
The citizens of Tornado Alley towns like Joplin long ago adapted to the region's abusive weather by assembling warning systems, building shelters, and instructing children in siren interpretation and shelter taking from the earliest days of elementary school. But adaptation and instruction can only do so much. As towns like Joplin have grown, subdivisions sprawling into soybean fields, they have become larger targets. A century ago, Joplin covered 12.5 square miles. Now it occupies 35 square miles. Building codes, meanwhile, aren't written with storms even remotely as strong as the May 22 tornado in mind. Plenty of homes and businesses get built that would have a hard time withstanding the atmospheric strains of a terrarium. Houses are frequently built on slab foundations, with no basement in which to ride out a tornado. Many businesses are no better. A larger-than-average percentage of the deaths caused by the Joplin tornado happened in commercial buildings, including big-box retail stores. Home Depot said that its Joplin store, which was demolished in the storm, was built properly and that no building could have survived the tornado—but it also said the company will be adding an underground storm shelter to its new store. In the aftermath of the tornado, citizens, reporters and government officials scrutinized the warning system and promised to find out what went wrong. Did forecasters give people enough notice? Did the satellite and radar systems work as designed? Did anyone pay attention? I was more interested in the cause of the storm itself. For years I had been hearing unnerving weather reports from back home: news of 70-degree days in January, of droughts followed by floods followed by droughts, of ice storms causing power outages not seen in the area since the advent of electricity. Was this tornado, by far the most devastating natural disaster the area had ever experienced, part of a pattern? Was climate change causing this insane weather? "With every landmark destroyed, some blocks seemed shorter than they had before; others longer."I realized, as scientists dutifully reminded the press in the days after the storm, that it's probably impossible to draw a causal link between any single weather event and climate change. But I couldn't help but sympathize with the sentiment that Bill McKibben, a writer who has long argued that global warming is the single most important problem facing humanity, expressed that week in a Washington Post op-ed. The headline: "A Link between Climate Change and Joplin Tornadoes? Never!" Rather than making connections between the destruction in Joplin and the floods and fires and droughts happening around the world, he argued, "It's far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change." When I read McKibben's column, I was in the middle of clearing my schedule and booking a trip back home. His sarcasm seemed to come from a place of exasperation that I happen to share—a frustration with the odd American reluctance to consider the possibility that climate change is not only real, but already contributing to disasters like the one in Joplin. * * * A week after the tornado, I set out with my dad in his pickup truck to retrace the storm's path. We started on the road west of town where storm chasers filmed those first portentous clouds. As we drove east, we encountered the first signs of damage—power lines askew, tree limbs down. The wounds soon became more traumatic. In a newish subdivision we saw the first real structural damage, a ranch-style home with a semi-collapsed garage. Above the garage door, a warning was scrawled in silver spray paint: "Looters will be shot!" The destruction came into cinematic view as we crested a hill on West 26th Street, which overlooked St. John's. The storm had established new vistas, shaving away the houses and trees that had previously defined the skyline. Debarked trees, blond like treated lumber, splintered the horizon. We stopped to make sense of the view. To our right, two flower-covered crosses, one pink, one blue, stood at the threshold of a vanished home. We got back in the truck and continued east, passing through neighborhoods that contained childhood homes, friends' childhood homes, elementary and middle and high schools. On the flight home, I had braced myself for this part. I had expected to look on the ruined landscape of my youth with sadness and nostalgia. But I was acutely aware that compared with the people fishing family photos from the rubble, I could not complain. It also turned out that the terrain was too disfigured to trigger many memories. The town was so unrecognizable that one of the first tasks workers undertook, after clearing the streets of rubble, was painting street names onto the pavement at every intersection. The signs were gone, as were the landmarks, and even lifetime residents were finding it difficult to navigate. Some blocks seemed shorter than they had before; others, longer. The major streets were clogged with emergency workers, police officers and other rubberneckers like me. Search-and-rescue crews
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spatfalls. Oyster populations living in waters with an average salinity of 15 ppt are dense and highly reproductive (11). Environmental factors can affect the physiological state of the oysters and thus in turn alter the ability of an oyster to actively feed, filter, and thus bioaccumulate viruses (25). This is evidenced by the poor viral bioaccumulation seen in our C. virginica oysters in the low-salinity water tank.
Only one C. ariakensis oyster perished during the entire test period (Table ), indicating the robustness of the species under the three salinity conditions. Crassostrea ariakensis oysters will likely feed, filter, and actively bioaccumulate pathogens under the tested range of salinities in the Chesapeake Bay. The salinity tolerance of C. ariakensis oysters was noted previously in a comparative field study of the two oyster species (3). Similar to our findings, the authors reported the mean cumulative mortality of C. ariakensis in low salinities (<15 ppt) to be 14%, compared to a mean cumulative mortality of 81% for C. virginica oysters (3).
Logistic regression models evaluated the effect of oyster species, salinity, and depuration time on the presence of viral RNA in an oyster. Analyses revealed that the odds of C. ariakensis oysters harboring enteric viruses were statistically greater than the odds of C. virginica oysters harboring the same viruses (for MNV-1, OR = 4.5; P < 0.01; for NoV, OR = 8.4; P < 0.001; for HAV, OR = 11.4; P < 0.001) (Table ). At least one virus was detected in 74% of all C. ariakensis oysters but was detected in only 42% of all C. virginica oysters (Table ). Variability of viral bioaccumulation between shellfish species has been previously noted (5). The authors suggested that Pacific coastal shellfish species can bioaccumulate large quantities of viruses quickly and may have a greater capacity for bioaccumulation than C. virginica oysters. Similarly, protozoan retention has been shown to vary between C. ariakensis and C. virginica species (8).
The effects of the covariates, salinity and depuration time, on the prediction of a virus-positive oyster for each oyster species were evaluated. Salinity was not a significant predictor of a virus-positive C. ariakensis oyster, since this oyster species bioaccumulated and retained MNV-1, NoV, and HAV similarly across all tested salinity levels (Table ; Table ). However, the odds of a C. virginica oyster testing positive for MNV-1, NoV, or HAV was statistically significantly greater (P < 0.04) in the 12-ppt-water-salinity tanks than for oysters in the 8- or 20-ppt-salinity tanks (Table ).
A previous study evaluating the effect of salinity on viral bioaccumulation found that water salinity of 7 ppt increased PV binding in shellfish mucus 20% over that in shellfish at 28 ppt (4). It was suggested that virus binding differences occurred because of competition between cations and viral capsids for mucus anions. Our study indicates that salinity largely affects the physiological health of C. virginica oysters and subsequently viral bioaccumulation and retention at low salinities. However, C. ariakensis, unaffected by salinity, will not only survive the range of salinities found in the Chesapeake Bay but also likely bioaccumulate and retain pathogens while living in contaminated water.
Depuration time was a significant predictor of a virus-positive oyster for both oyster species (Table ). As previously reported, depuration is ineffective in removal of virus from oysters (23, 25, 30). In our studies, oysters were allowed to depurate in tanks receiving flowthrough water filtration for 29 days. While the odds of a C. ariakensis oyster harboring MNV-1, NoV, and HAV decreased significantly (P < 0.01) with every additional day of depuration (Table ), C. ariakensis oysters were still positive for MNV-1, NoV, and HAV at day 29 at all salinities (Table ). A similar effect was seen in our studies for C. virginica oysters in tanks of 12 ppt, where oysters were positive for MNV-1 and NoV up to day 22 (Table ). Our study was the first to evaluate the rate of depuration of viruses by C. ariakensis oysters, in comparison to C. virginica. Rates of depuration do differ by shellfish species, with C. ariakensis depurating inefficiently at all salinities (Table ). Because viruses were detected at all sampled time points (Table ), conventional depuration may not effectively eliminate viral pathogens from bivalve mollusks, especially C. ariakensis oysters.
Regardless of oyster species and salinity, overall, PV and MS2 were bioaccumulated less efficiently than MNV-1, NoV, and HAV (Table ). Many early viral bioaccumulation and depuration experiments used various PV strains as a surrogate for the fate of enteric viruses in oysters (25). Investigations indicated that PVs are eliminated most quickly, and often entirely, from oysters during the first 24 to 48 h of depuration (9, 26). In our study, only 17% of all oysters tested at day 1 (24 h after bioaccumulation) were positive for poliovirus (data not shown). Given the fast depuration rate of poliovirus, it is likely that any oysters containing poliovirus at day 1 (i.e., the beginning of the depuration experiment) eliminated the virus prior to the first collection times of days 4 or 8. It is also possible that PV RNA was more labile in seawater and the virus and viral RNA were degraded prior to bioaccumulation. For example, Wait and Sobsey illustrated that PV was inactivated by 90% within 1 to 3 days in seawater in both laboratory and field settings at similar water temperatures to those used in our laboratory studies (20°C) (31). Similarly, coliphage MS2 was also not bioaccumulated or retained uniformly within or between oyster species (Table ). However, MS2 was found in both oyster species after 14 days of depuration (Table ), indicating the viral RNA can be stable if sequestered by an oyster.
Recent studies report that molecular interactions can occur between individual Norwalk viruses and type A HBGA located within oyster DD (14, 28, 29). While MNV-1 and HAV have not been evaluated for their ability to also bind to specific HBGAs, similar molecular interactions between these viruses and the oyster DD cells may occur. However, because MS2 infects strains of E. coli, molecular interactions occurring between HBGAs and MS2 are improbable. MS2 is most likely sequestered by the oyster rather than being attached to a cell surface receptor. Thus, the behavior of MS2 within oysters is not uniform, nor is it easy to predict. Future studies should evaluate the abilities of other enteric viruses to bind to cells present in oyster DD.
Our research found that both oyster species can harbor multiple virus types simultaneously (Table ). Statistically, individual C. ariakensis oysters tested positive for three viruses more frequently than C. virginica oysters (P < 0.05) (Table ). Additionally, more than half (57.4%) of the tested C. ariakensis oysters harbored between two and four virus types, indicating C. ariakensis may serve as a vehicle for multiple infectious agents (Table ). Mixed norovirus genotypes have been found in the stools of patients characterized in oyster-associated outbreaks (7, 15, 27) and from oysters implicated in an international outbreak (15). One laboratory-based depuration study evaluated two viruses, NoV and feline calicivirus (FCV), simultaneously from individual oysters (30). This study found only one virus type at the last day of detection (day 10) (30). Our study is the first to document that individual oysters can harbor and retain up to three viruses for 4 weeks after the initial exposure to virally contaminated water.
MNV-1 was evaluated as a surrogate for human NoV retention and depuration by oysters (Table ). Because human NoVs cannot easily be replicated in cell culture, little is known about the fate and transport of human NoVs in the environment and their survivability following depuration and relaying activities (1, 12, 17, 25). To our knowledge, two studies have evaluated the persistence of human NoV in oysters during depuration (23, 30). One of these studies evaluated depuration for only 48 h, with NoV GI being found in individual oysters at that time (23). The second study evaluated bioaccumulation and depuration of NoV GII and FCV by Crassostrea gigas oysters. NoV GII was detected after 10 days of depuration, while FCV depurated quickly, within 1 day of depuration (30). Our research indicates that NoV can be retained for 29 days in C. ariakensis oysters and for 22 days in C. virginica oysters (Table ).
Of all viruses, MNV-1 most closely matched the behavior of NoV in the two oyster species. Logistic regression models indicate that the odds of an oyster testing positive for NoV is 25.5 times greater (P < 0.001) when the oyster also tests positive for MNV-1 than when an oysters tests negative for MNV-1 (Table ). HAV was also very predictive of the presence of NoV (OR, 19.4; P < 0.001) (Table ). Previously, studies have employed viruses such as PV and coliphage MS2 to model the fate and transport of human NoV (13, 18, 25); however, in our studies, neither virus statistically predicted a NoV-positive oyster (Table ).
According to our and other recent studies, C. ariakensis oysters are more tolerant of wide salinity ranges (3), grow and filter water faster (10), bioaccumulate and retain viral and protozoan pathogens longer (8), and exhibit an inability to depurate some viral pathogens compared to the native C. virginica. Prior to the introduction of C. ariakensis, the Chesapeake Bay region should consider the public health risks of the consumption of C. ariakensis oysters. If C. ariakensis oysters are consumed, they should only be served cooked given the greater odds of their harboring a virus under all salinity ranges and time points. This study can also provide information to recommend depuration, relaying, harvesting, disinfection, and possibly cooking standards and to inform public officials as to when sewage-contaminated oyster beds may be reopened.(CNN) -- A shopper in Northern Ireland may have gotten more than she bargained for when she reportedly discovered a chilling note stuffed in a pair of pants she purchased from European retailer, Primark.
Scrawled on a yellow piece of paper and wrapped around what appears to be a prison identification card, was a message claiming to be from an inmate at a Chinese prison making clothes for export under conditions of slave labor.
"We work 15 hours every day and eat food that wouldn't even be fed to pigs and dogs. We're (forced to) work like oxen," the handwritten note said in Chinese.
The message appealed to the international community to "condemn these human rights abuses by the Chinese government."
Tip of the iceberg?
Karen Wisinska, who lives in Northern Ireland's Fermanagh county, said she bought the pants for about £10 ($16) on a trip to Belfast in 2011, but left the garment in her closet -- unworn -- after she discovered the zipper was broken.
She only found the note when she retrieved the item while packing for a holiday last week, she said. After getting a rough translation of the note, Wisinka sought help from Amnesty International, an organization that has documented the use of forced labor in Chinese detention facilities in the past.
"I was shocked to find this note and card inside the trousers from Primark and even more shocked to discover that it appears to have been made under slave labor conditions in a Chinese prison," she told Amnesty.
"I am only sorry that I did not discover the note when I first purchased the clothing -- then I could have brought this scandal to light much earlier."
Amnesty International's Northern Ireland program director, Patrick Corrigan, described the story as "horrific."
"It's very difficult to know whether it's genuine, but the fear has to be that this is just the tip of the iceberg," Corrigan said.
Investigation underway
Primark denied sourcing clothing made using forced labor in a statement Wednesday, noting the "considerable time delay" since the garment was purchased.
A spokesperson for the company said that particular line of pants was last sold in Northern Ireland in October 2009.
"We find it very strange that this... has come to light so recently, given that the trousers were on sale four years ago," he said.
Since 2009, the company's ethical standards team has carried out nine inspections of the supplier who made the garment, and found no prison or forced labor of any kind, the statement said.
Despite the company's suspicions, the spokesperson said Primark "knows its responsibilities to the workers in its supply chain," and has started a detailed investigation.
The company is also examining two other cases that have surfaced in Wales in recent days. On two separate occasions, women reportedly found desperate pleas sewn into labels on dresses purchased from the same Primark store in Swansea. One read "Forced to work exhausting hours," while the other said, "Degrading sweatshop conditions."
Primark said the circumstances surrounding the incidents were suspicious, since the labels looked very similar and the two garments were on sale around the same time, but they were made in two different countries, "many thousands of miles apart."
The budget retailer was among a group of international brands that sourced from factories in Bangladesh's Rana Plaza building, which collapsed in April 2013, killing more than 1,000 workers and injuring 2,500 others.
The company said it has paid over $12 million in aid and compensation to to support the victims of the disaster.
Forced labor in China
It's not the first time western consumers have found distressing notes allegedly from abused workers in detention in China.
In 2011, a woman in the United States found a letter in a mix of broken English and Chinese inside a Halloween decoration purportedly from a inmate who made the object under abusive conditions. Last year, CNN tracked down a Chinese man who claimed he wrote the note, along with more than a dozen others, while at a labor camp in northeastern China.
Sears, the company that owned the store that sold the item, said it found "no evidence" that production was subcontracted to a labor camp during its investigation into the case, but added it no longer sourced from that supplier.
Until recently, China used hundreds of labor camps to detain petty offenders without a trial, under what was known as the laojiao -- or "re-education through labor" -- scheme. The system was criticized by human rights groups as a means to silence so-called trouble makers, including political dissidents, activists and Falun Gong members.
In November last year, Beijing said it would begin to close the camps. But Amnesty International has since warned that while the laojiao camps have been shut, research suggests that authorities have expanded the use of other forms of arbitrary detention such as "black jails," enforced drug rehabilitation clinics and "brainwashing centers" to take their place.
CNN could not reach the Xiang Nan prison in China's Hubei province, where the note found in Northern Ireland allegedly came from. The facility houses around 5,000 inmates, according to China's justice ministry.
CNN's Dayu Zhang and Steven Jiang contributed to this report.The sun-like star, PZ Tel A and its brown dwarf companion, PZ Tel B. For size comparison, the size of Neptune's orbit is shown; PZ Tel B is one of few brown dwarfs imaged at a distance closer than 30 Astronomical Units from its parent star.
A raresun-like star that is both young and relatively close to Earth has been foundto be harboring an even weirder object? a failed star locked in a close orbitaround its host, according to a new study.
Thenewfound failed star, known as a browndwarf, has been dubbed PZ Tel B. It isseparated from its sun-like companion star PZ Tel A by a distance similar tothat between Uranus and the sun in our solar system. [Photo of the brown dwarf.]
"BecausePZ Tel A is a rare star being both close and very young, it had been imagedseveral times in the past," said research team member Laird Close, a Universityof Arizona professor at Steward Observatory. "So we were quite surprisedto see a new companion around what was thought to be a single star."
Aninternational team of astronomers, led by Beth Biller and Michael Liu of theUniversity of Hawaii, made the rare find using the Near-Infrared CoronagraphicImager (NICI), on the international 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile. Thebrown dwarf is about 36 times the mass of Jupiter, they found.
Thehost star PZ Tel A is essentially a younger version of the sun, but while ithas a similar mass, it is much younger, at only 12 million years of age (about400 times younger than the sun). The star is located approximately 168light-years away from the sun.
Thetwo objects are separated by only 18 astronomical units (AU). One astronomicalunit is the average distance between the Earth and the sun, which isapproximately 93 million miles (about 150 million km).
Inthe study, Close reanalyzed images of the parent star from 2003, in which thestar's glare obscured the presence of the brown dwarf. That suggests its orbitis more elliptical, rather than circular, researchers said.
Whyit's special
Browndwarfs are odd objects that fallsomewhere between planets and stars because of their temperature and mass. Theyare cooler and lighter than stars, but more massive? and typically hotter - thanplanets.
Mostyoung brown dwarfs and their companions found by direct imaging are at orbitalseparations of greater than 50 AUs (about 4.6 billion miles). For comparison,Pluto's highly elliptical orbit ranges between 30 AU (2.7 billion miles) at itsclosest to 49 AU (4.5 billion miles) at its most distant, according to a NASAfact sheet.
Sothe relatively small 18 AU (1.6 billion miles) separation between the browndwarf PZ Tel B and its partner is striking, researchers said. The astronomers alsoobserved PZ Tel B moving quickly outward from its host star in a non-circularorbital path.
"PZTel B travels on a particularly eccentricorbit? in the last 10 years, we haveliterally watched it careen through its inner solar system," said BethBiller, lead author of the study. "This can best be explained by a highlyeccentric, or oval-shaped, orbit."
Whatthis tells us
ThePZ Tel system is young enough to still possess significant amounts of coldcircumstellar dust, which may have been sculpted by the gravitationalinteraction with the young brown dwarf companion.?
Assuch, the odd binary object system can serve as a laboratory that can helpastronomers study the early stages of solarsystem formation, researchers said. Thebrown dwarf's mass and orbital motion have significant implications for whattype of planets can form? if at all? in the PZ Tel star system.
Huntingbrown dwarfs
Thenewfound brown dwarf was discovered using NICI, which is the most powerfulhigh-contrast instrument designed for imaging brown dwarfs and alienplanets around other stars. NICI iscapable of detecting companions 1 million times fainter than the host star, atjust one arcsecond separations.
Sincethe brown dwarf is so close to its parent star, special techniques were neededin order to distinguish the faint light of the companion from the light of theprimary star. PZ Tel B is separated by 0.33 arcseconds? an angular measurementequal to 1/60 of a degree? from PZ Tel B. This is equivalent to a dime that isseen at a distance of 7 miles (11 km).
Theresearch team was able to take pictures so close to the star by using anadaptive optics system and coronagraph to block our excess starlight. They thenapplied specialized analysis techniques to the images to detect PZ Tel B andmeasure its orbital motion.
Aninternational team of researchers is currently carrying out a 300-star surveyusing NICI, which will be the largest high-contrast imaging survey conducted todate.
"Weare just beginning to glean the many configurations of solar systems around starslike the sun," said Michael Liu, NICI campaign leader. "The uniquecapabilities of NICI provide us with a powerful tool for studying theirconstituents using direct imaging."
Thedetails of the PZ Tel B discovery are described in a paper being published bythe Astrophysical Journal Letters.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Sep. 3, 2014, 4:31 PM GMT / Updated Sep. 3, 2014, 4:31 PM GMT
NOVOAZOVSK, Ukraine - Pro-Russian rebels conquering territory in eastern Ukraine are fighting under a new flag that betrays their - and perhaps the Kremlin’s - soaring ambitions. The blue cross set on a red background, which is stitched into uniforms and flies on tanks, represents Novorossiya or 'New Russia' - a notional state that would swallow southern and eastern Ukraine.
It is slowly replacing the disparate flags representing individual independence-minded groups in the regions of Donetsk. Indeed, the separatist regional administration flag in central Donetsk – one of the rebel headquarters – is now flying the Novorossiya flag.
The fighters’ ambitions mirror the flag’s reach.
A rebel commander who recently captured a key town on the road leading to the strategically important town of Mariupol said his men were not about to lay down their arms in a cease-fire, as was reported earlier. They also planned to go as far as the city of Lviv, which lies even further west than Ukraine’s capital, Kiev.
“During [World War II] we freed the territory of the Soviet Union and we went further to Berlin,” said the commander, who calls himself “Gyurza” and whose men now fight under the Novorossiya flag. “Our aim is Lviv.”
His declaration followed conflicting statements from Kiev and Moscow, with the Ukrainian government at one point saying it had reached a "permanent cease-fire" with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which was denied by Moscow.
Putin later suggested that an agreement "to end the bloodshed" could be reached as early as Friday, which Ukraine's prime minister shot down, saying the Russian leader was simply trying to avoid further European and American sanctions.
Whatever his plans for a cease-fire or truce, Putin himself has been using the term Novorossiya to describe the part of Ukraine that Russia controlled during the 19th century for months.
On Friday, Putin addressed the militia of Novorossyia, and praised their "major success" inside Ukraine in a statement on the Kremlin’s website.Praise be to Allaah.
Firstly:
The history of the green dome
The dome over the grave of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) dates back to the seventh century AH. It was built during the reign of Sultan Qalawoon, and at first it was the colour of wood, then it became white, then blue, then green, and it has remained green until the present.
Professor ‘Ali Haafiz (may Allaah preserve him) said:
There was no dome over the sacred chamber. There was in the roof of the mosque above the chamber a waist-high enclosure of brick to distinguish the location of the chamber from the rest of the mosque’s roof.
Sultaan Qalawoon al-Saalihi was the first one to build a dome over the chamber. He did that in 678 AH. It was square at the bottom and octagonal at the top, made of wood, and built on top of the pillars that surrounded the chamber. Planks of wood were nailed to it, over which plates of lead were placed, and the brick enclosure was replaced with one made of wood.
The dome was refurbished at the time of al-Naasir Hasan ibn Muhammad Qalawoon, then the leaden plates slipped, but they were fixed and refurbished at the time of al-Ashraf Sha’baan ibn Husayn ibn Muhammad in 765 AH. It fell into disrepair and was renovated at the time of Sultaan Qayit Bey in 881 AH.
The chamber and dome were burned in the fire that swept through the Prophet’s mosque in 886 AH. During the reign of Sultaan Qayit Bey the dome was rebuilt, in 887 AH, and strong pillars to support it were built in the floor of the mosque, and they were built of bricks to the correct height. After the dome had been built in the manner described above, cracks appeared in its upper part. When it proved impossible to refurbish it, the Sultaan Qayit Bey ordered that the upper part be demolished and rebuilt strongly using white plaster. So it was built solidly in 892 AH.
In 1253 AH, an order was issued by the Ottoman Sultan ‘Abd al-Hameed to paint the dome green. He was the first one to colour it green, and the colour has been renewed whenever necessary until the present.
It became known as the green dome after it was painted green. It was previously known as the white dome or the fragrant dome or the blue dome. End quote.
Fusool min Tareekh al-Madeenah al-Munawwarah by ‘Ali Haafiz (p. 127, 128).
Secondly:
Rulings thereon
The scholars, both in the past and in modern times, criticized the building of this dome and its being given a colour. All of that is because of what they know of sharee’ah closing many doors for fear of falling into shirk.
These scholars include the following:
1 – al-San’aani (may Allaah have mercy on him) said in Ta-theer al-I’tiqaad:
If you say: A great dome has been built over the grave of the Messenger (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), costing a great deal of money, I say: This is in fact great ignorance of the situation, because this dome was not built by him (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) or by his Sahaabah or by those who followed them, or by those who followed the Taabi’een, or by the scholars and imams of the ummah. Rather this dome was built over his grave (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) on the orders of one of the later kings of Egypt, namely the Sultan Qalawoon al-Saalihi who is known as King Mansoor, in 678 AH, and was mentioned in Tahqeeq al-Nasrah bi Talkhees Ma’aalim Dar al-Hijrah. These are things that were done on the orders of the state and not on the basis of shar’i evidence. End quote.
2 – The scholars of the Standing Committee for Issuing Fatwas were asked:
There are those who take the building of the green dome over the Prophet’s grave in the Prophet’s Mosque as evidence that it is permissible to build domes over other graves, such as those of the righteous and others. Is this argument correct or what should our response to them be?
They replied:
It is not correct to quote the fact that people built a dome over the grave of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) as evidence that it is permissible to build domes over the graves of the righteous dead and others, because those people’s building a dome over his grave (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) was haraam and those who did it sinned thereby, because they went against what is proven in a report from Abu’l-Hayaaj al-Asadi who said: ‘Ali ibn Abi Taalib (may Allaah be pleased with him) said to me: Shall I not send you on the same mission as the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) sent me? Do not leave any image without erasing it or any high grave without levelling it.
And it was narrated that Jaabir (may Allaah be pleased with him) said: The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) forbade plastering over graves, or sitting on them or building over them. Both reports were narrated by Muslim in his Saheeh. So it is not correct for anyone to quote the haraam action of some people as evidence that it is permissible to do similar haraam actions, because it is not permissible to go against the words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) by citing the words or actions of anyone else. And because he is the one who conveyed the command from Allaah, and he is the one who is to be obeyed, and we must beware of going against his commands, because Allaah says (interpretation of the meaning): “And whatsoever the Messenger (Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم) gives you, take it; and whatsoever he forbids you, abstain (from it)” [al-Hashr 59:7].
And there are other verses which enjoin obedience to Allaah and to His Messenger. And because building up graves and erecting domes over them are means that lead to associating their occupants with Allaah, and the means that lead to shirk must be blocked. End quote.
Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Azeez ibn Baaz, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Razzaaq ‘Afeefi, Shaykh ‘Abd-Allaah ibn Qa’ood.
Fataawa al-Lajnah al-Daa’imah (9/83, 84)
3 – The scholars of the Standing Committee also said:
There is no proof in the fact that a dome was set up over the Prophet’s grave for those who take it as an excuse for building domes of the graves of the awliya’ (“saints”) and righteous people, because the building of a dome over his grave was not done on his instructions and was not done by any of his companions (may Allaah be pleased with them), or by the Taabi’een, or by any of the imams of guidance in the early generations whom the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) testified were good. Rather it was done by people of bid’ah (innovation). It was proven that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Whoever introduces anything into this matter of ours that is not part of it will have it rejected.” And it was proven that ‘Ali (may Allaah be pleased with him) said to Abu’l-Hayaaj: Shall I not send you on the same mission as the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) sent me? Do not leave any image without erasing it or any high grave without levelling it.Narrated by Muslim. As it is not proven that he (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) built a dome over his grave, and it is not proven from any of the leading imams; rather what is proven shows that to be an invalid action, and no Muslim should feel any attachment to the action of innovators who built a dome over the grave of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him). End quote.
Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Azzez ibn Baaz, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Razzaaq ‘Afeefi, Shaykh ‘Abd-Allaah ibn Ghadyaan, Shaykh ‘Abd-Allaah ibn Qa’ood
Fataawa al-Lajnah al-Daa’imah (2/264, 265).
4 – Shaykh Shams al-Deen al-Afghaani (may Allaah have mercy on him) said:
al-‘Allaamah al-Khajandi (1379 AH) said, discussing the history of the green dome that was built over the grave of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), and explaining that it is an innovation that was done by some sultans and ignorant persons who erred and made a mistake, and that it is contrary to the clear saheeh ahaadeeth and reflects ignorance of the Sunnah, and that they went to extremes and imitated the Christians who are confused and misguided:
It should be noted that until the year 678 AH, there was no dome over the chamber which contains the grave of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), rather it was built by the king al-Zaahir al-Mansoor Qalawoon al-Saalihi in that year (678 AH), when this dome was built.
I say: He did that because he had seen in Egypt and Syria the adorned churches of the Christians, so he imitated them out of ignorance of the command and Sunnah of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), as al-Waleed imitated them by adorning the mosque, as was mentioned in Wafa’ al-Wafa’.
It should be noted that undoubtedly this action of Qalawoon was contrary to the saheeh ahaadeeth of the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), but ignorance is a great calamity and exaggeration in love and veneration is a real disaster, and imitation of foreigners is a fatal disease. We seek refuge with Allaah from ignorance and exaggeration and imitation of foreigners. End quote.
Juhood ‘Ulama’ al-Hanafiyyah fi Ibtaal ‘Aqaa’id al-Qubooriyyah (3/1660-1662).
Thirdly:
The reason why it has not been demolished:
The scholars have explained the shar’i rulings concerning the building of this dome and its obvious effects on the followers of bid’ah’ who have developed an attachment to this structure and its colour, and they praise and venerate it a great deal in their poetry and writings. Now it is up to the authorities to implement these fatwas, and this is nothing to do with the scholars.
The reason why it is not demolished is so as to ward off fitnah and for fear that it may lead to chaos among the ordinary people and the ignorant. Unfortunately the ordinary people have only reached this level of veneration towards this dome because of the leadership of misguided scholars and imams of innovation. They are the ones who incite the ordinary people against the land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries and its ‘aqeedah and its manhaj. They are very upset about many actions that are in accordance with sharee’ah in our view and contrary to innovation in their view.
Whatever the case, the shar’i ruling is quite clear, and the fact that this dome has not been demolished does not mean that it is permissible to build it or any dome over any grave, no matter what grave it is.
Shaykh Saalih al-‘Usaymi (may Allaah preserve him) said:
The fact that this dome has remained for eight centuries does not mean that it has become permissible, and being silent about it does not indicate approval of it or that it is permissible. Rather the Muslim authorities should remove it and put it back as it was at the time of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him). They should remove the dome and the adornments and engravings that are found in the mosques, above all the Prophet’s Mosque, so long as that will not lead to an even greater fitnah. If it would lead to an even greater fitnah, then the ruler should postpone the matter until he finds an opportunity for that. End quote.
Bida’ al-Quboor, Anwaa’uha wa ahkaamuha (p. 253).
And Allaah knows best.He helped Vancouver Whitecaps become the first Canadian club to reach the play-offs in the MSL but a 2-1 defeat at the hands of David Beckham's LA Galaxy on Nov 1 effectively ended his season.
Even though Scotland's hopes of reaching the World Cup finals have practically been extinguished, Miller, who turns 33 next month, is anxious to be match-fit for the double header against Wales at Hampden on March 22 and the visit to Serbia four days later.
“I don’t want to be taking the time off, so this is another week’s training and a game for me,” he said. “Nobody has been in touch [about a loan].
“There are a lot of hurdles to be crossed between leagues, teams, the MLS etc for it to happen. It’s something I’ve not thought too much about, but I’m not too keen to take the time off so if something came up I’d look into it.
“Our season will have started [by the time of the March qualifier]. It’s in a similar area to the September qualifiers here, because I’ll have had three or four games under my belt going into them. Our first league game is March 2.
“I’ve thought about it and it’s not ideal, because coming to that you would be well into the business end of the season with your club if you’re here: you’d be at a different stage.
“It’s a case of not being too fussed and of trying to find someone willing to take you where you’re going to get games. Even if it’s not starting every week, as long as you’re training towards it and taking part just to keep you ticking over, that would be important.
“Here or down south, it doesn’t really matter where I go as long as it means I'm ready for the games in March.”
Asked whether he would welcome a return to Hibernian, his first senior club, Miller replied: “Hibs are top of the
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In 1968, TWA was a swingin’ jet-set airline…. fast forward a few decades and it became saddled with debt, eventually claiming bankruptcy and being bought-out by American Airlines. A sad end to a groovy airline.
“You will need isometrics even if you have decided to reduce solely by dieting. Because when the fat is gone there will remain layers and layers of loose, flabby, unattractive skin that had been stretched out by fat”. Yuck.
I wonder, if you looked through today’s teen magazines, would you find articles about sewing your own clothing? I think that skill is largely a thing of the past.
Why is it that magazines have forever been filled with art school ads? Are they scams? I never enlisted in one.
Once upon a time, Cliff’s Notes were a student’s best friend. Why read a great work of literature when you can get the condensed version spoon-fed to you in minutes? I suppose the internet has supplanted the need for Cliff’s Notes.
Ahem. Excuse me, TEEN magazine. That’s gender-stereotyping. Please retract this statement immediately.
“Somebody calls you. You answer quite slowly. The girl with PhisoHex skin.”
“Just sling groovy Porta Four over your shoulder and dig great cartridge entertainment.”
You’ve got to hand it to Madison Avenue – they can make even a sanitary napkin advert a thing of beauty.
Craving more TWA-inspired shagadelic fashions? Just subscribe to “TEEN for the grrreatest bargain of the JET AGE!McLaren's racing director Eric Boullier says despite the team ending its partnership with Jenson Button the British driver will remains part of the squad’s “family” having been a “brilliant driver and ambassador”.
After McLaren confirmed Lando Norris would step up as its reserve and third driver from 2018, Button’s partnership with the Woking-based team will come to an end having joined in 2010 as reigning F1 world champion from Brawn GP.
Having stepped down as a full-time F1 driver at the end of 2016, taking up the back-up role behind Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne this season, Button will now leave McLaren to pursue other racing commitments with the British driver having previously voiced an interest in Japan’s Super GT series.
Reacting to the confirmation in Brazil, Boullier insists Button will always to welcomed back to McLaren having clinched eight F1 race wins with the team including the British squad’s last victory back at the 2012 season finale.
“Jenson has been a brilliant driver and ambassador for us, for Formula 1 and for England as well,” Boullier said. “His contract is ending at the end of this year but he will always be part of the McLaren family and always have a special place for us.
“That's life and this is another step and another chapter with Lando stepping in to the third driver role.”OAKLAND — Warriors executive board member Jerry West has agreed to a two-year extension with the team through the 2016-17 season, an NBA source confirmed to this newspaper Wednesday.
West had one year remaining on his original deal with the team, and this new deal will be tacked on for a total of a three-year commitment from this point.
This move, coupled with the new deal for general manager Bob Myers through the 2017-18 season, puts a bow on co-owner Joe Lacob’s desire to keep his front office together for the long term as the team gets set to move into a San Francisco arena by 2018.
West, 76, had told associates recently that he was thinking about retiring for good, especially after the chaos of the Warriors’ 51-win season and subsequent firing of coach Mark Jackson.
But West also told friends that he remains passionately interested in making the Warriors a title contender.
Jackson and West were on chilly terms through most of last season. But team sources say the decision to move on from Jackson was made by Lacob and Myers.
According to multiple sources, West, along with coach Steve Kerr, was a leading voice in the team’s decision this summer not to put Klay Thompson into any trade offer for Kevin Love, who has since been traded from Minnesota to Cleveland.
But that final decision also was made by Lacob and Myers, and the process, while at times heated, was exactly the way Lacob wants his front office to work.
West joined the Warriors’ executive board as a part-owner in May 2011, and his contract was due to expire at the end of this coming season.
West, a Hall of Famer, also has had a large role in the Warriors’ quest to line up sponsors and build support for their move to San Francisco.
As the Los Angeles Lakers’ main decision-maker, West helped craft two championship runs, one featuring Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and another featuring Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant.Yogscast, Payload, Revolution and Escape join One Special Day
The Yogscast have joined the growing number of games industry companies who've signed up for SpecialEffect's One Special Day charity initiative.
One Special Day, which will be held on 15 July, is an opportunity for companies to donate 100% of revenue in one or all areas of their business; for example a day's sales of one or more games, or 100% of advertising revenue, in-app purchases or DLC.
The Yogscast have pledged their support as a promotional partner. Mark Turpin, Yogscast CEO and SpecialEffect Vice President, said "Games allow us to escape our world to visit another, experiencing anything and everything and loving every second of it. SpecialEffect give the gift of gaming to people who thought it was lost from them. The tireless work and passion to help that Mick Donegan and the team display never ceases to amaze me."
"We think One Special Day is a fantastic idea and are delighted to get behind the day as a promotional partner and I hope to get the chance to play some of the games on the day."
Payload Studios, Revolution Games and Escape Technology have also joined the event this week as contributory partners. Russ Clarke, Founder of Payload Studios, added "As long-time supporters of SpecialEffect, we're delighted to be joining the One Special Day line-up, helping to turn sales of TerraTech into magic moments for people with disabilities."
One Special Day is open to all companies working in the games industry. To find out more, visit www.onespecialday.org.uk
To get involved, contact the SpecialEffect team on +44 (0)1608 810055 or 07984 822433, or email [email protected]
Below: The Yogscast's Turps with SpecialEffect Event Coordinator Tom DoneganOne night several weeks ago, an unusual sight could be seen in a small park in Jerusalem's Nahlaot neighborhood. The local residents - Haredi yet heterogeneous - attacked a well kept public park and destroyed it to its core. Earlier that evening, the police had arrested the man who created the park and devoted his time to sports activities in it, and now the parents were taking out their anger on his creation. They couldn't tolerate the discovery that this man, S., a very familiar figure in the neighborhood and city, is suspected of belonging to a network of pedophiles - they even claim he is the brains behind it - which operated unimpeded in the small neighborhood. This network of pedophiles, claim the parents, included no fewer than 10 molesters and operated for years, in houses, niches and parks. Many dozens of children - apparently over 100 - from the neighborhood and elsewhere fell victims to it.
An empty playground. Michal Fattal
The story of the pedophile network in Nahlaot exploded in August, with the arrest of four suspects. One of them had already been arrested several months earlier and subsequently released. S., who was arrested two weeks ago, was the fifth suspect, and the parents hoped that this was the start of a solution to the major crisis they had experienced. But this month, attorney Shlomit Ben-Yitzhak, of the Jerusalem District Prosecutors' Office, submitted indictments in the affair, and the parents discovered that their hopes had been dashed: Indictments were submitted only against two of those involved - B. and P. And although the indictments describe sodomy, indecent assaults and rape, they refer to only five children. Even the most skeptical of those involved in the investigation and in the welfare agencies admit that that number is only a small percentage of the attacks. The police themselves have interrogated over 40 children.
The possibility of serving indictments against two additional suspects is still under consideration, but they are currently free. But what disappointed the parents most - and what motivated them to think that the arrests did not, in the final analysis, herald the hoped-for solution - was the release of S. Called "the handler" by H., one of the parents, S. was released without charge after a week and began walking around the neighborhood again. Along with him, the small community's nightmare returned in full force.
Someone close to the investigation claims that the reason for the huge gap between the parents' stories and the harsh testimony on the one hand, and the legal outcome on the other, is the activity of the parents themselves. The parents, he says, unwittingly interfered with the investigation process. The conversations and "investigations" that they conducted with their own children undermined the reliability of the stories the children then told the juvenile investigators. There are parents who even showed their children pictures of the suspects so the children could identify them, an activity that invalidated their testimony. For their part, the parents stress the fact that they have cooperated with the authorities from the beginning. Many of them are ultra-Orthodox, but as opposed to the usual stereotype of this religious community, they did not hide anything, described what their children had told them without mincing words, and encouraged their children to talk. Only afterward, they say, did they discover that the problem was not a lack of cooperation, but on the contrary - their great desire to eliminate the problem.
The interrogation texts, which are being revealed here for the first time, indicate the difficulties in getting children involved in the criminal evidence system - difficulties that are common to all the cases that center around children. Alongside that, there is also an indication of the unique difficulty in this particular case, stemming from its dimensions and the place where it occurred.
The knowledge that there was a group of pedophiles among them was a tremendous blow to local residents. In the small neighborhood, which is known for its pluralism and openness, Yiddish-speaking Haredim, American skullcap wearers, Bratslav Hasidim and even secular people live in coexistence and with mutual respect. They all testify that, before the incident, this was an open, trusting neighborhood. "This is a neighborhood with a naivety you won't find anywhere in the 21st century. And suddenly they find themselves talking about rape and sodomy. Those are words that have never been heard in this place," says one of the residents.
One of the accused, B. He denied all charges of sexual assault against the children. Daniel Bar-On
G. and R., a Haredi couple who live in the neighborhood, are just two direct victims of the affair. A few years ago, they began to sense that something was wrong with their children as they started suffering from various behavioral problems. G. and R. didn't hesitate. They turned to family therapists and child psychologists in order to discover the problem. "They told us that we lacked confidence, that the children were third-generation Holocaust survivors. They said that it was my husband's fault, and they said that it was my fault," recalls R.
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It was only 10 months ago that they discovered the real reason. A former neighbor called and told them that her son had returned home with black and blue marks on his penis. The neighbor also mentioned B., the first suspect in the case and one of the two who were later served an indictment.
"And then I suddenly understood," says R. "We started asking the children. One of them replied: 'He didn't do bad things, he only gave punishments.' When I asked him to explain, he described acts of sodomy, indecent assault and rape. This is a child of four, he has no way of inventing it, he has no place from which to imagine it."
B. lives very near the home of G. and R. and was known in the neighborhood as being feeble-minded. "The absurd thing is that I was his defender in the neighborhood," says G. "When my son raised accusations against him, I thought it was my job to feel sorry for him and to be angry with my son, and that only made it harder for him. Instead of his parents protecting him, they supported his greatest enemy."
The parents estimate that three of their children fell victim to B.'s acts. All three are suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms and are receiving psychological therapy.
The Jerusalem neighborhood of Nahlaot. According to parents, a pedophile ring operated here for many years with at least 10 child molesters taking part. Daniel Bar-On
Since they learned about the attack, the parents are discovering additional dimensions of abuse, additional clues about the nightmarish world in which their children lived. "My son has a fire phobia, he doesn't allow me to light the Shabbat candles and I have to remove him from the room," says R. Eventually the child told his parents that B. had once caught him playing with a lighter and punished him with harsh physical and sexual violence. "He told him: 'I'm doing this to you so you'll know not to touch fire,'" says G.
In another case, the parents claim they discovered that B. had made a rule. Whenever their mother went out to the supermarket, the children had to come to his home for a series of 'punishments'. "One time the children begged me to take them along but I refused, because the therapists said that I wasn't strict enough. When I returned I saw the three of them screaming. I didn't understand what had happened."
The parents submitted a complaint to the police as soon as the acts were discovered. The subsequent investigation led in the end to the serving of an initial indictment against B.
At that point, nobody imagined there was more than one molester and more than a few children. But as time passed, more and more children began to talk. They described in detail acts of rape and sodomy, watching pornographic films, harsh physical punishments for "disobedience," and watching the rape or abuse of another child. The parents claim that almost every child who lived there, or even came for a visit, was a target of abuse. "We noticed that we were a kind of bacterium, that everyone who came was infected. A niece came for Shabbat and it turned out that she had been exposed to pornographic films," says G.
"[Previously] we already had cases of molesting 70 or 80 children, but I've been in the profession for 30 years and I've never seen such brutality. It's heartrending," says Debbie Gross, director of the Crisis Center for Religious Women that is helping the families.
Altea Steinherz, a trauma specialist who is helping the parents on a volunteer basis, has difficulty holding back tears when she describes one of the stories she heard, about a brother who was forced to watch his sister being raped. "Anyone who has heard this story knows that it was true. I didn't sleep for an entire week because of that story."
How is it possible that in such a small neighborhood, in a radius of about 50 meters, there are presumably no fewer than four men who spend most of their time hunting down children, together or alone, abusing them and enlisting additional adults for group sexual attacks?
The residents explain that, among the residents, there are many lonely adults, some of them with special needs. The residents claim S., the leader of the gang, worked among them as a recruiter. "These people are unemployed and nobody pays attention to them, they're looking for some excitement and someone recruits them," claims one of the parents.
The investigation of M., whose testimony is the basis for the indictment against B., lasted for several hours. The texts reveal an intelligent boy whose descriptions are coherent. First the investigator ensures that he distinguishes between fact and fiction. "I want [you] to tell me... only the true things that happened, and I want to be sure that you know what it means to say something true and something untrue," he tells the child. "If I say, for example, that you're standing now, would that be true or untrue?"
M.: "Untrue, I'm sitting."
"So, I see that you know what it means to say something true and something untrue. Now, if I ask you something you don't know, then say you don't know - all right?"
Only after these preliminaries does the interrogator get down to work. He shows M. the picture of the suspect, and the child immediately answers: "I played with him in the mikveh [ritual bath] and I was in his house many times - we were groups that came to him. We knocked on the door and he opened it. We had to walk around outside his house so that they wouldn't hear outside when he was hitting... He showed us films. He told us not to tell our parents, and if someone told, he would hit him with a toy gun and it hurt."
The gun that M. is talking about recurs repeatedly in the children's descriptions of B.'s reign of terror. The parents say he would threaten to shoot the children, murder their younger siblings or burn their houses down.
In his interrogation, B. denies the acts that the children attributed to him. Although he confirmed that he "brought children home, I played checkers with them, and there are some... with whom I played 'balancing'." But he denied implicitly that he had attacked them sexually.
B's attorney, Roy Politi, responds: "This story is a horrifying example of turning a person whose only crime is a personality disorder that dooms him to live on the margins of society, into a monster who can be victimized. For several weeks, public hysteria in the accused's neighborhood gave rise to a process that should become a subject for a sociological study. In the course of it, rumors turned into complaints, and a story was consolidated to the effect that over 50 children had been raped by the accused and others on a daily basis for years, were forced to participate in mass orgies and suffered exceptional sexual abuse. All that without anyone noticing their strange disappearance for hours at a time, injuries on their bodies or other indications. The accused denies the accusations against him and will prove his complete innocence in the courtroom."
M.'s testimony became the basis of the indictment after his interrogator decided that he was "consistent and tries to stick to the relevant facts that he draws from his memory... I believe that he can give testimony in court." But that was not the situation in many other cases. In those cases, the interrogators decided that, in light of the parents' involvement, "It's impossible to determine reliable findings." This decision, say those familiar with the case, does not mean that a child is lying, but that it is impossible to determine whether what he is saying is entirely correct. But the result is the same: Most of the suspects were released to their homes, to the horror of the parents.
People in the legal system and professionals involved in the case actually agree that, even if there are exaggerations in the children's stories, the core is true. Debbie Gross states she has no doubts over the verisimilitude of most of the children's stories. "I don't think that a child is capable of inventing such stories," she says. "You can't invent such a thing even when you're exposed to newspapers, the Internet and television. And a Haredi child certainly can't invent such stories."
"I'm sure that it's not an invention, there's a very large mass of children who were harmed," said someone who is very close to the investigation, but who has some reservations. "But when a child says that he was hurt and says that it happened only once, and then goes back and says that it happened three times because his mother reminded him, that's a problem. We have a child who told a very serious story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, but in the end it turned out that his parents had shown him the picture of the suspect, and that invalidated the entire testimony. We are beginning to understand that the parents caused damage. The knowledge that there may be pedophiles walking around free outside certainly makes people feel terrible. But there is definitely also another possibility - that not everything is true. And it's very difficult to sort what's true from what may not be true."
One of the issues that bothered the police - and also bothers Politi - was the fact that most of the children began reporting what happened to them at exactly the same time. The children and their parents were quizzed on this during the interrogations, and one of the neighborhood residents was even interrogated under caution for interfering with the investigation process.
The parents, for their part, admit that they may be mistaken, but they point an accusing finger at the police. "We're new at this. They should have told us what to do and what not to do," says one resident. The parents also point to problems in the police investigation. Among other things, the time that passed until the suspects' homes were searched, which enabled them to remove evidence. "I understand the problem with the children's testimony, but why wasn't there initiative on the part of the police?" asks one resident. Now, in light of the meager indictments, say the parents, they won't hasten to turn to the police again with additional names.
"They murdered their souls. We, the men, are still living somehow, but our wives aren't living. They're in an ongoing trauma," says G. And H., who says that five of his children were caught in the net, adds: "Among the five, you can sense it with three of them. But the most frightening are the two on which you can't see anything. You don't know when it will come out. With God's help it will pass, but it's very frightening. We won't be calm until we accompany these children to the chuppah and they have their first child. Then we can say that we've forgotten about it."
But it's not just the parents who feel they are standing on shaky ground. The entire neighborhood has changed. "Once we were known as an open neighborhood, now everything has disappeared. Today, when a stranger shows up in the synagogue, the gabbai [sexton] tells him not to come again. That's something that never happened before," says a neighborhood resident. H. points to the playground and public spaces that have emptied of children as a result of the affair. "The yards were bustling, today it's quiet. I have nine children and the door to the house is locked, nobody leaves." Gross understands them perfectly. "This is a simple, naive community that has been hit by a tsunami and they simply didn't know what to do with it. It's a catastrophic blow," she says.
The community leaders are actually demonstrating an ability to cope. They turned to a lawyer to try to change the mind of the Prosecutors' Office regarding the additional suspects. At the same time they started a fund, collected donations and have started to pay for intensive individual and group therapy, for the children and the families.
On the advice of the psychologists who are treating the neighborhood children, an unusual sight was seen there about two months ago: At 9:30 P.M., when the police arrived at P.'s house, dozens of parents and children were waiting for them on the balconies and at the windows, in order to see them raiding the house, arresting its tenants and confiscating equipment. The psychologists thought that the sight of the arrest would reinforce the children's confidence. "After he was arrested there was a festive atmosphere here," says one of the neighbors.
Now, say the parents of the children who were molested, one thing scares them more than anything else: The moment when their children discover that the suspects are not in prison, as the children were promised.HOLL SENT TO INDY Tweet Photo by Christina Shapiro 03/01/2015 11:16 AM Article By: Rockford, Ill. – The Rockford IceHogs announced Sunday that they have loaned defenseman Justin Holl to the ECHL’s Indy Fuel.
Holl, 22, made his AHL debut in Rockford’s 6-3 win over the Texas Stars on Saturday. The Tonka Bay, Minn. native has recorded four goals and 19 assists with the Indy Fuel to start his first professional season. The rookie defenseman made his pro debut on Oct. 17 and registered his first point the next night against Fort Wayne.
Prior to turning pro, Holl spent four seasons with the University of Minnesota from 2010-2014, compiling eight goals and 30 assists in 142 career games. During his senior season, Holl scored the game-winning tally in the final few seconds of the NCAA semifinals to send the Gophers to the National Championship game against Union.
Holl was selected in the second round (#54 overall) of the 2010 NHL Entry Draft by the Blackhawks.
Next Home Game: Friday, Mar. 6 vs. Oklahoma City at 7 p.m. The IceHogs complete their season series with the Barons as Oklahoma City returns to the BMO for Rockford Hockey Club Night. Rockford will be recognizing youth hockey in the community by wearing specialty Rockford Hockey Club sweaters during the game.A message from Chinese scientists: "Stop throwing out your cigarette butts!" Researchers have devised a financially viable process for recycling cigarette leftovers to extract chemicals present in the filters. And doing your part to recycle cigarette butts could help save one of our most precious resources -- oil companies.
That's right, oil companies. Cigarette butts contain a lot of chemicals, nine of which can be extracted and turned into compounds that are highly effective at preventing corrosion of a kind of steel widely used in the oil industry. Constantly replacing rusting pipes is a serious financial drain on oil producers worldwide, and a better anti-corrosive would help curb those costs.
Of course, the public isn't exactly drowning in warm, fuzzy sentiments for Big Oil right now (thanks, BP). Which makes the timing of such an announcement somewhat bizarre. But it's worthwhile to consider the upside to such a proposal. Cigarette butts can survive for up to 15 years in the sea (they're toxic to some fish), and 4.5 trillion of them make their way out into our ecosystems every year. So simply by collecting and disposing of cigarette butts in some kind of organized manner, there's a built-in benefit to all of us.
All that aside, oil companies -- as much as we all like to say horrible things about them -- are not going anywhere as long as we remain addicted to the product they peddle. But better anti-corrosives could help keep pumping equipment in top form, making calamities like the one we're currently dealing with less frequent. In theory, it could even drive the price of oil down ever so slightly.
A reasonable plan for collecting and recycling cigarette butts won't be in place anytime soon, but if anyone is poised to lead the way it's the Chinese. With 1 billion people and a certain penchant for tobacco, the Chinese consume a third of the world's smokes.
BBCCountries need to improve pledges on reducing emissions to keep the increase in global temperature below 2C by the end of the century, the International Energy Agency says (AFP Photo/Patrik Stollarz)
London (AFP) - The International Energy Agency on Monday warned temperatures could jump by as much as 4.3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century and urged countries to improve their pledges on reducing emissions.
In a report ahead of a climate change conference in Paris this year, the IEA said more should be done to reach the goal of keeping the increase in average global temperature below 2C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
Current pledges "will have a positive impact on future energy trends but will fall short of the major course correction required to meet the 2C goal," said the report, which was presented in London.
Instead it estimated there would be an average temperature increase globally of around 2.6C by 2100 and said the rise could be higher at 4.3C for countries in the northern hemisphere.
"The energy sector must play a critical role if efforts to reduce emissions are to succeed. Energy production and use accounts for two thirds of the world greenhouse gas emissions," the IEA's executive director Maria van der Hoeven said.
The agency's chief economist Fatih Birol said extreme weather events would become "much more frequent" as a result, with Africa particularly badly affected despite only minimally contributing to the problem.
Van der Hoeven stressed that "time is of the essence", noting that "the cost and difficulty of mitigating greenhouse-gas emissions increase every year."
While there is "growing consensus among countries that it is time to act", strong vigilance is required to ensure that the pledges are adequate and that commitments are kept, she added.
The IEA suggested five key measures to ensure that global energy-related emissions peak already in 2020.
They call for improved energy efficiency in key industrial sectors, reducing the use of inefficient coal-fired power plants, increased investment in renewable energy technologies, a gradual phasing out of fossil-fuel subsidies and a reduction in methane emissions in oil and gas production.
"This major climate milestone is possible utilising only proven technologies and policies and without changing the economic and development prospects of any region," the IEA said.
Countries are preparing for a crucial UN meeting in Paris -- the 21st Conference of Parties, or COP 21 -- of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which groups 195 nations.
The European Union earlier this year formally adopted climate change targets for the Paris conference, including a 40 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 1990 levels.
The United States, which accounts for 12 percent of global emissions, has announced its intention to reduce them by 26-28 percent in 2025 compared with their level in 2005.
China, which is the world's second-largest economy and accounts for 25 percent of global emissions, has set a target date of "about 2030" for its emissions to peak, but has not pledged any reductions.by Paul Kennedy @pkedit, Oct 26, 2015
By Paul Kennedy
Jesse Marsch
Oscar Pareja
Joey Saputo
Mike Petke
Ali Curtis
Felipe
Mike Grella
Kemar Lawrence
Chris Duvall
Matt Miazga
Jesse Gonzalez
Victor Ulloa
Kellyn Acosta
Thierry Henry
Tim Cahill
Bradley Wright-Phillips
Mike Grella
Gonzalo Veron
Ezequiel Cirigliano
Mauro Diaz
Fabian Castillo
There was not much separating the New York Red Bulls and FC Dallas, winners of MLS's Eastern and Western Conferences, respectively.Both finished with 18-10-6 records for 60 points and won their conference titles by seven points over the second-place team. The only thing that separated them was goal difference, the tiebreaker that gave the Red Bulls (62-43, plus-19) the edge over FCD (52-39, plus-13) for the 2015 Supporters' Shield.Their seasons mirrored each other's. FC Dallas started 3-0-1, the Red Bulls were 3-0-2 after five games. Both slumped in May-June -- FC Dallas 0-3-3 over six games, the Red Bulls 0-4-1 over five -- but both pulled away from the pack over the last 10 games of the regular season -- FC Dallas went 7-2-1, while the Red Bulls were 7-3-0. FC Dallas had the best home record in MLS at 13-2-2, while the Red Bulls were 12-3-2, behind only FCD and the LA Galaxy (12-2-3).There are a lot of other similarities between the two teams that say a lot about how you go about building a winner in MLS -- building it the right way.The coaches of both teams are in their second head-coaching positions in MLS:at New York andat FC Dallas. Both hold dream positions.Marsch coached Montreal in 2012, its first season in MLS, and left not because he didn't do a good enough job with the expansion team, but because Impact ownerdidn't like Marsch's so-called American approach. At the Red Bulls, Marsch was in the unenviable position of replacing the popularand inheriting a team that had considerable success in 2013 (Supporters' Shield winner) and 2014 (Eastern Conference finalist), but, the Red Bulls' new sporting director, and Marsch came in with a clear vision of what they wanted to do.Pareja's ties to Dallas go back to his playing career when he played eight seasons for the Burn (1998-2005). He was with FC Dallas for the launch of its academy and left and returned twice -- the first time to work briefly with the U.S. U-17s in residency in Florida and the second time after coaching the Colorado Rapids for two years.Both teams have relied on a core of players. Pareja picked from a larger pool -- 17 players made 10 or more starts -- but all but three of them were with Dallas for Pareja's first season as head coach in 2014 so they knew his system and were able to fill in at multiple positions as injuries and international callups mounted during the season.Marsch went with a set lineup almost all of the season. Of his four new starters,andin midfield each started 30 or more games, while, the bargain signing of the year out of Jamaica, would have likely reached that total in starts but for commitments with the Reggae Boyz.New York's only problem position was right back, where it lost second-year playerin midseason with a broken leg.Both clubs stood out for their reliance on young Homegrown players at key positions. The Red Bulls', 20, has developed into perhaps the U.S. best center-back prospect an MLS club has ever produced. Pareja has gone two better, giving key roles to three academy products: 20-year-old keeper, who won the starting job late in the season, and 23-year-oldand 20-year-old, who started together at central midfield for much of the season until Acosta's recent groin injury.Neither club has relied on big-name signings. The Red Bulls went low-budget after shedding the salaries ofandafter the 2014 season. Their highest-paid player -- according to MLS Players' Union figures -- is, who was rewarded for his 27 goals in 2014 with a bump to DP status at $660,000 in guaranteed compensation. No one on FC Dallas makes as much as $500,000.While other clubs have struggled to integrate expensive midseason signings into the starting lineup, both FC Dallas and New York spent significant resources to sign Argentines during the summer transfer window but did not rush to break them into the starting lineup.has played so well for the Red Bulls that he's keptout of the starting lineup.only recently became a starter in the Dallas midfield because of Acosta's injury.It's a credit to the success of both clubs in putting their teams together that perhaps their toughest task will be to keep them together. Miazga and Lawrence on the Red Bulls andandon FC Dallas rank among the most sought-after players in MLS. It's hard to imagine all four of them still be in MLS next season.[Episcopal News Service – Chicago, Illinois] John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County operates one of the busiest trauma centers in the country. The Chicago hospital has hundreds of physicians, medical residents and fellows on its staff but only one employee with the title of violence prevention coordinator and the word “chaplain” on her name badge.
Many of the patients the Rev. Carol Reese sees face a crisis of faith as much as a medical crisis, especially teenagers injured by gunfire.
“These kids are just trying to hold on to whatever bit of hope in life that they can,” Reese, 60, an Episcopal priest said in an interview last month at the hospital. “For some of them, their faith helps. For some of them, it gets pretty shaken in the midst of all of this.”
Reese will share her insights into communities traumatized by gun violence and public health approaches to violence reduction at a conference this week in Chicago held by Bishops United Against Gun Violence. “Unholy Trinity: The Intersection of Racism, Poverty and Gun Violence” is being held at the Lutheran School of Theology from April 20 to 22 in Hyde Park.
Reese sees firsthand the unholy trinity’s intersection in the hospital and as program director for Healing Hurt People-Chicago, a hospital-university partnership that studies ways of keeping teens safe while working with young victims as they recover and return to their neighborhoods.
Gun violence has surged in Chicago in recent years. The city, the nation’s third largest, recorded more than 4,300 shootings in 2016 and the most homicides in the U.S.
“Gun violence is an issue that cuts across all kinds of boundaries,” Diocese of Chicago Bishop Jeffrey Lee told Episcopal News Service in a phone interview. Seeing this as more than an urban or rural issue, a white or black issue, a conservative or liberal issue, Lee said the bishops want to engage people on all sides of the debate in establishing common ground.
“We wanted to bring people from a variety of viewpoints around what we can agree on,” Lee said, pointing to potential areas of consensus in reasonable gun safety legislation and measures targeting illegal weapons.
Stroger Hospital’s trauma center treated 900 gunshot wounds in 2015, the latest year it tallied, and Reese said the unit treats about 10,000 children and adults a year.
Like medical care, spiritual care is needed around the clock. A typical case may involve a teenager clinging to life and family and friends dealing with their own emotional trauma and feelings of guilt, that they didn’t do more to protect the victim, Reese said. She guides victims and their loved ones as they grapple with existential questions: Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?
“At the very core of it I think it is how people make meaning of what has happened to them, particularly in the light of a traumatic event,” Reese
|
What the heck?
What? Why’re you looking at me like that? Was I off for long? What did I miss?
- What’s the last thing you remember?
Oak wanted to check me over before we left Kalos, then it all went dark.
Wait, so that means Oak was here?
- But… he was crushed. Smashed to pieces.
Oak?
- No, I mean…
Oak must’ve copied it’s core and brought it here for some reason.
- I’m just glad you’re back!
Uh… it’s good to be back? Seriously, what’s going on?
- I fixed your problem, Zinnia. Time for you to hold up your end of the bargain.
Ah… well about that… there have been some other complications. We need to stay a while longer. There are things we both need to do.
- But you promised!
I’m sorry but the fate of everyone in this timeline hangs in the balance! I need your help!
- I don’t want to hear it! Are you sending me home or not?
Right now? No. But I have a good reason if you just listen–
- I don’t care anymore! I’ll find my own way home!
I take the silver ball from my bag and shove it into Zinnia’s hands before storming out of the hall.
You sure showed her! Whatever it was about…
Ah, you’re done.
- Yeah.
I forgot to give you this when we were in Sootopolis. It’s the Eon Flute, you can use it to call Latias if you ever need her help.
- Thanks.
So what’s next for you?
- I’m going to go to my aunt’s place and see if she can help me get home.
You don’t know where your home is?
- It’s complicated.
Pacifidlog Town
I stop off at the pokémon center and discover Zinnia had left another two pokémon in the PC for me.
I continue onwards, trying to think of what I’d even say to my aunt. I don’t know what year it is, she might not recognise me or she might not even be there.
Route 103
Caldar! I was hoping to find you here. Congrats on becoming champion!
- Yeah, thanks.
Oh and lookit! I finally got a keystone!
May shows me her bracelet, a multicoloured keystone is set into it. Five little stars are inside the stone.
Can we have a battle? For old times sake?
- Uh…
Aw come on, let’s go!
Go Swellow!
- Go Luchenko!
- Stone edge!
Steel wing!
Swellow swipes at Luchenko with hardened wings before Luchenko knocks swellow out with a sharp rock.
Go Wailord!
- Earthquake!
Surf!
Luchenko triggers an earthquake, the nearby hillside slides down onto the path and buries wailord.
Go Breloom!
- Earthquake!
Rock tomb!
Luchenko stomps the ground, triggering another earthquake. An upheaval blasts breloom from below. Breloom throws a bunch of rocks at Luchenko, surrounding her with boulders in the process.
- Earthquake!
Seed bomb!
Breloom launches a large seed at Luchenko, it explodes in her face and leaves nothing behind.
Oh snap!
- Luchenko! No!
- Go Amber!
- Dragon rush!
Seed bomb!
Amber charges at full speed into breloom, crushing it against a tree.
Go Raichu!
- Earthquake!
Quick attack!
Raichu darts at Amber, bouncing off her scales. Amber triggers an earthquake causing an upheaval to launch raichu into the nearby lake.
Go Blaziken!
- Earthquake!
Let’s show ‘em what we’ve got! Shadow claw!
May raises her arm, the keystone on her wrist lights up and blaziken evolves.
Damn that’s a big fire chicken!
Amber triggers one more earthquake, the ground opens up beneath blaziken and slams shut, trapping it neck deep in the earth.
Oh well, that’s why you’re the champion I guess!
Meanwhile in Mossdeep Space Center:
Professor Cozmo! Come quick!
What is it?
Look! The telescope!
Hm?
It’s coming right for us!
May Arceus have mercy on our souls…>>>I wanted to say that this was posted on Equestria Daily! It's #40. www.equestriadaily.com/2013/11… Thanks to however submitted it! <<<<
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My first drawing that is 100% tablet made, no pen tool, no mouse, nothing. I made this as a gift of sorts for the fabulously fabulous. I think back at end of September or beginning of October or something, I told her I planned on making something else for her, besides this danielsplatter.deviantart.com/…
It took me nearly two months to do that, but I did! And I will also look for any excuse to draw best pony.
I was inspired a bit by her style for this, but also some of those other digital paints I did back in June? July? Something like this danielsplatter.deviantart.com/…
Coloring wasn't as good at parts as I hoped, but eh. I've had so much stuff I've had to do over the past few days, it was nice to have something to relax with that wasn't a headache causing ordeal. I should do more tablet drawings, they're a blast. Overall, I think it turned out well! To me at least.Coloring wasn't as good at parts as I hoped, but eh. I've had so much stuff I've had to do over the past few days,it was nice to have something to relax with that wasn't a headache causing ordeal. I should do more tablet drawings, they're a blast.
Some appropriate mood music here, as well! I love this song. www.youtube.com/watch?v=35FMuK… Don't tend to like brony music that much (most of it seems like, blegh, dubstep) but I do like stuff like this. Somewhat electronic sounding. Sorta. Kinda. Maybe. I dunno.
I might do another one of these types of drawings if enough people like this! Maybe with a background too!
But regardless, I hope you all like this, my friends! Stay lovely, you awesome people.
Time Spent: About 7 hours
MLP belongs to Hasbro.
Art by
Why, hello colored lines! Haven't seen you in a while!Originally Posted by Ember Originally Posted by
Dear Leaders,
As always, Heroes Charge Team have listened to the voice from our amazing leaders and collected valuable feedback from the Community. Consequently the game version 1.4 will be coming soon! Here are the preview for your information and discussion:
New Heroes:
- The Rifleman: From the back line, he sacrifices his own HP to boost the attack damage and has the most powerful weapon--The Rifle!
- The Iron Hoof: Front line Tank Hero, who has Crowd-Control Skills and determination for survival.
- The Errand Hunter: Another front line Tank Hero, who masters the ability to absorb incoming attack and meanwhile deals AoE damage.
New Features:
- Booty Cave: The feature is designed to further resolve the stamina issue. And it offers more coins and gems to our leaders without costing any stamina. But to make it more fun, you will need to send out your heroes to defend it. On the contrary, feel free to plunder the booty caves defended by other leaders!
- Ranking: You will be able to check all kinds of ranking charts in the Ranking Box.
- Activities Calender: With the notifications from this feature, our leaders will not be worried about missing the great promotions and events.
- Upcoming Server Countdown: Click the Switch Server button, and leaders will be able to check when the next server will be opened.
Others:
- Added two more heroes to the Bronze Chest and Gold Chest: Arcane Sapper and Frost Mage.
- Added Arcane Sapper to the Guild Shop.
- Replaced the Imperial Executioner with Frost Mage in the Crusade Redeem.
- In the Hero Interface, leaders will be able to preview the required gear for the heros subsequent evolution levels.
If you have any feedback or ideas, please reply to this post. Thank you all for the continued support and love!
Best Regards,
EmberGet the biggest Newcastle United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Newcastle United chiefs have confirmed that their kits will be produced by Puma again next season.
Designs for the new shirts are set to be sanctioned by the club soon and their kit sponsors with a new main sponsor also to be confirmed.
United say that their prospective new club sponsor will compare favourably to English football’s top clubs.
A panel at the club’s latest fan forum stated: “The club outlined that it is in a long-term relationship with its kit manufacturer, PUMA.
“The club also confirmed that kits had been selected for next season, with an order to be placed shortly on kits for the following 2018/19 campaign, due to the required lead times.”
Newcastle top shirt sellers this season:
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And offering an update on the new sponsor, United chiefs said: “The club stated that positive progress has been made in relation to a new sponsor for the 2017/18 season and that an announcement will be made as soon as the club is in a position to do so.
“The club stated that the name will remain as St. James’ Park and that the naming rights had not been included in discussions with potential sponsors.
“The club highlighted that being in the Premier League creates the best possible platform for a good commercial performance, but that nevertheless the club continued to perform solidly in this regards, with new avenues for revenue being continually explored.
“The club stated that its potential shirt deal benchmarks very favourably against comparable clubs in the Premier League.”Image copyright AFP Image caption The bus had been travelling from Mombasa to Lamu when it was attacked
Gunmen have killed seven people, including four police officers, after attacking a passenger bus in Kenya's coastal county of Lamu.
The gunmen opened fire on the bus near the town of Witu, some 50km (31 miles) from the resort island of Lamu.
They then targeted a police vehicle that had arrived at the scene. Somalia's al-Shabab Islamist militia has said it carried out the attack.
Nearly 100 people have been killed in violence on Kenya's coast this summer.
Hundreds of families have been displaced by the unrest, which has also damaged the local tourist industry.
Military assault
The bus targeted on Friday was travelling from the city of Mombasa to Lamu. Gunmen fired at the vehicle after blocking its path with their car.
The bus driver was among those killed, the Lamu county commissioner Miiri Njenga told Reuters news agency.
Eight people are said to have been admitted to hospital, most of them with gunshot wounds.
The attack comes a day after Kenya's military said its aircraft had bombed jungle bases used by militants in the area.
A spokesman for al-Shabab, Abdulaziz Abu Musab, told Reuters the Kenyan announcement was "propaganda".
Friday's attack, he said, was "in response to Kenya's claim that it deployed more troops in the coast and thus tightened security".The latest dietary guidelines advise us to eat at least three servings of whole grains every day, which can help prevent things like heart disease, certain cancers, and type 2 diabetes. In other words, at least half of all the grains that you eat should be whole grain.
Being the nutrition-conscious type that you are, you have probably taken this message to heart and are doing your best to eat more whole grains. But if you are confusing “multi-grain” products with “whole-grain” products, you may still be falling short of the mark.
The Whole Truth About Whole Grains
Whole grain products contain all the parts of the grain: the germ, which is rich in essential fatty acids and b-vitamins; the endosperm, which is mostly starch; and the bran, which, of course, is high in fiber. In products made with refined grains, on the other hand, most of the germ and bran have been removed, leaving the starchy endosperm, which is the least nutritious part of the grain.
And here’s something I was surprised to learn: Whole grains, much like the Nutrition Diva herself—are greater than the sum of their parts. You might think that you could take some refined flour, add some bran, essential fatty acids, and b-vitamins, and end up with the equivalent of a whole grain. Not so!
The health benefits that you get from eating actual whole grains add up to more than what you’d get out of eating the equivalent amount of fiber or any of the other nutrients we know they contain. Researchers suspect that the whole grains also contain phytochemicals that we don’t know about, and these compounds are responsible for some of the good effects. Somehow, the whole package as it occurs in nature offers something we can’t quite replicate in the food lab.
PagesThe greatest wealth is to live content with little. Plato
When it comes to ramen, I don’t think there is a person in modern history without a connection or memory to warm noodles in a bowl and the comfort & subsequent memories they bring. I mean is there? For me and my siblings growing up, Mr. Noodles were a major treat, since while inexpensive and easy to make, my folks weren’t exactly the ‘fast food’ types. But as most parents know, it is prudent to treat kids from time to time and so they did, even if it meant buying packages of cheap-as-borscht dry noodles that were laden with the salt & fake flavours from that little silver pouch, not to mention the MSG and whatever else goes into those iconic little packages of cheap & oh-so-tasty sustenance. Oh, Mr Noodles indeed.
Fast forward to now, when I’m lucky enough to be able to frequent (as many other Vancouverites are) a cosy little corner in Chinatown where the noodle bowl reigns supreme (and supremely done too I might add) without a salt pack or crinkly yellow package in site. For those who haven’t been, Harvest Union is doing it all right, with hand-crafted bowls stuffed with all kinds of tasty, healthy surprises appealing to all eaters from vegan to those looking for meat options too. There is something for everyone at Harvest and it’s here that I’ve recently re-discovered the bowl of hot soothing broth that contains not only perfectly cooked noodles but all the other possibilities that work together to make a meal worth waiting for.
It was after a working lunch there recently that I was inspired to finally create a noodle bowl of my own, having been teased by various recipes here and there in the blogosphere. I set out to test my ideas with a few requirements, starting with wanting a gluten-free option. I’d worked enough with rice noodles to know how easy to use and delicious they were, and they always leave me feeling content and just right (read: satisfied but not too full). Second, I wanted something that would be quick, without any extra cooking time, would use one pot only, and created a truly minimal mess. As you can see I kept it pretty simple. So simple in fact, that by using pre-made broth & soup, this meal will take you literally less than 10 minutes from start to the finished product. Of course, if you’ve got the time, the patience, and the produce, I’d suggest starting from scratch with this simple-as-can-be-squash soup and this homemade broth.
Either way, I hope you enjoy this as much as I have been. In just as much time as it takes to boil that water for the instant stuff, you can have a fully nutritious meal that’ll hit the spot and keep you healthy, without sending your food budget sky-high either. No noodling around: this bowl is the real deal.
On a side note, I want to thank all of you who popped by last week to read up on the post to help Feed South Africa. I’m happy to report that because of that campaign, food bloggers and their readers were able to successfully raise the targeted goal of $5,000 to help feed 100 school children in South Africa for a year! It’s initiatives like this that see communities all over the world get the help they need, and it doesn’t happen easily. It always feels good to be a part of something special, and I’m so thrilled to know it was a success. Congrats to Nicole & everyone involved for a spectacular effort! xOn Sunday, for the first time in the country's history, women in Saudi Arabia began registering to vote in the upcoming national elections, thanks to a 2011 royal decree. The Independent reported that Saudi Arabian officials described the new voting rights as a "significant milestone in progress towards a participation-based society." Amnesty International UK’s Karen Middleton told The Independent: "This long overdue move is welcome but it’s only a tiny fraction of what needs to be addressed over gender inequality in Saudi Arabia." Women in Saudi Arabia still face harsh oppression, such as not being allowed to drive, or how some rape victims are forced to marry their rapists. But allowing women to participate in elections is an important step toward gender equality.
Now that the Middle Eastern country updated its antiquated voting laws, there's only one country left in the world that doesn't let women vote: The Roman Catholic capital of the world, Vatican City. But voting in Vatican City is more complicated than in any other country, since only cardinals — the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church — are allowed to vote for a new Pope. This means that not even all men have the right to vote. And because women can't become cardinals, no women have the legal right to vote in Vatican City elections. The Vatican has always operated on old religious doctrine, but it's made progress in other areas recently. Pope Francis has a more accepting view of gay marriage, and called for climate change action in his last encyclical. So why can't similar progress be made for women's rights?
ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images
Pope Francis has publicly supported equal pay for men and women. In April, when speaking to a crowd in St. Peter’s Square, the Pope said: "Why is it expected that women must earn less than men? No! They have the same rights. The disparity is a pure scandal." But gender equality doesn't mean that women are equal to men in some areas of life, but not others. Vatican City being the only country in the world where women can't legally vote is also a "pure scandal." Women will never be equal in Vatican City until they can become cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church, and thus vote in elections. For once, the Vatican should follow Saudi Arabia's lead.Professional Dota 2 team and The International 2011 winners Na’Vi announced on Friday that they will be disbanding their current roster to make space for a newer and fresher line-up. The decision has come after Na’Vi failed to qualify for the Frankfurt Major set for November.
Na’Vi has been on a rough road ever since their disappointing performance at The International 2014, where they only managed a discouraging 8th-position finish. Their last tournament victory happened back in November 2014, beating Team Tinker 3:0 to lift the Dota 2 Champions League season four trophy – which brought confidence back to the squad after a rather disappointing 2014 campaign.
What’s next for Na’Vi? A new roster will arise shortly, with Na’Vi planning to announce the new line-up in the coming weeks, leaving many fans upset regarding the future of beloved all-star Dendi. After the announcement that the team was to disband, Igor Sydorenko, Na’Vi’s chief operating officer, shared this statement:
After the protracted series of failures of our team, we have to take measures and with hard feelings fully disband the squad. On behalf of all the fans and Na’Vi staff I express gratitude to the guys for their work and emotions, which they’ve granted to us all the time. However, sooner or later, the time of old heroes passes. The fate gives us new challenges, which we need to accept and prove that Na’Vi is a team of champions.
Since their inception in 2011, the Na’Vi Dota 2 team has produced incredible and memorable moments. For all that they’ve done for the community and myself as a Dota player, I bid the current team roster farewell. GG Natus Vincere.The Knights of the Pentangle Return to Fight Evil alongside King Arthur
Another offering in Misfits Studios' series on New Camelot for the Third Edition Super-Powered by M&M rules, The Knights of the Pentangle details the returned Once and Future King of the Britons and his new reincarnated knights. Together again, these heroes fight for justice across the United Kingdom (and abroad.)
Within the Knights of the Pentangle PDF you will find:
13 new advantages : Banter, Connected (Revised), Contacts (Revised), Ear to the Ground, Enduring Inventions, Gambler, Master Trap-Maker, Moment of Weakness, Muscle Up, Reliable Attack, Specialization, Strongarm, and Wire Fighter.
: Banter, Connected (Revised), Contacts (Revised), Ear to the Ground, Enduring Inventions, Gambler, Master Trap-Maker, Moment of Weakness, Muscle Up, Reliable Attack, Specialization, Strongarm, and Wire Fighter. The Senses (Psychometry) power effect.
power effect. The Enhanced Knockback extra.
extra. The Bulky, Exposed, Heavy Recoil, and Reduced Trait flaws.
,,, and flaws. Game stats for Camelot using the new headquarters rules found in Better Mousetrap or the Headquarters Construction Guide, both also from Misfit Studios.
using the new headquarters rules found in or the, both also from. King Arthur (and Excalibur ), Merlin, and other reincarnated Knights of the Pentangle: Galahad, Gawain, Guinevere, Lancelot, and Tristram. Also included are suggestions for other Knights the players could use as characters.
(and ),, and other reincarnated Knights of the Pentangle:,,,, and. Also included are suggestions for other Knights the players could use as characters. The Holy Grail.
Super-Powered by M&M and its associated logo are Trademarks of Green Ronin Publishing and are used under the provisions of the Super-Powered by M&M Trademark License (see www.mutantsandmasterminds.com/licensing for details).
Requires the Mutants & Mastermind’s Hero’s Handbook by Green Ronin Publishing for Use.
Note that the new headquarters and organizations rules rely upon as-yet unreleased content that will appear in Better Mousetrap 3e. All new advantages, power effects, extras, and flaws will also appear in the former work upon its release.
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Keep checking back for more Steven Trustrum Marketing productsThis amazing, versatile low carb salad is the accidental product of my laziness. I was trying to come up with a keto paleo sushi (really sashimi) hand roll using seaweed snacks but was having problems with them holding together. After struggling awhile (and having to eat my soggy failures haha), I decided WTH I'm just going to combine all of the ingredients and call it Keto Paleo Sushi Sashimi Salad, with Sriracha dressing and seaweed snacks “croutons”! Wow that's a lot of S's!
Seaweed snacks are individually packaged, small rectangles of seasoned and dried nori that are becoming all the rage lately. I really wanted to use them in this recipe because they are a little crispier than just plain nori sheets and not as thick. I also like the sea salt seasoning on them, and I think they're easier to keep around the house as they're tasty as a snack just on their own and are about 3 net carbs for a whole package. You could however use any nori in place of the snacks, but it would be best if it was toasted. Seaweed in any form is an amazing source of natural iodine and trace minerals. It's one of the most nutritious foods on our planet (not quite as nutritious as liver though).
Tips for making Paleo Keto Sushi Salad
If you take this salad for lunch to work later in the day, keep the seaweed ‘croutons' separate until you eat
This makes a great first course to a sushi dinner. You can dress this little salad up very nicely for guests.
The type of seafood and vegetables can be swapped out for what you have available, and the seafood doesn't even have to be raw if you don't like it.
If you do not use the optional ginger, this recipe is also a great meal if you are doing a Whole30 diet.
Sushi Salad
Yield:
1 main dish serving or 4 appetizer servings
Ingredients:
For the Sushi Salad:
4 ounces wild bay shrimp (the little ones), or bite sized fish/seafood of your choice (raw or cooked)
1/2 of a thin skinned cucumber, or about 4-5 blanched asparagus spears, cut into bite sized pieces
2 Tablespoons chopped spring (green) onions
1/2 avocado, cut into chunks or mashed
Seaweed snacks – about 3-5 small sheets (or to taste) – add right before serving
optional: chopped pickled ginger
For the Sriracha Salad Dressing:
2 Tablespoons mayonnaise
Sriracha hot sauce to taste (I used about 1/8 tsp but I'm a weenie)
1/4 teaspoon gluten free soy sauce
freshly ground black pepper
Preparation:
Combine all of the salad ingredients in a bowl except for the seaweed. In a separate small bowl, combine the Sriracha salad dressing ingredients, mix with a fork. Add just a few drops of Sriracha to start and keep mixing in more to taste. My dressing was light pink but I know a lot of people who like A LOT of Sriracha on their food! If you want to stop at this point and chill the salad for later, do it now before you combine with the dressing and seaweed croutons. Toss the salad ingredients with the salad dressing, top with crumbled seaweed, and serve!
PAID ENDORSEMENT DISCLOSURE: In order for me to support my blogging activities, I may receive monetary compensation or other types of remuneration for my endorsement, recommendation, testimonial and/or link to any products or services from this blog.When it comes to British heroes, they don’t come more British than Johnny English. Yes, there’s that Bond fellow, but he’s more rogue than gentleman and the Aston Martins that he drive seem to break down a lot.
Besides, when did you last hear 007 having a conversation with his car? For that’s precisely what Rowan Atkinson gets up to in his latest movie, Johnny English Reborn. In the film the car is keyed to English’s voice with sometimes hilarious results, but the Phantom can do more than just take orders – in one scene it cuts a Phantom-shaped hole in a door using a laser tucked away in the Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament.
You can see for yourself in a special preview of the film recorded before the Frankfurt Motor Show.
Rowan Atkinson gives us the background on ‘Jonny English Reborn’ the sequel to the 2003 hit movie in which he plays the British spy, Jonny English. In the interview he talks about the film, the car and his passion for Rolls-Royce.
Atkinson took time from a busy schedule to join Rolls-Royce at the Frankfurt Motor Show and talk about his co-star, ‘Royce’, the 9.0-litre V16 engined Experimental Rolls-Royce Phantom Coupe which literally ‘saves the world’ in the latest Johnny English movie.
[two_columns ]
Talking with Torsten Müller-Ötvös, CEO of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, the Mr. Bean star spoke of his admiration of the deep quality of Rolls-Royce cars and why he chose a Phantom Coupe to star in his latest film.
As you can see, Royce is a very special car, used by Rolls-Royce in development of the Phantom.
But whilst its 9.0-litre V16 engine is entirely in keeping with the Phantom Coupe’s demeanour, the Rolls-Royce board chose instead to use the downsized 6.75-litre V12 powerplant in the production model.
Atkinson, being a Rolls-Royce enthusiast knew that 3 or 4 of these engines had been built and Rolls-Royce were happy to fit one in a Phantom when approached by the actor.
[/two_columns] [two_columns_last ] [/two_columns_last]
Rolls-Royce have refrained from revealing any details of the engine’s prowess, all we know is that it has “unbelievable power and torque”, which probably means somewhere north of 600 bhp and 800Nm of torque.
The V16 engine first appeared at the 2004 Geneva Motor Show in the Rolls-Royce 100EX ‘Experimental Car’, which went on to become the Phantom Coupe in 2008.The Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman and Matt Zapotosky break down the trial of former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell and his wife. (Lee Powell/The Washington Post)
The Washington Post’s Rosalind Helderman and Matt Zapotosky break down the trial of former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell and his wife. (Lee Powell/The Washington Post)
Maureen McDonnell, having uttered not a single word in court for five weeks, stepped into a car and rode away from the crowd a newly convicted felon, still silent.
Her husband, who made history as the first Virginia governor to stand trial and to be convicted, stopped to thank the news media after the verdict Thursday afternoon. Still working the crowd, that guy.
After 24 hours on the witness stand and one of the biggest public displays of wife-shaming in memory, former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell (R) didn’t save himself. Or his wife.
He had the chance last year to man up and spare his wife and family all this. Prosecutors offered him a single count of fraud that avoided all mention of corruption and any charges against his wife.
But McDonnell decided to gamble. And everyone lost.
1 of 54 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Robert F. McDonnell on trial View Photos Former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, are battling corruption charges. Caption Prosecutors drop the case against former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell and his wife after the Supreme Court overturned his public corruption conviction on June 27, 2016. Sept. 4, 2014 Former governor Robert F. McDonnell wades through the media after being found guilty of corruption at the Federal Courthouse in Richmond. He was convicted of 11 corruption-related counts. Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
The McDonnell family members sobbed after the jury’s guilty verdicts were read in a Richmond courthouse. But the tears should have started much earlier, because whether or not the jury decided that Bob and Maureen McDonnell were guilty of public corruption, the couple had already trashed respect, honor and decency for themselves, their family and the people of Virginia.
The biggest roadkill in all this is Maureen McDonnell. Jurors were treated to a parade of TMI witnesses who called the former first lady a “nutbag,” who talked about her fits, her frustrations and her private meltdowns and even raised the possibility that she suffered from a mental illness.
And still, she was silent.
This woman took the role of long-suffering political wife to a new level. She was flayed, demeaned, belittled and besmirched in court. And she didn’t say a word.
This trial was an unmasking of an uncaring husband and the ruthlessness with which he pursued power — even at the expense of his spouse and children. The lessons here aren’t so much about a shopping spree the former first lady went on with wealthy operator Jonnie R. Williams or the event she helped orchestrate for him to plug the vitamin product he claims to have squeezed out of tobacco leaves.
Let’s be honest, the value of the luxury gifts and loans involved in the case, $177,000, is pretty petty. The McDonnells took these from a Virginia businessman. They let him pay for part of their daughter’s wedding. In exchange, they tried to help him promote his product.
But what this trial told us is that Virginians, embodied in the seven men and five women of the jury, value integrity.
View Graphic Verdicts of individual counts from the McDonnell trial.
All that the McDonnells said they appreciated when they ran for office — family values, honesty, transparency and that integrity — was lost not just in their transactions with Williams, but, more important, in the way they acted in that courtroom.
Bob and Maureen McDonnell didn’t really address the corruption charges, the possibility of a corrupt quid pro quo during their trial. Rather, they practically mocked the legal system by asking jurors to listen to kvetching and whining about the state of their marriage.
Or at least he did. We still don’t know what she would say.
Maureen McDonnell came and went into the courtroom apart from her husband, keeping quiet, talking only occasionally to her attorneys.
The jury was treated to a cockamamie, Dr. Phil legal strategy of making Maureen, a wife and mother of five, the problem.
We are so used to hearing powerful men on the witness stand say, “I didn’t do it.” But this was one of the first times — and an especially low point in American history — that we saw such a man try to shift all the blame to his wife.
Bob McDonnell whined about the slights, huffs, insecurities and private frustrations that any couple of 38 years would have.
He complained that his wife wasn’t as happy as he was when he won elections. She was insecure and tense about his relentless march forward into public life.
All of that was supposed to make it okay for him to take money from a man who was clearly trying to win him over and get special favors.
I watched those jurors when prosecutors displayed an exhibit of a bill from a fancy golf resort, where greens fees for a day can run more than $2,000. That sort of living surely doesn’t sit well with most working Americans.
But it was the evisceration of his wife — no matter how unpalatable her personality may be — that made us squirm the most.
The jury found McDonnell guilty of 11 counts of and his wife guilty of nine. There’s a pretty good chance they are going to prison. An awful spectacle followed by an awful outcome for a man who once aspired to the White House.
No wonder he had his face in his hands, shaking and sobbing. He’d thrown the mother of his children under the bus, and it hadn’t gained him — or her — anything but humiliation and shame.
Twitter: @petuladThe apartment of convicted Aurora theater shooter James Holmes in Aurora, Colo. (Aurora Police Department via European Pressphoto Agency)
After James Holmes, clad in body armor, stormed into a late-night showing of the “Batman” film “The Dark Knight Rises” on July 20, 2012, and opened fire, Aurora, Colo., was left with the devastating aftermath: 12 dead, more than 70 injured.
But once Holmes — sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for his crimes last month — was in custody, the nightmare did not end. Holmes, who told police he was “the Joker,” warned them he had left a trap for them at his apartment.
He was not lying.
When investigators located his apartment, they found a jerry-rigged booby trap that could have hurt or killed many others. Now, as a result of an open-records request, hundreds of photos of the apartment — some shown to the jury during Holmes’s four-month trial, as the Associated Press reported — are now available for the first time.
“This apartment was designed to kill,” Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said in 2012, as USA Today noted.
The release of photos also included images of the theater in the wake of the shooting — images too graphic to include here.
When Holmes left his home for his rampage at the Century 16 movie theater, he left techno music blasting in a room with 30 homemade grenades and 10 gallons of gasoline. Holmes, who reportedly received 50 packages in the four months leading up to his rampage, had been busy.
“Imagine that fireball … you would have an explosion that would knock down the wall of [nearby] apartments,” an unnamed official told CNN at the time. “That flame would have consumed the entire third floor. … By the time a fire truck would have arrived, they would have arrived to a building that would have been completely consumed in flames.”
Police found gunpowder, fuses, bullets and wiring in the apartment. (Aurora Police Department via European Pressphoto Agency)
There was at least one near miss when a neighbor turned up at Holmes’s door to complain about the loud music.
“Kaitlyn Fonzi, a 20-year-old biology student at University of Colorado Denver, lives in an apartment below Holmes,” the Denver Post wrote at the time. “Around midnight, Fonzi said she heard techno music blasting from Holmes apartment. She went upstairs and knocked on the door. When no one answered, she put her hand on the door knob and realized the door was unlocked.”
Fate — or, perhaps, instinct — intervened.
“Fonzi decided not to go inside the apartment,” the Denver Post wrote.
When authorities showed up to defuse the bomb Holmes had left for them, it took a
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to their business by offering $1 million for research, and demanding that the US Federal Government appoint a 'blue-ribbon panel' of scientists to oversee research to prove that cellphones were safe. This trivial reaction to what was perceived as a real threat, caused a storm in Congress.
The CTIA president Thomas Wheeler held immediate fire-fighting meetings with his advisors, and especially with Motorola, the company which dominated the industry, and, as a result, they put up $25 million (initially) to fund a major research program through a new entity which was established by their public relations firm Ketchum. They also enlisted John D. Graham, the director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis
Lorraine Thelian, the director of the Washington DC offices of Ketchum, found for them the ideal science-for-sale entrepreneur to run the research organization. George L. Carlo was an experienced science lobbyist for Philip Morris and the tobacco industry, who had built his pro-corporate reputation in fighting the battles over Agent Orange and dioxins for the Dow Chemical Company, before establishing his own service firm Health and Environmental Services (along with a number of other pseudo-think-tanks, and societies).
Carlo set up for the cellphone industry, the Wireless Technology Research as a limited liability company, totally controlled by himself and his wife. Over the next few years it spent $27.8 million of the CTIA's money on research guaranteed not to find anything of health significance.
Unfortunately, Carlo eventually split with the CTIA acrimoniously, and he set up a number of rival operations promoting the cellphone health scare, and selling protective devices to stop users getting brain cancer. Overall, Carlo proved to be more of a liability than anyone could imagine. [[4]]
Ketchum Down Under
In text submitted for its listing in the February 1994 edition of O'Dwyer's PR Services Report, Ketchum boasted of its crisis management prowess in defeating a campaign by an unnamed Australian environmental group over a "toxic contamination" site. "When an environmental group launched an attack on an Australian pesticide manufacturer, the government shut the plant down amid fears of widespread pollution. KPR helped organize a response that led to the plant's reopening within a deadline set by the company. As a result, the environmental group received significant criticism for distorting the facts and alarming the public." [8]
U.S. Government PR Contracts
According to the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform Minority Office, Ketchum received the following amounts per year, for federal PR contracts: [5]
$1,692,000 in 1999
$2,552,000 in 2000
$3,657,000 in 2001
$2,563,000 in 2002
$31,163,457 in 2003
$58,895,846 in 2004
The firm's website and the Public Relations Society of America's database of Silver Anvil Award Winners indicate that Ketchum has worked for the following federal agencies, in addition to its Education Department work:
Internal Revenue Service, to promote “Ten Minute Taxes” with Telefile;
Department of Health and Human Services, to “change the face of Medicare,” promote long-term health care planning, encourage preventative care, and raise awareness of home health care information; and
U.S. Army, to “reconnect the Army with the American people” and boost recruiting around its 225th birthday, in 2001.
In May 2005, a PR Week story on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services request for proposals on its outreach work over the next five years reported that, "Under the last umbrella contract... Ketchum led a $25 million integrated marketing campaign to drive people to the Medicare (800) number and website." [6]
Despite the controversy over the Armstrong Williams contract, Ketchum won a a $25 million contract, including $2 million in fees, to manage the advertising campaign as part of a $300 million, three-year U.S. government effort encouraging seniors to sign up for the new Medicare prescription drug program.
Ketchum "produced a controversial series of prepackaged news stories," or video news releases (VNRs), for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). VNRs that Ketchum produced for the Department of Education were also recently found to be "covert propaganda."
The Washington Post reported, "HHS officials say Ketchum got the new work because it already had a multiyear contract to provide public relations services for the department. The firm promised the new ads will not cross the legal line." HHS's Kathleen Harrington said that seniors trust Medicare information more when it comes from the government, so "it's in the interest of our success... to label everything appropriately." [7]
Clients
Ketchum's client list (most listings from O'Dwyers PR Daily) includes:
Personnel
Senior executives
Other staff
Paul Baverstock head of UK corporate practice
Jennefer Witter - former vice president
711 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Phone: 646/935-3900
Fax: 646/935-4499
Web: http://www.ketchum.com
Articles and resources
Related SourceWatch articles
References
External resourcesOn today’s This Week in Trump Administration Lies, we aren’t just highlighting blatant statements of misinformation. We’re also looking at examples of pushback.
The first lie happened on February 10, when Donald Trump insisted that fraudulent votes were cast during the election of 2016 in the state of New Hampshire, which he won. He swore thousands of people were brought in by bus, which senior policy advisor Stephen Miller backed up a few days later. That simply did not happen, which former New Hampshire GOP chair Fergus Cullen knows perfectly well. Here’s the pushback: he called out the lie, offering $1,000 to anyone who could prove that people were bused into the state to cast illegal ballots.
On the 12th, Trump used Twitter to accuse CNN of cutting off an interview with Bernie Sanders after the senator joked about “fake news.” Once again, CNN’s PR account corrected him — this time by showing the transcript of the interview — then jumped in with their catchphrase: “Those are the facts.”
Sean Spicer misquoted Charles Krauthammer on the 14th, seemingly making up a phrase that the Fox contributor had not said. He also defended Mike Flynn‘s choice to reach out to Russian officials and Trump’s decision to ask Flynn for his resignation.
On Twitter and during a press conference on the 16th, Trump claimed he won 306 electoral votes when he really won 304. Moreover, at the presser, he swore he had the biggest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan. In fact, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all won by larger electoral percentages. PolitiFact points out that his victory “ranks near the bottom, belonging somewhere between the lowest one-fourth and the lowest one-fifth of all Electoral College victories in history.”
Politifact wasn’t the only organization that called Trump out on that one. NBC News’ Peter Alexander stood up to ask a question at the press conference and told Trump that his statistics were all wrong. Then, he asked why Americans should trust a President who tells lies, only to be assured by Trump that the information had come from someone around him.
Note that we won’t include Kellyanne Conway claiming that the president had full confidence in Flynn mere hours before asking him to resign. In that instance, it’s hard to say whether she really knew Flynn was getting ousted or not. Or even if those few hours before the resignation was handed over, Trump really did still have confidence in him.
[image: screengrab]
Lindsey: Twitter. Facebook.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] Rockets center Dwight Howard was apparently having some trouble holding onto the basketball against the Atlanta Hawks on Saturday night, so he resorted to the oldest trick in the book: Spraying his hands with Stickum.
Howard applied the adhesive substance while waiting at the scorer's table to check into the game. After he touched the ball, it didn't take long for Hawks forward Paul Millsap, who was at the line shooting free throws, to notice something was up.
Here's what ensued, as reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Chris Vivlamore:
Official Monty McCutchen grabbed the ball and went to each bench to issue a warning, saying "Stickum is illegal in the NBA." After first going to the Hawks bench he made his way toward the Rockets bench. Rockets coach J.B. Bickerstaff slid in front of the can, still at the scorer’s table. McCutchen noted he knew what Bickerstaff was hiding.
The warning was as far as it went, and no penalty was given to Howard or the Rockets - though the can was promptly removed from the scorer's table, according to Vivlamore.
"I've never felt the ball like that ever," Millsap said after the game. "It was sticky. It seemed like super glue was on there."
The ball in question was reportedly delivered to the officials after the game, and the incident is under review by the NBA.
Howard doesn't feel he did anything wrong, despite McCutchen calling it illegal.
"I don't know why people are making a big deal out of it," he said after the game, according to Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle. "I do it every game. It's not a big deal. I ain't tripping."Take a look at the Bulls’ new Nike jerseys
This season marks a new era for NBA uniforms.
For the first time, teams can have sponsor patches on their jerseys. This is also the first season of Nike’s contract as the league’s merchandise vendor.
The Bulls revealed their new Nike Icon jerseys on Wednesday in a gallery of photos on Twitter.
The team showcased Dwyane Wade’s jerseys, which look similar to years past. Nike said in a statement that the main difference is the material used and the mechanical design of the uniforms.
Nike showcased Dwyane Wade's jersey for their reveal. | Bulls/Twitter
Take a look at the new jerseys:
FIRST LOOK: Introducing the official Chicago Bulls @Nike Icon jersey, which will serve as our primary home uniform this season. pic.twitter.com/OtMRZww8Mu — Chicago Bulls (@chicagobulls) August 2, 2017
FIRST LOOK: Say hello to the Chicago Bulls @Nike Association jersey, which will serve as our primary road uniform this upcoming season. pic.twitter.com/Q2c0bqDNcj — Chicago Bulls (@chicagobulls) August 2, 2017
For home games, the Bulls will primarily wear their red jersey or Nike’s “Association Edition.” When the Bulls are on the road, they will wear their white jerseys or the “Icon Edition.”
The team used Dwyane Wade’s jersey to showcase the new uniforms.
Two years ago, Nike made an eight-year global partnership with the NBA to stat this season. Nike’s iconic swoosh will be stitched on the players’ jerseys, shorts and compression tights.
Nike said they spent 25 years of research and gathering insight from current and former NBA players. They used this knowledge to create basketball uniforms that have heat and cool maps, which help regulate the body’s temperature.
Cavaliers’ Kyrie Irving said he appreciated Nike taking the time to speak with the athletes.
“The mental advantage of a quality uniform is priceless,” Irving said in a statement released by Nike on Wednesday. “The fact that Nike listened to all of our feedback while developing the new NBA uniforms speaks volumes. I’m excited for the new fit and feel.”
Follow me on Twitter: @madkenneyUpdate: So many people have asked: we ARE doing an iOS version, having passed the threshold weeks ago!
A spectrometer may not sound like what you wanted for your birthday, but it's a ubiquitous tool for scientists to identify unknown materials, like oil spill residue or coal tar in urban waterways. But they cost thousands of dollars and are hard to use -- so we've designed our own.
This open hardware kit costs only $35, but has a range of more than 400-900 nanometers, and a resolution of as high as 3 nm. A spectrometer is essentially a tool to measure the colors absorbed by a material. You can construct this one yourself from a piece of a DVD-R, black paper, a conduit box, and an HD USB webcam.
We've also created open source software (spectralworkbench.org) to collect, analyze, compare, and share calibrated spectral data. We've even made an experimental version which converts your cellphone into a spectrometer (see rewards -- now with iOS in addition to Android)!
Public Lab community members have used this new tool to identify dyes in "free and clear" laundry detergent, to test grow lamps, and to analyze wines.
Now we need your help in collecting data to build a Wikipedia-style library of open source spectra, and to refine and improve sample collection and analysis techniques. We imagine a kind of "SHAZAM for materials" which can help to investigate chemical spills, diagnose crop diseases, identify contaminants in household products, and even analyze olive oil, coffee, and homebrew beer.
Public Lab is an open community (join now!) which investigates environmental issues with DIY tools. You might have heard about our first big project to document the BP oil spill using aerial photos from kites and balloons and our balloon mapping kits Kickstarter. Since then we've been working on new ways to ID contamination on the cheap. We hope you'll join us in taking the next step!
"Countertop" spectrometer prototype
Web-based Spectral Workbench analysis softwareFor our next meetup, we are proud to present Jaunt!
- Jaunt is a technology company located in Palo Alto, CA delivering a completely new way to present and experience media with the first full-stack hardware and software solution for cinematic VR. The Jaunt platform makes use of advanced, proprietary algorithms and computational photography software to enable the creation of seamless, omnidirectional 3D experiences. We work with the world’s best content creators across numerous verticals including Hollywood, travel, real estate and education to create the most immersive cinematic VR experiences in the world. These cinematic VR experiences are accessible to anyone looking to discover truly immersive content.
- VisiSonics is a spinout from the University of Maryland’s Computer Science Department. They have created several technologies for gaming and VR. The most exciting one is their ability to create sound with pinpoint accuracy anywhere in space…with stereo headsets. It’s called “RealSpace 3D Audio” which it has been licenced by Oculus for their Audio Solution ( http://www.diamondbackonline.com/news/article_aba162a8-4a9f-11e4-a50a-001a4bcf6878.html ). Gregg Wilkes and team will be on hand to give us a brief presentation on it’s origin as well as stick around to provide live demonstrations of the technology. It is available today for the Unity Gaming Engine for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Additionally, VisiSonics has a full 8” Spherical Array with 64 Microphones and 5 HD camera’s that can capture video and audio in 360 degrees simultaneously. They will be able to “demonstrate” Virtual Presence through an Oculus Rift DK2.
We will also have a number of new demos for everyone to experience. Like last time, feel free to bring any VR experience you think is new and exciting. As always, we are excited to show off the amazing potential of virtual reality to first-time users and VR evangelists alike!Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Milwaukee Co., WI Sheriff David Clarke reacted to remarks from Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton speculating on why some in the black community join gangs.
“Joining a gang is like having a family,” Clinton said. “It’s feeling like you’re part of something bigger than yourself.”
Clarke rejected that statement and told fill-in host Tucker Carlson those remarks demonstrate Clinton’s disconnect from life in the black community.
“Tucker, I’m still trying to get my head around this,” Clarke said. “Joining gang is like joining a family. Mrs. Bill Clinton is totally disconnected from life in the black community. She has such a misperception about our intelligence level. She thinks we’re some lower form of intelligence to think because we don’t have family experience we should join a gang. That is preposterous. Why didn’t she say make better lifestyle choices? If you want to join something, why don’t you join a church? Why don’t you join the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts? How about the boys clubs and girls clubs?”
“To sit up there and suggest that we — that is dysfunctional culture, gang activity,” he continued. “For her to sit up there and embrace this as if it’s something that’s socially acceptable in the black community, this stuff ought to be rejected out of hand. It ought to be shunned and shamed by the black community. The reason why there’s no family structure in the black community, she should offer an apology, is because of failed liberal urban policies, the war on poverty, that totally destroyed any structure or any family unit in the black community. And she should have brought that up and said we’ve got to change policies so we can help the black community reconstruct that family experience so kids can make better lifestyle choices.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poorDan Kopf, Priceonomics; Data: IMDB
Action movies date back to the earliest days of film, but they haven’t always been as popular as they are today. In the 1930s, when modern Hollywood came to life, only a small fraction of the most popular American movies were part of the action genre as tagged by the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).
How things have changed. The last 80 years have witnessed the action genre’s inexorable rise. Action movies, which made up just 4% of the top films in the 1930s, encompassed over 34% of films thus far in the 2010s. Though it is difficult to isolate the causes of this growth, researchers and industry participants theorize that the increasing affordability of special effects, and the desire to appeal to a more global audience, played a large part.
We discovered the action genre’s ascendence by looking at the data catalogued on IMDB. We analyzed the 100 most popular feature films in every year, by most votes on IMDB, made in the United States from 1930 to 2014. IMDB assigns each movie a genre or multiple genres, so we were able to look at which types of films have become more common through the years.
In addition to the action movie’s striking boom, we also found interesting patterns in the history of the popularity of the comedy and horror genres. The popularity of horror movies peaked in the 1980s and have slowly descended in popularity since. Comedies were initially very popular, but their prevalence have been quite uneven across time.
Trends for the Most Common Genres
The chart below displays the popularity of the 5 most common genres in American film since 1930. Those trend lines are smoothed fits based on the percentage of the top 100 movies in each year that were in that genre.
We can see that the number of popular movies that fall into “drama” decreased relatively quickly from 1930-1975, and held more or less steady from 1975 onwards. “Comedy” (in red) has had a more topsy-turvy ride. And “action” (blue), has been climbing steadily since the birth of Hollywood.
Dan Kopf, Priceonomics; Data: IMDB
The above chart may look different from other charts on this same subject. A popular chart from 2012 also looking at genre change appears quite different due to their inclusion of all movies in IMDB without filter on country or popularity, and because they assigned movies that had been cross-listed in different genres to only one genre.
Most movies on IMDB fall into more than one genre. In fact, 83% of the films in our dataset are assigned to more than one genre. American Sniper, for example, is assigned 6: action, biography, drama, history, thriller, and war. IMDB tags the animation movie “Big Hero 6” and the stunt documentary film “Jackass 3D” as part of the action genre because they contain action sequences. So perhaps it is more appropriate to think of those movies tagged as “action” movies on IMDB, not as Sly Stallone style action flicks, but rather as movies containing “action”.
As noted earlier, the chart is based on a dataset of the top 100 movies were chosen based on the number of votes in IMDB. This is a good proxy for popularity at the movie theater. The chart below shows the relationship between votes and revenues in 2010. Each point represents a movie. That outlier for votes, with over 1.2 million, is the action/sci-fi blockbuster “Inception”.
Dan Kopf, Priceonomics; Data: IMDB
The Rise of Action
The next chart displays, in more detail, the steady growth of the action genre in the most popular American movies by year. Each point is the number of action movies in the top 100 movies in that year, and the line is a smoothed fit of the trend. In every decade from 1940 to 2010, there were, on average, three more action movies in the top 100 than there were in the preceding decade.
Dan Kopf, Priceonomics; Data: IMDB
Action movies from 1940 look very different from action movies from 2014: movie magic has come a long way. Researchers from the University of Indiana, who also studied movie genre trends, observe that the genres that have increased in prevalence are the most technology intensive. According to them, the shift towards technology intensive movies, like action movies, occurred because those movies have become “relatively cheap to produce”. A technological innovation like Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) made including action cheaper -- these days you don’t actually have to blow up an actual building, in order for a building to blow up in your movie -- and thus leads a director/producer to choose to include an action sequence, when before it would have been an unjustifiable expense. And it’s made films that are mainly “action films” cheaper to produce overall.
Some industry insiders theorize that the rise of the action genre is related to globalization. They suggest that action and sci-fi movies translate better to a global audience, and that Hollywood is simply serving their new, larger constituency. The researchers from Indiana dispute this as a driving factor, claiming that the proportion of international revenues for American movies has not changed substantially over the last 40 years, during a period of major growth for action movies.
The Ups and Downs of Comedy and Horror
Unlike the continuously positive trend for action movies, the popularity of comedy has seen both highs and lows. In the 1930s, nearly 40% of popular movies were comedies. The average fell below 20% in the 1950s. Perhaps this was a symptom of the seriousness of America after World War II. Comedy films surged in popularity in the 1980s and 90s, the period of America’s first comedy boom, and have been on a slight decline since. Perhaps the second comedy boom, supposedly happening now, will lead to another upswing.
Dan Kopf, Priceonomics; Data: IMDB
Like action, horror was not a large part of popular American cinema during the 1930s. Fewer than 5% of popular movies were part of the horror genre in the 1930s but they steadily grew in popularity, reaching a high water mark in 1981, when 29 of the top 100 films were classified as horror (including Friday the 13th Part 2 and The Howling). Since that peak in the 1980s, horror’s popularity has slowly receded.
Dan Kopf, Priceonomics; Data: IMDB
***
Our analysis of the most popular genres of movies across time demonstrates the fluidity of American popular film. As tastes and technology has changed, so have the kinds of movies that were made. But while the prevalence of some genres have had peaks and valley, the trend for action movies has been an undeviating ascent.
This post was written by Dan Kopf; follow him on Twitter here. To get occasional notifications when we write blog posts, please sign up for our email list.James Belohovek... special prosthetics, mechanical devices and house miniatures: Alterion Studios, Inc.
Barry Crane... puppets and prosthetics ceator: "Thing" and "Pubert", David B. Miller Studio
Albert Delgado... special effects supervisor
Mike Elizalde... mechanical designer
Eric Fiedler... special prosthetics, mechanical devices and house miniatures: Alterion Studios, Inc.
Scott Forbes... special effects technician / special effects (as Scott E. Forbes)
Tony Gardner... special prosthetics, mechanical devices and house miniatures: Alterion Studios, Inc.
Vance Hartwell... special prosthetics, mechanical devices and house miniatures: Alterion Studios, Inc.
Gary L. Karas... special effects
Michael Levitre... puppets and prosthetics ceator: "Thing" and "Pubert", David B. Miller Studio (as Michael LeVitre)
Frank Charles Lutkus III... puppets and prosthetics ceator: "Thing" and "Pubert", David B. Miller Studio (as Charles Lutkus)
John Mauvezin... special prosthetics, mechanical devices and house miniatures: Alterion Studios, Inc.
Dave Nelson... puppets and prosthetics ceator: "Thing" and "Pubert", David B. Miller Studio (as David Nelson)
Carolyn Oros... special effects technician
Brian Penikas... special prosthetics, mechanical devices and house miniatures: Alterion Studios, Inc.
Jeff Pepiot... special effects
Ken Pepiot... special effects coordinator (as Kenneth D. Pepiot)
Gintar Repecka... special effects foreperson
V. Jude Ruta... puppets and prosthetics ceator: "Thing" and "Pubert", David B. Miller Studio (as Jude Ruta)
Greg Solomon... special effects makeup
Robert Cole... special effects (uncredited)
Carol Koch... cosmetic finish (uncredited)
Becky Ochoa... special effects (uncredited)
Gary Pawlowski... special effects technician: David B. Miller Studio (uncredited)The tango milonga—or dance scene—in Montevideo is much more friendly and less intimidating than in Buenos Aires.
It is frequented by a small group of mainly locals. So when they see a new face, people will come up to you to find out what you are doing there and to ask you to dance! This is very different from the competitive atmosphere in Buenos Aires.
There is also a lot more space on the dance floor, useful for beginners. So especially if you are a beginner or intermediate dancer, Montevideo is definitely the place for you to improve your technique.
Hey, wait! I thought tango was from Argentina?
Oops, don’t catch any Uruguayan hearing you say that. Tango is a heritage shared by Argentina and Uruguay. It is a quintessential part of music and dance from both countries, and it’s actually more accurate to refer to tango as rioplatense* – meaning that it is from the Rio de la Plata or River Plate region. In fact the world’s most famous tango is half-Uruguayan, half-Argentinian.
Days, times and costs of milongas in Uruguay
You can find a milonga to attend any night of the week in Montevideo. There are at least two milongas, or tango salons, open every day.
Beware! Most milongas start about 9.30 pm during the week and 10.30 pm on weekends, but most dancers don’t get there until hours later. On the weekends most people arrive about 11 pm and dancing goes on till 4 am. There are a few afternoon milongas.
There are several open air milongas including on New Year’s Eve too.
Entrance fee to the milongas is usually charged at the door and it is modest, anything from no charge to 150 pesos (less than 5 USD). If you take a class before you will normally not have to pay for the milonga.
GURU RECOMMENDATION The Sunday evening cafe concerts at Joventango
Joventango runs a tango cafe-concert on Sunday nights, with exhibition dancing and occasional live music followed by the milonga. It’s kind of cheesy and totally authentic. I love it. The good news is that the cafe-concerts start at 7.30pm. Unusually early for Montevideo entertainment.
Find a milonga and group tango classes in Montevideo
The best resource is an app and website called Hoy Milonga. You can use it to find milongas and classes in any part of the world! Find a milonga in Montevideo on their site.
The Guru recommends Montevideo tango milongas
I don’t dance myself but I have a very good friend who does, and she shared insider observations regarding the character of each milonga which you can read in The Guru’Guay Guide to Montevideo in an extensive chapter on tango in Montevideo.
You’ll find out which milongas are frequented by “tangueros de ley” (old school tango dancers who are strictly orthodox in their attire, etiquette and dancing style). Which are more “hippie” — including dancers wearing their street shoes, even tennis shoes (sacrilege!). And which monthly milonga is held in a crumbling Art-deco mansion frequented by members of the national ballet that’s not to be missed…
You will also find collected contact details for each milonga in English (yessss), where to take dance classes, dance class etiquette and recommended tango teachers (thinking specifically of you as a non-Uruguayan).
Photos: In a testament to truely how NOT-for-export the Montevideo tango scene is, I was unable to find a single Montevideo milonga photo for commercial use, till I got lucky enough to stumble on Leo Alvarez‘s photos of the Hijos de Galicia milonga in Parque Rodó. Thanks, Leo!
[Article first published: Mar 14, 2016 and last updated at the date above]Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Zoie Burgher knows exactly what you see when you tune into her Call of Duty streams. She knows that viewers judge her and people assume the worst because of how she presents herself. Burgher is currently blowing up on YouTube anyway, thanks to a recent ban on Twitch.
Twitch, a popular livestreaming service, has rules specifying that streamers cannot show too much skin during broadcasts, much less focus on anything overtly sexual. Burgher, who is known for twerking while playing Black Ops 3, has been banned many times for violating that rule, with the most recent expulsion happening last weekend. While this turn of events may not sound surprising, Burgher contests that there’s something suspect going on with the latest incident with her Twitch account:
As Burgher tells it, she hasn’t actually been streaming on Twitch for the last month, maintaining a low profile leading up to Twitch’s official convention. The last time Burgher was streaming, she claims, she was wearing the Swedish outfit pictured in the video above. In the email Burgher shared with me, Twitch lists the infraction as “porn or other sexually explicit content.”
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While Burgher recognizes that the first few bans were legitimate, in an email exchange she described the latest ban as “unfair,” since in her eyes she’s technically been on good behavior lately. She also notes that other streamers have worn similarly revealing clothes but have not gotten banned yet. I asked for specifics and didn’t hear back from Burgher, and Twitch declined to comment as well.
Burgher’s story has spread all over YouTube in the last month, with dozens of videos dedicated to dramatically reacting to her content, and collectively they’ve reached millions views.
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Source: BlastphamousHD TV
Burgher’s even made a playlist featuring videos where people roast her, and it includes titles like “Zoie, please go to a cam site,” and “Zoie Burgher: a new cancer forms.” That’s tame, compared to the specific insults hurled at Burgher on social media sites and comments sections, where many have taken to calling Burgher a slut and whore. Some cite YouTube’s own community guidelines, which stipulate that “YouTube is not for pornography or sexually explicit content,” though historically the enforcement of that rule is not very clear cut.
“The argument [against Burgher that] I’ve found most interesting is that what she is doing is detrimental to the image of female gamers,” commented YouTuber Philip DeFranco in a video addressing the controversy surrounding Burgher. “With Zoie being the most-watched streamer on YouTube at the time that she’s streaming, isn’t she representative of female gamers? To which I think the argument is perception-wise yes, but also on the other end, is that fair? No one’s ever looked at my videos and goes, ‘Uh, that’s so representative of guys on YouTube.’”
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For detractors, it’s not just that Burgher is playing Black Ops 3 provocatively. The peanut gallery keeps bringing up Burgher’s meteoric rise—Social Blade, a YouTube metrics tracker, notes that Burgher has gained nearly 400,000 followers in less than a month. For people who toil away on YouTube for ages before gaining a following, seeing Burgher tear it up so quickly has proven infuriating. It’s a misplaced jealousy that suggests viewers are being tricked into watching Burgher’s content or that she’s cutting corners to get a fame she does not ‘deserve,’ whatever that means. Meanwhile, actual YouTube giants make Burgher’s subscriber count look laughable (no offense to Burgher.)
“I stream, and all that entails: storytelling, game commentary, chat interaction, fostering a sense of community....while in a bikini,” Burgher said. Burgher’s point is that while most pundits focus on her attire, they ignore the many elements that have made her stream successful, too. Archives of Burgher’s streams sometimes focus on her sexuality, yes, but they also feature plenty of trash talking, self-aware jokes, and kill streaks. Burgher isn’t just entertaining people with her antics, she’s also playing well:
Not that it stops the social media onslaught. Burgher’s owning it. She jokingly refers to herself as a ‘thot’ while streaming, and her Twitter bio says ‘brought to you by daddy issues,’ a jab at one of the most common insults hurled at her.
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“What is the first thing people say about girls who are wearing ‘too little’ clothes, or about girls who are acting ‘un-lady like’?” Burgher mused. “It’s said they have no parents, they were raised badly, or never met their father. So I beat [people] to the punch line...because then maybe you’ll sit back for a moment and think—wait, is there more to this?”
“I’m a college educated girl, and I could tell you more about the Middle Eastern crisis and its centuries-long dynastic feud between the Sunni and Shi’a than anyone you have ever met,” Burgher said. “But first I have to do 50 more jumping jacks on live camera because this guy just donated 50 dollars. Platform is power, and I don’t mind using sex appeal to get it.”
I asked Burgher why she thinks she’s become such a hot topic on YouTube, and she told me that it was just a matter of being at the right place at the right time.
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“September is a slow month,” Burgher explained. (To wit, one of the popular videos featuring Burgher outright says ‘there wasn’t that much news today.’)
“Most people familiar with consumer buying cycles (and therefore ad rates, the source of YouTube money) understand that the before-school consumption spike has been replaced with a media consumption lull as kids are back in school and no longer able to consume as much social media,” Burgher continued. “I have risen from 3,000 to 300,000 subscribers in 10 days [ Editor’s note: now up to 400,000 ], and not just 10 days, but during a time when everyone (on YouTube) is suffering from lower views, and lower audience interaction...people are competing not only for views and subscribers, but attention. Once there is sufficient attention on a subject, other YouTube channels start covering it in an attempt to capitalize on the views.”
“At the end of the day, people could be getting entertained anywhere on the internet.”
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Burgher’s insinuation is a deeply ironic one: while some accuse her of weaponizing her sex appeal for personal gain, the truth is more that other YouTubers are exploiting her looks for better thumbnails, and saucier news/reaction videos. Every time a YouTuber features Burgher, they increase her profile more and more. YouTube and social media are complaining about a behemoth that it created in the first place.
“At the end of the day, people could be getting entertained anywhere on the internet—even on the pornographic sites people suggest as alternatives for content, but they’re not; they’re watching me,” Burgher said. “So I will take their good faith and invest it into myself to evolve and grow as a person and YouTuber.”
“I can have a great personality all I want, but if no one’s around to experience it, how great is it really?” Burgher said. “I aim to get an audience, and I’ve done that.”
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On Twitch, Burgher’s story would have been an old one: the internet has been misguidedly arguing about livestreaming ‘camwhores’ for ages, trying to police what a woman should or should not wear on-camera. Years ago, Burgher’s ban would have closed the latest chapter in that saga quickly, but instead it has spilled onto YouTube. Guess you can say that YouTube’s own livestreaming service has finally made it.Latest:
The Real Ronald Reagan Revealed in This Movie
There you go again, Hollywood.You’ve taken a great story about a real person and real events and twisted it into a bunch of lies.You took the true story of Eugene Allen, the White House butler who served eight presidents from 1952 to 1986, and turned it into a clichéd “message movie.”“Lee Daniels’ The Butler’” stars Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, a fictional character supposedly based on Eugene Allen’s real life.But let’s compare the two
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-- Kurt R.
24. Merrick Madsen
• Ranking in August: Unranked
• Position / Current Team: G / Harvard, NCAA
• 2015-16 Stats:.933 SV%, 1.91 GAA
After missing out on the top-25 cut last summer, Madsen has made his way back onto the list, relying heavily on his numbers this year to boost him into the ranking. In his 14 games played at Harvard University, he's done pretty well for himself.
Madsen noted in an interview with Steve Coates at development camp this past summer that, as a freshman behind a solid senior goaltender, he wasn't able to play much and that it was his goal to take over that starting role coming into his sophomore season. Madsen's certainly accomplished that goal, taking 14 of the 18 starts for Harvard. Madsen also carried Harvard in the annual Shillelagh Tournament hosted by Notre Dame. In Harvard's first invite, Madsen saved 59-of-60, posting a shutout in the title game against RPI. Madsen was also named MVP of the tournament. Pretty cool! And a decent mustache too.
Madsen mirrors the new class of modern NHL goaltending: a tall frame with good movement and agility. Madsen also mentioned in the Coates interview that he's studied Ben Bishop's tape, noting that he wants to "imitate" some of Bishop's techniques. That's certainly a good thought.
While he's still quite raw, a number of questions that scouts had about him are getting answered in his first year getting significant minutes in the collegiate circle. Can he compete in the NCAA? Will more minutes mean weaker play? Yes and no, respectively. Madsen's numbers are good enough for a ranking of 8th amongst goaltenders, his performance stacking up well against other D1 goalies (like Thatcher Demko, who is ranked 6th according to USCHO's statistics). I mean, hey, the kid was among 66 nominees for the Hobey Baker. That's worth something. (You can vote for him here, if you have any inclination.)
It's hard to say exactly where Madsen will land in the coming years. Goaltenders are hard to predict even at the NHL level, let alone at lower levels. However, Madsen seems to be developing nicely, another goalie in the ranks whose progress is exciting to watch.
-- Allison J.
23. Cooper Marody
Ranking in August: 23
• Position / Current Team: F / Michigan, NCAA
• 2015-16 Stats: 8 G, 6 A in 21 GP • Position / Current Team: F / Michigan, NCAA• 2015-16 Stats: 8 G, 6 A in 21 GP
When the Flyers selected Marody in the sixth round of last June's NHL Draft, there was real reason for optimism surrounding the pick. The 18-year old was coming off an impressive season in the USHL, scoring 58 points in 52 games, and had committed to a top-tier collegiate program in the University of Michigan. But doubts remained regarding his size and relatively short track record of high-end production.
His performance thus far at Michigan has gone a long way towards easing those concerns. Marody roared out of the gate to start his freshman season, scoring 13 points in his first 12 games as a Wolverine. In fact, for the first month of the season, he was neck-and-neck with Kyle Connor (17th overall pick in 2015) for the team lead in points despite Marody receiving third-line minutes. His pace has recently slowed, however, with coach Red Berenson noting that the tougher competition of Big Ten conference play proved to be an adjustment period for Marody and his linemates.
Still, the legendary Berenson raved about Marody's skillset, stating, "In terms of his offensive game, he has good hands. He’s good with the puck and he has that mental ability to be patient with the puck, and then he has the skill to put the puck in the net." Marody's defensive game still appears to need some work, but it's hard to be disappointed with his freshman season so far. Despite limited minutes, Marody has produced offensively and is carving out a role for himself at a school that has produced numerous NHL players. For a player who has successfully used the slight of being cut from his high school varsity team to drive him to success in his hockey career, it's probably not the best idea to bet against him.
-- Charlie O'Connor
22. David Kase
Ranking in August: 22
• Position / Current Team: F / Piráti Chomutov, Czech Extraliga / SK Kadan, Czech 1.liga
• 2015-16 Stats: 1 G in 18 GP (Extraliga) / 6 G, 8 A in 16 GP (1.liga) • Position / Current Team: F / Piráti Chomutov, Czech Extraliga / SK Kadan, Czech 1.liga• 2015-16 Stats: 1 G in 18 GP (Extraliga) / 6 G, 8 A in 16 GP (1.liga)
Kase was a player that, going into last June's draft, many agreed had exciting skill and vision but lacked ideal size, with his 5'10" stature holding him back in the eyes of some. All the better for Ron Hextall and the Flyers, though, who snagged him in the fifth round of the draft despite having some belief that he could go as high as the second round.
The young Czech has spent his time in the 2015-16 season moving between a few different stages. He had spent some time at the start of the year with Chomutov at the Czech league's highest level, but was later loaned to SK Kadan in the league's second tier after a bit of a slow start. The brief move appears to have helped Kase get back on track -- he averaged nearly a point per game in 16 contests with Kadan. Recently, Kase was recalled back to Chomutov in the top tier, and reports are that he's been getting more ice time with them since his return, which can only be a good thing.
Kase also represented the Czech Republic in the U20 World Juniors in December and January, for the second time in his playing career. Though he only tallied one point -- a single assist -- in five games, it was easy to come away from the tournament intrigued by his play. Our own Charlie O'Connor mentioned in his WJC prospect review that Kase did a great job setting up his teammates for looks that they just couldn't cash in on, and Ron Hextall himself had a lot of nice things to say about Kase's play at the tournament, likening him to a "pitbull" but still speaking positively of his skill level.
While his age-18 season hasn't been a true breakout year, it's been progress, and there's still a lot to like in what Kase has brought and continues to bring to the table. Hopefully things continue trending upward for him in the Extraliga over the rest of the season.
-- Kurt R.
21. Felix Sandstrom
Ranking in August: 21
• Position / Current Team: G / Brynäs, SHL
• 2015-16 Stats:.903 SV%, 2.82 GAA in 12 GP
• Position / Current Team: G / Brynäs, SHL• 2015-16 Stats:.903 SV%, 2.82 GAA in 12 GP
The knock against Felix Sandstrom when the Flyers drafted him last year was that he just hadn't played much -- only 14 games in 2014-15. But we have a lot more to judge Sandstrom on now, and while his ranking at No. 21 on this list remains the same as it was last summer, there's still a lot to be excited about with this kid.
For starters, he's played most of his hockey in Sweden's top league this year. His numbers aren't stellar, but to be in the SHL at age 18, especially for a team like Brynas that develops goalies well, is a very good thing. He's one of just a handful of players under 20 on that team, one of the others being fellow Flyers prospect Oskar Lindblom.
As for his performance at the 2016 WJC for Sweden, he didn't play a huge role due to the rise of Islanders prospect goalie Linus Soderstrom. When he did play, he was crushed by his defense in a rout against the Americans, and he pulled a shut out against Denmark. Still, in any event, to be on the WJC team at age 18 is impressive and he will have another chance next year.
That's the track Sandstrom is on. It's going to take a while for him to develop, as is the case with any goaltender. But he's very young and in a great situation to develop as a player.
-- Travis Hughes
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How we voted spots 25 to 21:Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
June 25, 2014, 5:32 PM GMT / Updated June 25, 2014, 5:38 PM GMT
The painstaking process of destroying Syria's giant chemical weapons stash is set to begin next week. U.S. vessel MV Cape Ray is scheduled to leave the Spanish port of Rota for Gioia Tauro, Italy, Wednesday where it will play a key role in the delicate mission. First, it will meet Danish vessel Ark Futura, which is carrying Syria's entire stockpile of chemical weapons and precursor chemicals.
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Approximately 560 tons of the deadly chemicals will be transferred to MV Cape Ray on July 2 and 3. The U.S. ship will then head into international waters in the Mediterranean where the deadly chemicals, including mustard and sarin nerve agent precursors, will be pumped through two hydrolysis systems, mixed with hot water and rendered harmless. Syria handed over its final acknowledged stockpile of weapons, totaling 1,300 tons, this month. The remaining 740 tons will be transported to disposal sites in the U.K., Finland and Port Arthur, Texas.
In-DepthCalifornia Utility-Scale Solar Energy Surpasses Wind Energy For 1st Time
May 9th, 2016 by Adam Johnston
A recent report notes that utility-scale solar energy jumped past wind for the first time within the state.
Vaisala notes public records from the California Independent Systems Operations (CAISO) show California utility-scale solar energy in 2015 reached 15,592 GWh (or 6.7 % of California’s system), compared to wind energy reaching 5.3% of the state’s electricity generation. Even more impressive is that utility-scale solar energy has grown 15 times over since 2011, when it was only 1,000 GWh.
“California’s continued commitment to renewable energy is very encouraging and creates a great deal of opportunity for the industry,” said Vaisala Global Manager of Energy Services Pascal Storck.
Variability in California’s solar market has increased thanks to advanced solar capacity, Vaisala said. This creates supply fluctuation and increased system volatility, which affects prices.
To counteract these concerns, Vaisala has come up with a localized reporting service for CAISO to meet increasing solar power within California’s grid, which will give more accurate information and reduce volatility.
Storck said other places around the world that have seen rapid solar capacity increases eventually put strain on systems. Vaisala is helping its customers prepare and respond within the market changes in sustainability and profitability, with its new localized forecasting system, which has been well received, Storck also said.
California leads in solar PV installations, as it continues to dominate the solar landscape. With the state having one of the top Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) of 50% by 2030, this will put further need to increase not only utility-scale solar energy, but also improved local solar forecasting to produce maximum results, as the state heads towards its clean energy goals.In light of the Las Vegas shooting Sunday night, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was also a victim of gun violence, called the massacre "a grave tragedy for our nation."
Giffords released a statement on Twitter Monday. "I know this feeling of heartbreak and horror too well," she said. In 2011, Giffords was shot in the head at close range while meeting with constituents in a grocery store parking lot. Six people were killed during the assassination attempt.
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Even after she resigned from Congress, Gifford has remained a staunch advocate for stricter gun laws, with her husband, retired astronaut Mark E. Kelly. "This must stop—we must stop this," she wrote.
Giffords also urged Congress to "find the courage it will take to make progress on the challenging issue of gun violence," she said. "I know they got into politics for the same reason I did — to make a difference, to get things done. Now is the time to take positive action to keep America safer. Do not wait. The nation is counting on you."
The former Congresswomen offered her prayers and condolences to the victims and families affected by the Las Vegas shooting, where the death toll has risen to at least 58 people, with more than 400 injured, making it the most deadly mass shooting in modern U.S. history. In the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in 2015, 49 people were killed.
Politicians are likely to address the pleas for tougher gun laws in the coming days, though President Donald Trump's statement this morning made no mention of it.This release is available in German.
"It was shown that Internet addiction is not a figment of our imagination," says the lead author, Privatdozent Dr. Christian Montag from the Department for Differential and Biological Psychology at the University of Bonn. "Researchers and therapists are increasingly closing in on it." Over the past years, the Bonn researchers have interviewed a total of 843 people about their Internet habits. An analysis of the questionnaires shows that 132 men and women in this group exhibit problematic behavior in how they handle the online medium; all their thoughts revolve around the Internet during the day, and they feel their wellbeing is severely impacted if they have to go without it.
Gene variation more frequent in Internet addicts
The researchers from the University of Bonn and the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim compared the genetic makeup of the problematic Internet users with that of healthy control individuals. This showed that the 132 subjects are more often carriers of a genetic variation that also plays a major role in nicotine addiction. "What we already know about the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor in the brain is that a mutation on the related gene promotes addictive behavior," explains Dr. Montag. Nicotine from tobacco fits - just like acetylcholine, which is produced by the body - like a key into this receptor. Both these neurotransmitters play a significant role in activating the brain's reward system. "It seems that this connection is not only essential for nicotine addiction, but also for Internet addiction," reports the Bonn psychologist.
Women more affected by this mutation
The actual mutation is on the CHRNA4 gene that changes the genetic make¬up for the Alpha 4 subunit on the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. "Within the group of subjects exhibiting problematic Internet behavior this variant occurs more frequently - in particular, in women," says Dr. Montag. This finding will have to be validated further because numerous surveys have found that men are more prone to Internet addiction than women. The psychologist assumes, "The sex-specific genetic finding may result from a specific subgroup of Internet dependency, such as the use of social networks or such."
Better addiction diagnosis through biological markers
Dr. Montag added that studies including more subjects are required to further analyze the connection between this mutation and Internet addiction. "But the current data already shows that there are clear indications for genetic causes of Internet addiction." He added that with the mutation, a biological marker had been found that would allow to characterize online addiction from a neuro-scientific angle. "If such connections are better understood, this will also result in important indications for better therapies," says Dr. Montag.
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Publication: The role of the CHRNA4 Gene in Internet Addiction - A Case-control Study, "Journal of Addiction Medicine," DOI: 10.1097/ADM.0b013e31825ba7e7, Internet: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=internet%20addiction%20chrna4Mate, we know how you feel. Photo: Games of Thrones/ IMDb.
Hackers have caused the ultimate spoiler alert for Game of Thrones fans.
HBO has confirmed it has been hacked and episodes of Game of Thrones, along with a script for a forthcoming show may be among stolen data.
The cable TV station has released the following statement about the attack:
HBO recently experienced a cyber incident, which resulted in the compromise of proprietary information. We immediately began investigating the incident and are working with law enforcement and outside cybersecurity firms. Data protection is a top priority at HBO, and we take seriously our responsibility to protect the data we hold.
The company did not give specifics on what shows might be involved, or how much material, but the hackers claim they stole 1.5 terabytes of data.
HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler wrote to staff saying the hack included “some stolen proprietary information, including some of our programming”.
Entertainment Weekly reports that it was among several media organisations to receive an anonymous email, allegedly from the hackers:
Hi to all mankind. The greatest leak of cyber space era is happening. What’s its name? Oh I forget to tell. Its HBO and Game of Thrones……!!!!!! You are lucky to be the first pioneers to witness and download the leak. Enjoy it & spread the words. Whoever spreads well, we will have an interview with him. HBO is falling.
Entertainment Weekly reports that future episodes of the shows Ballers and Room 104 have been put online, as well as part of the script for next week’s episode of Game of Thrones. No GoT episodes have appeared online at this stage.
The theft follows the hacking of Netflix in April, when an episode of Orange Is the New Black and leaked online before its scheduled release.
Entertainment Weekly has more here.
Business Insider Emails & Alerts Site highlights each day to your inbox. Email Address Join
Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.LANSING, MI -- Gov. Rick Snyder has appointed a 15-member standing advisory board to implement
included in a state report focused on Enbridge's Line 5 pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac. The Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board includes, among others, members of the U.S. Coast Guard, National Wildlife Foundation, Marathon Pipeline Co. and Enbridge Inc., which operates a 62-year-old twin line under the Mackinac straits that environmental advocates say
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since mid-July, when the a state task force recommended its creation in a joint report on the pipeline issued by the Department of Environmental Quality and the state Attorney General's office. The board, created by
, is tasked with "advising state agencies on matters related to pipeline routing, construction, operation and maintenance," according to an announcement from the governor's office. One of its anticipated tasks is to commission a third party risk analysis of Line 5. A first meeting has not yet been scheduled.
Related
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"While pipelines are an efficient way to deliver necessary energy to power our homes, our communities and our economy, pipeline spills also have negatively impacted our natural resources in the past," Snyder said in a statement. "We remain fully committed to protecting our Great Lakes and natural resources, and this board will be charged with continuing the important work of safeguarding our environment while ensuring safe, affordable and reliable energy." The Michigan Environmental Council called the new board a "
" but wants further measures like requiring interim insurance or bonding from Enbridge of at least $500 million pending the third party risk assessment. "I see an opportunity here for the conversation about Line 5 to become more open and transparent and for Enbridge to provide clear information about the condition of its pipelines," said MEC president Chris Kolb. The board will be co-chaired by DEQ director Dan Wyant and Michigan Agency of Energy director Valerie Brader. Members will serve terms expiring Dec. 31, 2018. Their appointments are not subject to the advice and consent of the Michigan Senate. Other board members include: • Bill Schuette, Michigan Attorney General (or his designee). • Keith Creagh, director of the Michigan DNR (or his designee). • Michigan State Police Capt. Chris Kelenske, commander of the Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division. • John Quackenbush, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission (or his designee). • Jerome Popiel, U.S. Coast Guard 9th District incident management advisor. • Jennifer McKay, policy specialist for Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council. • Michael Shriberg, Great Lakes regional director for the National Wildlife Federation. • Brad Shamla, vice president of U.S. operations at Enbridge Energy Co. • Craig Pierson, president of Marathon Pipe Line LLC. • Guy Meadows, director of the Great Lakes Research Center and an adjunct professor in geological and mining engineering and sciences at Michigan Technological University. • Christopher Shepler, president of Shepler's Mackinac Island Ferry Service. • Jeffrey Pillon, director of Energy Assurance and Midwest Regional Coordinator for National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO). • Robert Hupp of Grosse Pointe, a member of Bodman PLC law firm. Also announced Thursday was a formal agreement with Enbridge to ban heavy tar sands crude oil from ever flowing through Line 5. The heavy dilluted bitumen, or "dilbit," oil was the type that Enbridge spilled into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. The company has said it has never planned to put heavy crude into Line 5, but the July 14 state task force report
. "This binding agreement solidifies the company's commitment not to transfer heavy crude under the Straits," said DNR Director Keith Creagh.
Garret Ellison covers business, environment, history and government for MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. Email him at [email protected] or follow on Twitter & InstagramIn the middle of a field of withered sunflowers stands a man in a white shirt wondering if war or peace will ultimately prevail. His name is Paul Picard and he is the head of the OSCE Observer Mission on the Russian-Ukrainian border in southern Russia.
For weeks now, volunteer fighters, weapons and even heavy military equipment have been trickling into Ukraine through this segment of the border. The soldiers are coming to provide support to pro-Russian separatists in their battle against the Ukrainian military. They're members of Vladimir Putin's secret army in Ukraine.
Picard, a Frenchman, is witness each day to the events taking shape along the border, but there's little he can do to stop them. His mandate with the observer mission is limited to the scope of a few meters inside the border because Russia and the other OSCE member states failed to reach an agreement on anything more extensive. Picard and his 15 staff don't even have permission to inspect the cars and trucks that are legally crossing the border. Nor do they have the right to stop people who are penetrating the border into the Ukraine through unguarded fields.
One of the border crossings under OSCE observation is located near a city on Russian soil with 50,000 inhabitants. The municipality is surrounded to the north, south and west by Ukrainian territory. Strangely, the city is named Donetsk -- the same as the embattled bastion of pro-Russian separatists some 160 kilometers (99 miles) to the west in Ukraine.
For weeks, the Russian Donetsk has also played an important role in the conflict over Ukraine's future. It has become the hub for Putin's creeping invasion. Two barracks are located at the edge of the city and 50 military vehicles parked at one of the facilities. Pro-Russian fighters from eastern Ukraine can be seen walking in the city center. They claim they are "here to rest." A group of Chechens wearing bullet-proof vests and armed with pistols is standing next to their Ladas, which have no license plates.
Just as Picard is giving an interview to Russian television, a military jeep with a Russian license plate and decals of the Russian airborne troops passes by. The men sitting inside wear camouflage and identify themselves to SPIEGEL as rebels. It's also possible they're Russian soldiers, or at least that they still were only a few days earlier.
Vacation in a War Zone
But Picard can't say such things -- he needs clear proof first. His reports instead make frequent reference to "people in military uniforms crossing the border in both directions."
In his interview, Picard states that he and his men, stationed at the border crossings in Donetsk and Gukovo, haven't observed the delivery of any military equipment to Ukrainian territory. It's a sentence that will then be broadcast that night on the Russian news. Picard's observation that this applies only to his OSCE mandate -- in other words, "the 40-meter border in Donetsk and the 40-meter (130 foot) border in Gukovo"-- is ignored entirely by the Russian propaganda.
As is so much else. The list of deliberate lies that President Vladimir Putin spews about Ukraine to both his people and the world is long and cynical -- including his claim that Russian soldiers spotted in Ukraine had either gotten lost or were spending their vacation in the war zone.
Putin's house of cards, which began teetering last week following numerous reports from observers and also NATO satellite images, holds many risks -- not just in terms of foreign policy, but also domestically. The reintegration of Crimea into Russia and Putin's tough stance against the West may have quickly driven his popularity rating to over 80 percent. But last week, when the first reports emerged of deaths among Russian recruits in Ukraine, the mood began to darken.
SPIEGEL ONLINE Map: The Battlefields of Eastern Ukraine.
The pollster Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), which is considered to have close ties with the Kremlin, even reported that although 57 percent of Russians back providing support to the pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, only 5 percent are in favor of an outright invasion. Meanwhile, only 9 percent expressed their support for weapons deliveries to the separatists.
Putin is also lying because fears of war are rooted so deeply in the Russian populace. In the 20th century alone, more than 40 million Russians lost their lives in armed conflict. The exact number is unknown because in Afghanistan and in the two Chechen wars, Moscow has kept casualty numbers classified. But memories of those events are now being evoked in many Russians.
It remains difficult to ascertain whether Putin is using the secret invasion of recent weeks to bolster his position ahead of an EU and NATO summit on Sept. 4, or if he does in fact want to establish a land corridor through eastern Ukraine to Crimea. What is clear, however, is that Putin is willing to use any means at his disposal, including war, to prevent Ukraine from aligning itself more closely with the West. During a visit to a holiday camp for pro-Kremlin youth on Friday, Putin said, "We need to make the Ukrainian authorities start negotiations of real substance" with the insurgents.
A Bad Omen
Such a political course requires soldiers, among other things, to provide support for the separatists in eastern Ukraine. But they are to be kept secret from the international community -- and even the troops themselves often know little about their own mission. They are soldiers like Andrey Balobanov from Siberia.
The Russian recruit had just turned 18 when he got conscripted by the military last December. The day he left home, Balobanov welled up in tears. His father embraced him and they consoled each other with vodka. A mirror had shattered on the floor of the family's simple brick house in Panovo a short time earlier, portending a bad omen for the family.
"It was almost as if Andrey already had a premonition that something terrible would happen," his father Sergey says today. "He was afraid of the military."
During the first weeks, Andrey wrote upbeat letters to his family back home. But when his mother congratulated him on the occasion of his birthday in April, his voice seemed strangely distraught. "After that, I didn't hear his voice again," says Marina Balabonova. "Until July when he suddenly appeared as a prisoner of war in a Ukrainian video."
Up to that point, Andrey's parents had assumed that he had been completing his service in Garrison 65349 near the city of Samara, Russia, along the Volga River. A commanding officer also confirmed this when his parents sought contact with their son. They were informed that, unfortunately, their son was not available to speak. By then, though, he had likely already been sent to Belgorod, a Russian city located not far from the Ukrainian border. That, at least, is what he texted to a friend.
At the beginning of July, an investigator from the provincial capital of Omsk, located 300 kilometers away, paid a visit to the Balobanovs. He told the family that officials were searching for their son, who he claimed had left the troops without leave. By now, Marina and Sergey Balabonov were beside themselves with worry over their son. Andrey's father then filed a missing persons report with the police in Omsk.
On July 17, the family sent a letter to Vladimir Putin in which they wrote, "Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, we are asking you to find our son Andrey." Marina, a saleswoman at "Sundown," one of the three shops in the 800-resident village, rummages through her son's room as she tries to find a copy of the letter and gathers photos and documents from the dresser.
"They have to get my Andrey back," she says. "He was just a normal soldier and Russia claims that it isn't even waging a war." She looks fatigued and says she has had rings around her eyes for weeks now. The knowledge that her son may be fighting in a war that doesn't even officially exist is making it difficult for her to sleep nights.
Mysterious Deaths
Last Thursday, the family received a letter from the public prosecutor stating that Andrey has been declared a deserter. The country to which he had pledged his allegiance and that dispatched him on a secret mission is now trying to label him as a traitor. "Our son may be sent to prison for up to five years," his father says. "But we're certain that he only wound up in Ukraine under his commander's orders."
The Balobanovs also received a letter from the Kremlin indirectly confirming that Andrey is being held as a prisoner of war. The letter states that the matter has been transferred to the Russian Foreign Ministry. "Since then, we've been getting calls constantly from people who don't identify themselves and demand that we not discuss the case with the press," says Sergey Balobanov.
Attempts at intimidation, lies and propaganda have all been part of Putin's creeping invasion of Ukraine for weeks. Hundreds of Russian soldiers have reportedly been removed from their units and allegedly sent on maneuvers before receiving orders to go to Ukraine.
In Pskov near the border to Estonia, police a week ago tracked down and harassed journalists trying to cover the burial of two soldiers who, by all appearances, perished in eastern Ukraine. Indeed, the number of instances in which Russian soldiers are dying under unexplained circumstances is growing.
In Kostroma, a city along the Volga, around 25 mothers and fathers stood in front of the barracks demanding to know the whereabouts of their sons.
All serve in Regiment 1065 and there has been no news about them. One woman screamed angrily that her husband had called from the rebel stronghold Donetsk and that people should stop telling lies. "You're just bringing harm to your sons and your husbands if you start talking about it to the media," one officer warned the woman in response.
Putin has been deceiving the world since the very beginning of the Ukraine crisis. When asked on March 4 if Russia was thinking about annexing Crimea, he answered, "No, we are not." But only 14 days later the peninsula's annexation was celebrated on Red Square.The late-model Ford Escape and I arrived at the intersection in my neighborhood at about the same time. I recognized the driver, a nice guy whose kids play with mine. I brought my Honda CB1100 to a stop and waited. So did he. Which was unusual, because he didn't have a stop sign. No, wait—he's stopped to talk to another one of our neighbors. I gave him about 30 seconds to change his mind and go forward. When he gave no sign of ending his conversation, I let the clutch out and started crossing the intersection.
Naturally, about half a second later, my neighbor started driving forward, still looking back at the person to whom he'd been speaking. I beeped the horn and twisted the throttle at the same time. He came to a sheepish halt about where my right leg would have been had I not accelerated out of the way and waved apologetically.
Think about that for a minute. Although my neighbor hadn't looked ahead for more than half a minute, he naturally assumed that the road ahead of him was clear. Sounds crazy, right? In fact, his behavior was less crazy than it might sound, and chances are that we've all done the same thing ourselves, for reasons that are both inherently biological and completely normal.
[pullquote align='L'] If you could see a raw feed of the image sent to your brain by your eye at any given time, you'd be horrified.[/pullquote]
The first thing to understand is that our eyes don't see very much. We tend to think of eyes as cameras, but in reality they are biological devices with considerable limitations. If you could see a raw feed of the image sent to your brain by your eye at any given time, you'd be horrified. It's mostly blurry, it has a blind spot near the middle, and it's upside down.
Luckily for us, our eyes are constantly in motion, even when we think we are looking straight ahead. They send several pictures every second to the brain, which then assembles the best and sharpest parts from each picture into a mental image. That's what we see. When you read the print on this page or screen, your eyes are flicking all over that page or screen, assembling a complete picture that you can then read.
Think of an old-school radar screen. There's a bright green line that tells you what the radar is seeing at that very moment, and it sweeps in a circle, continually refreshing the screen. Compared with the human eye, the line is the small area it can focus and see at any given time, and the whole screen is the image we have in our minds.
The human eye isn't really that great when compared to other outstanding eyes in the animal kingdom, such as the ones attached to eagles, some grazing animals, and (wait for it) sharks. But when it's combined with the human brain as an evolved system for hunting deer and the like, it's not bad. The problems start when things happen faster than the eye-brain system can "see." Since the eye is only looking at a very small area at any given time, it's possible that an alien or hugely advanced predator of some type, could actually hide in plain sight by moving quickly enough to avoid the eyeball's motion. (This is part of the plot of Blindsight by Peter Watts, a great book that I can't recommend enough to all of you.)
Luckily for us, the eyeball-tracking aliens haven't arrived—or they have arrived, and they are simply content to sit around and harmlessly make fun of us for being so blind. I can't say for sure, because I wouldn't be able to see them. But there are things that move quickly enough, and are small enough, that we don't necessarily "see" them even when they are right in front of us.
As you might guess, motorcycles fall into that category of things that we don't always perceive even if they are right in our field of vision. A motorcycle approaching head-on from a distance occupies a very small part of a driver's vision. If it's going quickly, it's possible that the eye simply won't get around to looking at it enough to make it "stick" in the brain before it arrives in the driver's immediate vicinity. That part is important because the brain can really only see things that it understands.
Your brain has a sort of visual shorthand for objects. For instance, chances are that you aren't really seeing everything around you right now, especially if you are in a familiar environment. You're just seeing the shortcuts that your brain is placing there to conserve processing power and attention. That's why people become fatigued more easily in foreign countries or really unfamiliar terrain; their brain is working overtime trying to account for all the things that it doesn't normally see. For this same reason, if you don't expect to see a motorcycle or pedestrian during a certain part of your morning commute, your brain will often ignore a motorcycle or pedestrian right in front of you, particularly if they aren't moving sideways across your field of vision.
Alright. Let's take a typical case. A driver is preparing to turn left from a side road onto a main road. There's a GSXR-1000 flying down that main road because what's the point of having something that fast if you don't wind it out, right? So our driver looks left and doesn't see the Gixxer because it's pretty far away. He looks right. Now he looks left again. The bike is much closer, almost on him, but because he didn't see it last time—and this is important—his brain simply discards the Gixxer as a result of his brain not expecting to see it. His brain is already busy doing this discarding for everything from his blind spot to various floaters in his vision to his own eyelashes. What's the harm in adding just one more object?
So the driver pulls out and BAM it's a GSXR-1000 in the door and at least one person who will wind up either dead or crippled. And the driver will tell the cop, "I didn't see him." And the cop will chalk it up to the Suzuki simply moving too quickly or to the driver being inattentive. But there truly is that third possibility: The driver looked right at the Suzuki but failed to truly "see" him.
This sort of thing happens with bicycles and pedestrians as well, of course, but it doesn't happen nearly as often because
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, making the case for why voters should put Clinton in the White House.
In his statement on Wednesday, Sanders said Trump "tapped into the anger of declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media."
"People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids," Sanders said in the statement.
"All while the very rich become much richer."Imagine if Wall Street were to honor Bernie Madoff for his skills as an investor ten years from now. The equivalent just happened in Florida, where Betty Sembler--co-founder of the abusive Straight, Inc. rehab chain--has been named by Governor Charlie Crist to its "Women's Hall of Fame" for her work fighting drugs. Last year, the DEA gave her a lifetime achievement award.
You may know Betty Sembler as wife of mall magnate Mel Sembler (another co-founder of Straight). He's the guy who headed the Scooter Libby Defense Fund, chaired finances for the Republicans during the first election of the second Bush, and served as ambassador to Italy, naming a building he acquired for the embassy for himself, in the process.
Straight--which at its peak had centers in seven states and claims to have treated 50,000 teens--has long been discredited for not only being ineffective, but harmful. Its policy of using confrontation, humiliation and physical punishment led to dozens of lawsuits, with plaintiffs winning hundreds of thousands of dollars for kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment and emotional abuse.
Some of the more notorious cases involved kids being gagged with Kotex, being restrained by fellow students until they wet or even soiled themselves, and frequent use of sexually degrading and homophobic slurs. Many survivors have since been diagnosed with PTSD; there have also been numerous suicides.
Research conducted on confrontation has found that the more it is used, the more likely patients are to drink or take drugs and drop out of treatment.
"With all the available evidence-based treatments with proven effects, it's hard to understand a desire to support things that fly in the face of evidence," says addiction expert Tom McLellan, PhD, who is CEO of the Treatment Research Institute and a professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.
Regarding Straight's tactics, McLellan says, "They're counterproductive. It's hard to even conceive of a therapeutic relationship based on confrontation, bullying and frankly, meanness."
Says William Miller, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of New Mexico and one of the leading experts on addiction treatment evaluation, "Obviously this recognition was not founded on evidence-based effectiveness in helping troubled teens."
If Straight was simply a historical relic, the refusal to accept its tarnished place in the history of addiction treatment might be tolerable. However, programs based on Straight like the Pathway Family Center in Detroit and AARC in Canada are still operating. While the worst physical excesses seem to have declined in some places, the emotional abuse of being constantly forced to focus on your flaws and bad behavior, remains.
And most teens who have been through these programs say that the psychological abuse is the worst part. Imagine being attacked every day as a "druggie" who needs to "surrender" and "admit powerlessness" and "character defects." Consider what it feels like to be told when you do discuss your actual drug use that you are lying, that you must have done more than that, that you are not telling the whole story. If you admit excessive use, you are attacked and further identified as an addict-- if you don't, you are bullied for being a liar.
Meanwhile, imagine having every aspect of your daily life under a microscope, with no privacy, even at night or in the bathroom. Everything you do or say is picked over by other teenagers whose only chance of going home and getting free is to pick up on your weaknesses and attack them, to prove that they are "working the program." And you have to attack others, too, if you want to "advance."
Consider, too, that your sex life is included in this examination--and that any desire for anyone else will be attacked as "fake" or "addictive," rather than seen as human and normal. Any relationships that you have had in the past will be tarred as "druggy"-- and you will be told that your first love never really cared for you, that anything that happened while you were "using" was about drugs and nothing more.
If you confess to being a virgin, you'll be ridiculed for that--but if you admit sexual activity, you'll be reviled as a slut. And if program staff make inappropriate advances, you'll be blamed for leading them on!
I wish I was making this stuff up--but unfortunately, I've personally listened to and read hundreds of accounts of similar and even worse treatment at Straight, Inc. and its descendants. And sadly, it's not limited to them: other "troubled teen" programs like the Family Foundation School, the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools and the Elan School are similarly based on "breaking" teenagers to fix them.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
June 21, 2015, 11:29 PM GMT / Updated June 21, 2015, 11:29 PM GMT By Tim Stelloh
A child actor famous for his role in a "Star Wars" prequel was arrested last week after leading South Carolina police on a 25-mile high-speed chase, Colleton County Sheriff's Sgt. Kyle Strickland told NBC News on Sunday.
Strickland identified the actor as Jake Broadbent, 26, formerly known as Jake Lloyd, who played Anakin Skywalker in "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace." According to his IMDB profile, Broadbent's last film was in 2005.
Strickland said the chase began after the sheriff's office was alerted to a reckless driver about 2 p.m. ET. The driver was Broadbent, and when a deputy followed him, he speeded away. "He starts passing cars on the double yellow line," Strickland said. "He's going head on into oncoming traffic."
Deputies followed Broadbent onto Interstate 95, where he was driving "upwards of 100 miles per hour," Strickland said. Broadbent drove through a grassy median, where he crashed through an old fence, then onto a frontage road, Strickland said. At a dead end, when the pavement became a logging road overgrown with trees, Broadbent kept driving, Strickland said.
"He bounced off a bunch of them like a pinball machine," he said.
Strickland said it was unclear why Broadbent was in South Carolina — his address is in Colorado — or why he tried to evade police. "He didn't appear to be on drugs or intoxicated," Strickland said.
Broadbent remained in the Colleton County Detention Center, where he was being held Sunday in lieu of $10,700 bond on charges of resisting arrest, reckless driving, driving without a license and failure to stop.“We are obviously entering a new stage in the development of our political system, and we should not close our eyes to that,” Mr. Medvedev told members of United Russia, according to an official transcript. “It has already begun. And it began not as a result of some demonstrations — that is just superficial, it is foam, if you like — it is a manifestation of human dissatisfaction.
“It began because the old model — which faithfully and truly served our state in recent years, and didn’t serve it badly, and which we all defended — it has exhausted itself,” Mr. Medvedev said, adding that United Russia should take a leading role in proposing reforms. “We need to change the model, and only then will there be dynamic development in our country.” He warned that Russia will face disaster if the public ceases to view the government as genuinely elected — a danger, since Mr. Putin is likely to run against a slate of docile, Kremlin-approved candidates, on the heels of the parliamentary elections that have drawn anger.
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“It is categorically inadmissible that the political system be delegitimized,” Mr. Medvedev said. “This would only mean one thing for our country: the collapse of the state. What Russia is without government is something that everyone remembers well from history books, it’s 1917.”
The Russian authorities have said that American leaders were interfering by publicly criticizing the elections, and Mr. Medvedev said he had raised complaints with President Obama in a telephone conversation on Friday.
“I was of course obliged to tell him one thing: you can assess our elections as you like, that’s your business. Honestly speaking, this has little significance to us,” Mr. Medvedev said, who has enjoyed a warm relationship with his American counterpart during the administration’s efforts to “reset” relations with Russia. “But when on the next day, or the day after that, begins the old song and dance, when we hear the reproofs in the worst traditions of the cold war, that is outrageous. It is definitely not a reset. And I was obliged to say this to my comrade yesterday.”
He seemed to be referring to a Dec. 5 statement by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Putin has said that Mrs. Clinton’s words were a coded signal to “some actors in our country” to organize street protests.
Mr. Medvedev seemed not to agree. “The street, that is not the U.S. State Department,” he said. “The street is the mood of our people. And the authorities should responsibly and clearly say this. It is their mood.”NEW DELHI: The Congress has asked PM Narendra Modi to explain if it was ethical to accept gifts as head of government for personal use, accusing him of "dhanpati" connection.Responding to the news of the PM putting on auction the gifts he received including the now-famous pinstriped suit, AICC spokesman Randeep Surjewala said, "The PM must answer the ethical question of accepting gifts and not depositing its proceeds with the exchequer."Surjewala said, "The wisdom in hindsight of auctioning the Rs 10 lakh one-time wearable suit is circus of the absurd. It will neither absolve nor mitigate the 'dhanpati' connections of Modi."Congress is of the view that the key issue with the gifts, especially the suit, is that when accepted as head of state or country, they are to be deposited with the exchequer, which the prime minister has not done.He is also not at liberty to accept gifts in personal capacity. Party leaders said they would ask the pm to clarify on this issue.Gary Murphy of Arlington watches a tutorial to join a Quakecon match on his custom PC during QuakeCon at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center on Thursday. Murphy said he spent a weekend creating his PC case
QuakeCon, which has spent more than two decades in the Dallas area, is a big deal. It attracts thousands of attendees every year, and in 2017, it is the home of a video game tournament with a $1 million prize pool. Not bad for a convention that started with a group of less than 50 people in 1996. What began as a small gathering for fans of the first-person action game Quake (created by Dallas-area game developer Id Software) has grown into one of the country's biggest gatherings of video game fans.
QuakeCon 2017
While anyone can come to the convention -- for free -- to play games, watch panels, enjoy board games and more, the most notable draw has always been the BYOC: the "Bring Your Own Computer" area. More than 2,000 gamers camp out for what is essentially a four-day video game party. Walking through the aisles can make for a fascinating people-watching experience. You'll meet the players that come to QuakeCon with their team of serious, competitive friends who play games like Overwatch and Playerunknown's Battlegrounds. You'll meet the people who have spent weeks if not months creating crazy computer cases to show off in a public venue. You'll see the people who are there just to watch Star Wars: The Phantom Menace on a projector while people nearby play Super Smash Bros. on an old TV. And as of recent years, some QuakeCon attendees are just as interested in playing tabletop board and card games as they are the latest first-person shooter.
In short, it's one of the weirdest, yet coolest four-day parties you can attend, provided you really love games.
This year, thousands of hopeful BYOC attendees were turned away, and some of the people who did manage to get tickets attempted to resell them for as much as $1,000. That's a problem, says Id Software's Tim Willits, and it's one they hope to start solving as soon as next year. Part of that solution involves a change in venue. While QuakeCon was held at the Hilton Anatole from 2010 to 2016, this year marked the event's return to the Gaylord Texan Resort Hotel and Convention Center in Grapevine. QuakeCon has been here before, but not since 2009.
A Slideshow of 5 Photos Gamers compete against each other in various multiplayer games during QuakeCon at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center Thursday. Brandon Wade/Special Contributor
Joseph Morjan (center) and Joseph Fadely of Forney play a match of Overwatch. Brandon Wade/Special Contributor
Tristen Brown of Lewisville plays Overwatch during QuakeCon. Brandon Wade/Special Contributor
Jeff Pittman of Dallas plays "Elder Scrolls Ledges" during QuakeCon. Brandon Wade/Special Contributor
Tristen Brown of Lewisville plays Overwatch. Brandon Wade/Special Contributor
Unfortunately, the BYOC is a bit smaller this year, but Willits says that won't be the case in the future. "We are coming back to Gaylord next year, and the year after, and I think the year after that, and we're going to have even more space. So we're going to expand the BYOC.... We'll have the entire convention center, so we're going to try to almost double [BYOC seating]." That could allow for a couple thousand more attendees, making an already huge event even bigger. Granted, that size could bring some additional infrastructure challenges. About an hour after our interview with Willits on Thursday, he could be found running around the BYOC because the internet in the entire convention center had gone down. And when you have thousands of connected gaming computers gathered together, reliable internet and power are essential. (As of this writing, the source of the outage is unconfirmed.)
20 years of QuakeCon memories from the Id Software employee who's seen them all
As far as the venue, though, Willits and his team seem happy with where they've landed. "We really like this place, and we're excited to be back at the Gaylord," he says. Willits also stresses that you don't need to camp out in the BYOC to enjoy QuakeCon. The folks at Id Software and their parent company, Bethesda, have made an effort to give people who don't have their own PCs something to do at the show. There is a cosplay competition for the first time ever, for example, as well as public computers that anyone can use to play games like Doom. Attendees can also get their hands on some big unreleased games, Wolfenstein II, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider and The Evil Within 2, as well as immerse themselves in virtual-reality demos for upcoming games like Skyrim VR. But what about Quake, the game that started all of this frenzy in the first place? This year is actually a big one for Quake, because the newest game in the series, Quake Champions, has just launched in Early Access. What that means is that while the game isn't actually finished, you can buy it and play it with other people, giving fans a brand new Quake game to play for the first time since Quake 4 was released in 2005. Id Software and Bethesda are making a big push for Champions to be a hit in the fast-growing esports scene. You could argue (and Willits has) that the original Quake was one of the first major competitive games that could be classified as an esport, and the hope is that Champions continues that legacy. An impressive stage sits front-and-center in the QuakeCon exhibit hall, encouraging even the most casual attendees to sit and watch at least a little bit of high-level competitive play. "Once you fall in love with Quake, you'll love Quake forever," Willits says.
A Slideshow of 4 Photos Shane Hendrixson (left), Michael Bignet, Andrew Trulli and Timothy Fogarty compete in the Quake Champions tournament during QuakeCon on Thursday. Brandon Wade/Special Contributor
Team Liquid and team 2Z compete against each other in Quake Champions. Brandon Wade/Special Contributor
Shane Hendrixson (left), Michael Bignet, Andrew Trulli and Timothy Fogarty compete in the Quake Champions tournament. Brandon Wade/Special Contributor
Shane Hendrixson and Michael Bignet compete in the Quake Champion" tournament. Brandon Wade/Special ContributorPresident George W. Bush was allowed to continue with a routine visit to a school when the terrorist attacks occurred on September 11, 2001. Remarkably, members of the Secret Service and other personnel responsible for protecting the president failed to evacuate him from the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, after they learned that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and it became clear that America was under attack.
As the nation's leader, Bush should have been considered a likely target for terrorists. Furthermore, his schedule had been publicized in advance and so terrorists could have found out where he would be on September 11.
And yet, after arriving there shortly before 9:00 a.m. on September 11, Bush was allowed to stay at the Booker Elementary School until around 9:35 a.m.--almost 50 minutes after the first hijacked plane crashed into the World Trade Center and over 30 minutes after the second hijacked plane hit the Trade Center. He left the school just two or three minutes before a third attack occurred, when the Pentagon was struck.
The Secret Service's failure to promptly evacuate Bush from the school is particularly baffling in light of the accounts of some key officials who were with the president that morning, in which these men recalled being worried that the school would be attacked. There were even concerns that terrorists might crash a plane into it. The failure to evacuate the school is also alarming in that it left hundreds of people there--not just the president--potentially in danger.
It would be wrong to attribute the inaction of the Secret Service to incompetence. Agents who were in Sarasota for Bush's visit to the city were highly skilled individuals. They arranged extensive security measures for the visit, and they acted with great urgency and professionalism as they protected Bush after he left the school. They appear to have only failed to adequately protect the president for a period of about 40 minutes in the middle of the 9/11 attacks, after he arrived at the school.
We need to consider, therefore, whether the inaction of the Secret Service at this critical time is evidence of something sinister. Could efforts have been made to somehow put the agents in Sarasota into a state of paralysis? They might, for example, have been tricked into thinking the reports they received about the terrorist attacks in New York were simulated, as part of a training exercise.
The inaction of the Secret Service could in fact be evidence that, in contradiction to the official narrative of 9/11, rogue individuals in the U.S. government were involved in planning and perpetrating the terrorist attacks on September 11.
NO ONE CALLED THE PRESIDENT ABOUT THE FIRST CRASH DURING THE DRIVE TO THE SCHOOL
On the morning of September 11, 2001, President Bush was scheduled to visit the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, where he planned to take part in a reading demonstration, and then talk to parents and teachers about his education policies. [1]
His motorcade left the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key, where he'd spent the previous night, at around 8:39 a.m. on September 11 and headed to the school. At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. [2] Numerous people in the motorcade, including White House officials, military officers, and journalists, learned about the crash as they were being driven to the school. [3] But no one called the president to tell him what had happened.
Bush was first informed about the crash at around 8:55 a.m., when he arrived at the school. Navy Captain Deborah Loewer, director of the White House Situation Room, ran up to him and said, "Mr. President, the Situation Room is reporting that one of the World Trade Center towers has been hit by a plane." "This is all we know," she added. [4]
Bush was told about the crash again by Karl Rove, his senior adviser, as he was shaking hands with members of the official greeting party outside the school. [5] He has recalled thinking at the time that the incident must have been "a terrible accident." [6]
He then talked on the phone with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was at the White House. She told him the plane that struck the World Trade Center was a commercial jetliner, not a light aircraft. But Bush still thought the crash was an accident and went ahead with the scheduled event. [7] At 9:02 a.m., he entered the second-grade classroom of teacher Sandra Kay Daniels to listen to the students reading. [8]
BUSH CONTINUED WITH THE READING EVENT AFTER BEING TOLD, 'AMERICA IS UNDER ATTACK'
A minute later, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Bush was alerted to what had happened at around 9:05 a.m. to 9:07 a.m., when Andrew Card, his chief of staff, approached him and whispered in his ear: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack." [9]
Despite receiving this devastating news, Bush carried on as if nothing was wrong. "In the middle of a modern-day Pearl Harbor," author James Bamford commented, "he simply turned back to the matter at hand: the day's photo op." [10] Significantly, author Philip Melanson pointed out, "no [Secret Service] agents were there to surround the president and remove him instantly." [11]
Bush listened to the children reading for five minutes, and then spent at least two minutes asking them questions and telling the school's principal about the second crash. [12] He left the classroom shortly before 9:15 a.m. [13] He was still sticking closely to his schedule, which specified that he would conclude his participation in the reading demonstration at 9:15 a.m. [14]
BUSH GAVE A SPEECH THAT WAS SHOWN LIVE ON TV
Even then, with the demonstration over, no effort was made to get the president away from the school. Instead, Bush spent the next 15 minutes in the "staff hold," a room adjacent to Daniels' classroom, where he talked on the phone with officials in Washington, DC, and worked on a statement he wanted to give before leaving the school. [15]
He entered the school library to deliver the statement at 9:30 a.m. This was the same time as he was originally set to address parents and teachers at the school. So, 44 minutes after the first attack on the World Trade Center and 27 minutes after the second, it was still apparently considered unnecessary to alter the president's schedule. The only change was that instead of discussing his education policies, Bush talked about the attacks in New York and announced that he would be heading back to Washington. [16]
The short speech was broadcast live on television and watched by millions of Americans. [17] If any terrorists had been unaware of the president's location before then, if they were watching TV, they knew now.
Bush only started to deviate from his schedule after he finished the speech. He was originally set to head out of the school at 9:55 a.m., with his limousine leaving there 10 minutes later and heading to the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport. [18] But due to the extraordinary circumstances, his motorcade left the school and speeded toward the airport at around 9:35 a.m.
During the journey to the airport, Bush talked on the phone with Condoleezza Rice and she told him the Pentagon had been attacked. [19] (The attack on the Pentagon took place at 9:37 a.m.) The motorcade reached the airport sometime between 9:42 a.m. and 9:45 a.m. Air Force One, the president's plane, took off without a fixed destination at around 9:55 a.m. [20]
BUSH'S LOCATION WAS PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE
The fact that the president was allowed to stick to his schedule and stay at the Booker Elementary School for 40 minutes while America was under attack is particularly alarming since Bush's plans for September 11 were publicly announced four days in advance and had then been reported in the media. If terrorists had wanted to kill the president as part of the 9/11 attacks, therefore, they could have found out where he would be on September 11 and tried to attack him while he was there.
On September 7, 2001, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer revealed in a press briefing that on the morning of September 11, Bush was going to be in Sarasota, where he would "continue his focus on reading and education." A transcript of the briefing would presumably have been published promptly on the White House website. [21] The president's plan to visit Sarasota was reported that day in newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Florida Times-Union. [22]
The most informative reports, unsurprisingly, appeared in a newspaper for Sarasota, where the planned visit was "big news," according to journalist and author Mark Bowden. [23] The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported on September 7 that Bush would "probably speak at a local school" when he visited Sarasota on September 11. [24] The following day, the newspaper revealed where the president would go during his visit. He planned to deliver "an education speech Tuesday morning at Emma E. Booker Elementary School," it reported. [25]
Some people who were at the Booker Elementary School on September 11 recognized the danger that existed because Bush's plans for the day had been publicized in advance. "The fact that the president would be at Booker Elementary at this hour, on this day, had been public knowledge for days," Mike Morell, Bush's CIA briefer, wrote. [26] Therefore, he commented, "anyone could have known about it." [27]
Karl Rove similarly stated: "The president's whereabouts were obviously known. Everybody knew exactly where he was, if you wanted to know." [28] Colonel Steve Burns of the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office remarked, "The [president's] itinerary was known at least for several days prior to his visit to Sarasota, so it was a real concern that maybe there was additional targets, even being the school or something." [29]
MEMBERS OF BUSH'S ENTOURAGE WERE WORRIED THAT THE SCHOOL MIGHT BE ATTACKED
The failure of the Secret Service to promptly evacuate Bush from the Booker Elementary School in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center is also baffling considering that some members of his entourage believed at the time that the school might be attacked because of his presence there.
Members of Bush's Secret Service detail were worried that the president could be a target, according to Dave Wilkinson, assistant special agent in charge of the presidential protection division. They were asking each other, "Is there any direction of interest towards the president... or is this just an attack on New York?" he recalled. [30]
Rove confirmed that the Secret Service thought the president could be a target while he was at the school. Bush's agents determined that the attacks "might be an effort to decapitate the government," he said. [31] This meant the terrorists wanted to "take all the leading officials and kill them." [32]
Mike Morell recalled "growing increasingly concerned about [the president's] safety" while Bush was in the staff hold, after the reading demonstration ended. [33] Among the president's staff there was a "fear of the unknown," according to Brian Montgomery, the White House's director of advance. "We didn't know if someone had put a biological agent or chemical agent at the school," he said. [34]
Some people were worried that terrorists would fly an aircraft into the school. Bush's Secret Service agents were concerned "that someone might fly an airplane into the Emma Booker Elementary School or there might be a... suicide bomber nearby," Rove said. [35] Morell recalled that he was "really worried that someone was going to fly a plane into that school." [36] He contemplated telling Edward Marinzel, the head of Bush's Secret Service detail, about his concern, but decided not to after determining that Marinzel had probably already considered this scenario. [37]
Even some teachers, students, and parents recognized the potential danger to the school. There was "a fear by many parents that Booker Elementary was now a target by terrorists because of the president's visit," Clesha Henry, a fifth-grade teacher at the school, recalled. [38] Derek Jenkins, another teacher, stated that after Bush left the school, "One of my thoughts shifted to the fact that Emma E. Booker is located only a few miles from the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport and we could have very easily been a target as well." [39] Henry recalled a boy in her class saying: "I'm scared, Ms. Henry. Are we going to die?" [40]
SOME OFFICIALS WANTED TO EVACUATE BUSH AFTER THE SECOND ATTACK OCCURRED
Not only were some members of Bush's entourage concerned that the Booker Elementary School might be attacked, at least two key officials--Major Paul Montanus and Edward Marinzel--wanted the president to be evacuated from the place immediately after they learned of the second crash in New York.
Montanus, the military aide who accompanied Bush to the school, apparently called for an evacuation after seeing Flight 175 crashing into the World Trade Center on television, at 9:03 a.m. Just after 9:00 a.m., according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Sarasota County Sheriff Bill Balkwill was approached at the school by "a Marine responsible for carrying Bush's phone." This person was presumably Montanus, a Marine Corps officer. Montanus had heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, but little else about the incident in New York. He asked Balkwill, "Can you get me to a television?"
The two men, along with a SWAT team member and three Secret Service agents, went to an office at the school where there was a TV. There, they saw the coverage of Flight 175 hitting the South Tower. Presumably realizing that America was under attack, Montanus exclaimed, "We're out of here!" and asked, "Can you get everyone ready?" according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. According to his own recollection, he said: "What in God's name? We gotta get out of here!" [41]
Montanus's words should presumably have led to the president and his entourage being evacuated from the school immediately. "While the Secret Service is charged with protecting the president's actual body," Marist magazine explained, "it is the president's military aide... who directs any evacuation" and the White House Military Office, which oversees the president's military aides, "that executes [the president's] safe passage." [42] And yet no evacuation took place at this time.
Marinzel appears to have been equally determined to get Bush away from the school after he learned about the second attack on the World Trade Center. After he was told about the second crash, he recalled: "Right then and there, things completely changed. We needed to figure out what we were going to do with the president." [43] Marinzel "wanted to get the hell out of [the school] as fast as possible," Mike Morell said. [44] He "was eager to get the president out of the school, to Air Force One, and airborne," Karl Rove described, and "immediately began making arrangements to beef up the motorcade and get it ready to move." [45]
Even Bush appears to have realized that he needed to be evacuated from the school promptly. Describing the situation while he was in the staff hold after the reading demonstration ended, he commented, "One thing for certain: I needed to get out of where I was." [46] And yet, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, while the Secret Service was "anxious to move the president to a safer location" at this time, it "did not think it imperative for him to run out the door." [47]
SOME PEOPLE DELAYED BUSH'S DEPARTURE FROM THE SCHOOL
Why Bush was allowed to stay at the school after the second crash at the World Trade Center occurred, especially in light of the desire of Montanus and Marinzel to get him away from there, is unknown. A few accounts, though, describe people delaying his departure.
Andrew Card apparently persuaded Secret Service agents to put off getting Bush away from the school until after the president had given his 9:30 a.m. speech from the library, according to Dave Wilkinson. After Marinzel told Bush, "We need to get you to Air Force One and get you airborne," Wilkinson recalled, the president's Secret Service agents "ended up with a compromise." This was because Card had said, "We have a whole auditorium full, waiting for the next event [i.e. Bush's speech]" and "there was no imminent threat there in Sarasota." It was therefore agreed that Bush could give his speech before leaving the school. [48]
The president's departure from the school was delayed by Bush himself, according to Frank Brogan, lieutenant governor of Florida. Brogan recalled that when he was with Bush in the staff hold, after the reading demonstration, "The Secret Service tried to get the president to return to Air Force One immediately, but he refused, saying he was committed to staying on the ground long enough to write a statement about what was happening, read it to the nation, and lead a moment of silence for the victims." [49] Bush "was courageously insistent about remaining on the ground to make a statement to the people of America," Brogan commented. [50]
Mark Rosenker, director of the White House Military Office, who was with the president at the school, indicated that Bush may have been allowed to stay at the school for such a long time because some people actually thought he was safe there. When asked in an interview, "In those early moments, there isn't a sense that the president could be in danger, is there?" he replied, "Not initially, the way we perceived it." The White House Military Office is "very conservative with the Secret Service," he added. [51]
THE SECRET SERVICE'S MISSION WAS TO KEEP THE PRESIDENT SAFE
The Secret Service is responsible for the protection of the president. [52] Various accounts have indicated that this agency, more than any other, should have ensured that Bush was promptly evacuated from the Booker Elementary School when it became clear that the U.S. was under terrorist attack on September 11.
The Secret Service is "responsible for protection of high-visibility officials and facilities that terrorists might target," a report by the Office of Management and Budget pointed out. [53] And in a "state of emergency"--like when America came under attack on September 11--its plan is "to get every protectee to a secure site," according to a National Geographic Channel documentary about the agency. [54]
The agency should decide what actions to take to protect the president, regardless of the president's demands, according to Dave Wilkinson. "By federal law, the Secret Service has to protect the president," he said. "The wishes of that person that day are secondary to what the law expects of us. Theoretically it's not his call, it's our call." [55]
The Secret Service should have evacuated Bush from the school immediately after the second attack took place, according to Philip Melanson, an expert on the agency. "With an unfolding terrorist attack, the procedure should have been to get the president to the closest secure location as quickly as possible, which clearly is not a school," Melanson stated. Bush would have been "safer in that presidential limo, which is bombproof and blastproof and bulletproof," he added. [56]
Melanson contrasted the inaction of Bush's agents at the school to the procedure that would normally have been followed if the president was considered to be in danger. "When there is a threat or intrusion at the White House," he wrote, "agents rush into the Oval Office, the family quarters, or wherever the president is, and immediately surround him and shut down the comings or goings of anyone--thus 'crashing' the Oval Office or the entire West Wing." [57]
GREAT CARE WAS TAKEN WITH THE PREPARATIONS FOR BUSH'S TRIP
The inaction of the Secret Service while Bush was at the Booker Elementary School in the middle of the 9/11 attacks stands out when we contrast it to the care with which the agency prepared for the president's visit to the school.
Major Robert Darling, the White House airlift operations liaison officer who organized Bush's trip to Sarasota, described the preparations he initiated for the trip. He arranged to have "five hardened Secret Service cars, numerous pallets of communication gear, and more than 200 support personnel" flown to Sarasota "a full four days prior to the president's scheduled arrival."
Secret Service agents and White House Military Office personnel consequently had "plenty of time to rehearse every aspect of the event, to include traveling the primary and alternate motorcade routes, practice
|
M ( \ x -> ( x, s )) mx
The new consumer type is just a TState with ProducerT as the state:
type ConsumerT i = TStateT ( ProducerT i ) type GPipe i o m = o ( i m ) type Pipe i a o m = GPipe ( ConsumerT i a ) ( ProducerT o ) m
Awaiting looks much like before,
await :: Monad m => Pipe i t o m ( Either t i ) await = lift $ TStateT headProducerT
All we need to do now to define composition is to make a NestTrans for TStateT. The function to do this is essentially the same as nestTransStateT above:
nestTransTStateT :: ( Monad ( t m ), MonadTrans t ) => s ( t m ) a -> NestTrans ( TStateT s a m ) ( t m ) nestTransTStateT s = NestTrans $ \ f m -> liftM ( \ ( a, s' ) -> f ( nestTransTStateT s' ) a ) ( runTStateT m s )
and by magic, we get composition:
compose :: Monad m => Pipe a r b m s -> Pipe b s c m t -> Pipe a r c m t compose = rebase. nestTransTStateT
General consumers and producers
There is nothing specific to ConsumerT or ProducerT in the composition function. All we require is that the 'consumer' on the left is a monad transformer, and that 'producer' on the right can be rebased. This leads to the more general type of compose:
compose :: ( MonadTransRebase t, MonadTrans r, Monad ( r m )) => GPipe r s m a -> GPipe ( TStateT s a ) t m b -> GPipe r t m b
There are some interesting choices for r, s and t here. By picking r = IdentityT, we get an upstream 'pipe' with no input, i.e. a producer. By picking t = IdentityT, we get a downstream 'pipe' with no output, i.e. a consumer.
Finally, the transformer s determines what information is based between the two pipes. By using ProducerT o you get a stream of o s followed by an a at the end. If you use ListT, there is a stream of a s with no value at the end. If you use IdentityT, just a single value is passed, so you get function composition. If you use InfiniteListT you get a producer that guarantees that it gives an infinite stream of values. And I believe it should also be possible to define more complex protocols, such as "first give 10 values of type a, then an unlimited number of b, and end with a c ". However, you do need a different await function for all of these.
To close things off, here are the producers and consumers based on IdentityT.Engadget Expand NY 2014 | Engadget’s Consumer Technology Event
Hey! You live in New York? You like technology? Got nothing planned tomorrow? Well aren’t you in luck! Tomorrow Nov. 8, 9am-6pm Experience the Future of Technology at Engadget Expand event. OH YEAH, and it’s FREE to attend. Being held in the Javits Center, this event plans to have over 10,000 attendees who will be entertained with panels, discussions and interactive opportunities. A highlight for VR enthusiasts will be the attendance of Virtuix’s Omni, the 360-degree Oculus Rift virtual reality treadmill. There are plenty of events and speakers tomorrow, you can view the entire schedule on the official event page. A few things on the agenda that focus on VR are:
Back To Reality: VR Beyond Gaming @ 1:10 – 1:40 PM
Make Your Own VR Headset @ 1:15 – 2:15 PM
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Photo Credit: Engadget[/fusion_text][/fullwidth]It all started with a box of tiny chicks, brought home from a livestock auction. Then a stray cat showed up, thin and starving and trying to survive in a blizzzard. Next a calf, rejected by his mother, battling multiple health issues and desperately clinging to life. Soon there would be goats, sheep, horses, alpacas, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, miniature donkeys and more. Animals from different places, with different stories, that all had one thing in common: the need for a safe and loving home they would never have to leave. A forever farm where they were respected and valued as the individuals they were.We, Karl and Raelle Schoenrock, opened our hearts and farm to these precious souls and Kismet Creek Farm was born. A sanctuary where every resident is treated as a someone, not a something. Where animals know only kindness, compassion, and trust. We need your help to continue construction and fencing, and offset daily operating costs as we try to build a following of visitors. Assistance with feed costs and veterinary bills is also always needed. Our ultimate goal is to be self-sufficient through tours, field trips, events, private bookings and more, but we aren't there yet! We are creating a space where people will interact with farm animals in their natural environment, getting to know their unique personalities, and forming lasting bonds. The animals we take in stay with us for their entire lives, so if you make a special connection with one, you can visit them over and over again for years.As we get established we have big dreams of hosting storytimes, movie nights, paint nights, family gatherings, reunions, birthday parties, maybe even weddings! We want to offer childrens' summer camps and one day even open a bed and breakfast or campground. The more successful we are, the more animals we can rescue and bring here to live out their days in freedom, surrounded by friendship and love. Please help us make our dream come true. Any amount will make a difference! Thank you so much!We are on Facebook, Instagram and You Tube if you want to know more about our story or our wonderful residents.The Loganville mother of two assumed the knocks on her front door Friday afternoon were from a solicitor.
“Don’t answer,” she yelled to her 9-year-old twins playing downstairs.
When the visitor began repeatedly ringing the doorbell, she called her husband at work.
“Get the kids and hide,” he told his wife.
As he dialed 911, his 37-year-old spouse, who works from home, collected the children and hid with them in a crawlspace adjoining her office. By that time, the intruder had forced his way into the three-story residence on Henderson Ridge Drive with a crowbar, authorities said. He allegedly rummaged through the home, eventually working his way up to the attic office.
“He opens the closet door and finds himself staring down the barrel of a.38 revolver,” said Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman, who relayed the woman’s narrative to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He asked that her name be withheld.
The woman fired six bullets, five of which hit Paul Ali Slater in the face and neck area, Chapman said. But Slater was still conscious.
“The guy’s face down, crying,” the sheriff said. The woman told him to stay down or she’d shoot again.
Slater, unaware that she had emptied her chamber, obliged as the mother and her children ran to a neighbor’s house.
The injured burglar eventually made it out of the home and into his car, driving away before deputies arrived on the scene. He didn’t get far.
“When you got five bullets in you, it makes you kind of disoriented,” Chapman told the AJC.
Deputies found Slater bleeding profusely in a neighbor’s driveway.
“I’m dying. Help me,” he told them, according to Chapman.
Slater was transported to Gwinnett Medical Center and is expected to survive, the sheriff said.
The Long Island native, who now lives in Gwinnett County, was released from the Gwinnett jail in late August after serving six months for simple battery and three counts of probation violation. Slater has six other arrests in Gwinnett dating back to 2008, according to jail records.
“My wife’s a hero,” the woman’s husband, Donnie Herman, told Channel 2 Action News in a brief statement. He did not respond to a request for comment from the AJC. “She protected her kids. She did what she was supposed to do.”
Chapman remarked that one of his deputies, impressed with the woman’s resolve, told the sheriff she had handled her first shooting better than he had.
“That mother’s instinct kicked in,” Chapman said. “You go after a mother’s kids and she’ll find herself capable of doing things she never thought she was capable of.”NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The number of teenagers who have experienced mania — a hallmark of bipolar disorder — is close to the number of adults estimated to have the mood disorder, suggesting that for many the condition begins during adolescence, according to a new study.
“The traditional wisdom has been that mania begins in your 20s and 30s,” said Kathleen Ries Merikangas, the study’s lead author and chief of the genetic epidemiology branch at the National Institute of Mental Health.
“I think the important thing is for people to recognize that mania does occur in adolescents,” she said.
Mania is a mood disorder characterized by excessive energy, a lack of sleep and sometimes risky and impulsive behaviors.
The most common diagnostic definition of bipolar disorder includes alternate cycles of mania and depression, though one type of bipolar diagnosis involves mania alone.
Merikangas said there have been smaller studies estimating how common mania is among children, and she and her colleagues sought to get a better handle on national rates of the disorder in kids.
The study included more than 10,000 teenagers who went through extensive interviews about their moods and behavior.
The research team found that 2.5 percent met the criteria for having had mania and depression, and 2.2 percent of teens had experienced it within the last 12 months.
Also within the year preceding the survey, 1.3 percent of the kids had mania alone and 5.7 percent had depression.
“I think that our data suggest that bipolar disorder is more common in adolescents than previous studies had shown,” Merikangas told Reuters Health.
She said it could be because the questions used during the interviews were somewhat broader than what earlier surveys had asked. But all children considered to have a mood disorder in her study met the criteria for diagnosis in the DSM-IV, the standard diagnostic manual for psychiatry.
Merikangas and her colleagues point out in their report, published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, that the rates of mood disorders they found among teenagers are close to what is seen in adults.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 2.6 percent of adults have had bipolar disorder in the last 12 months.
“This (study) confirms the impression that onset in adolescents is part of the picture for this disorder for many many patients,” said Dr. Robert Findling, director of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, in Cleveland, who was not involved in the new study.
The mood disorders also became more common as kids got older.
For instance, 1.4 percent of 13 and 14 year olds met the criteria for mania whereas nearly twice as many 17 and 18 year olds had the disorder.
Dr. Benjamin Goldstein at the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto said this study has made the greatest effort to date in determining how widespread bipolar disorder is among youth.
“I think what stuck out to me most was how severely impaired the adolescents were who were described as having bipolar disorder,” said Goldstein, who did not participate in the research.
About one out of every five teens with mania and depression had made a suicide attempt, and more than half had an anxiety or behavior disorder as well.
The study found that only about half of kids with mania and depression had been treated for the disorder.
Goldstein said there are effective treatments for kids with mood disorders.
The study results don’t necessarily suggest that the rates of bipolar symptoms in teens are rising.
More likely, Goldstein said, increasing numbers of teens who seek treatment for a psychiatric problem are being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“The take home message is that adolescence is when we really see bipolar disorder begin, so we should shift our focus of prevention and intervention earlier in the lifespan,” Merikangas said.
SOURCE: bit.ly/LGbMKa Archives of General Psychiatry, online May 7, 2012.In yet another instance of Bollywood directors trying to make progressive films but being stopped at every turn by an overzealous censor board, Alankrita Shrivasta's Lipstick Under My Burkha had to be re-edited to be cleared for theatrical release in India. The drama explores the sexual awakenings and personal struggles of four small-town Indian women and won accolades on the international festival circuit. It will finally hit theaters this Friday after being censored and delayed by almost six months.
Since the film pushes the envelope on social issues and physical intimacy -- bold in the context of Indian cinema -- the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), known for its aversion to sex and dissent, blocked it for having “contagious sexual scenes, abusive words, audio pornography,” a decision Shrivastava described as “an assault on women’s rights.”
In February, in an interview with the Quint, Shrivastava said: “Why should a film that tells a story of female desire be stifled? Don’t women have dreams? Why is it okay for women to be shown as mere objects of male fantasy, but not women with agency over themselves? It is about the continued stifling of women’s voices in our country.”
More on Forbes: 'Rangoon' To 'Sarkar 3': The Worst Bollywood Films Of 2017 -- So Far
Lipstick Under My Burkha won the Spirit of Asia Award at 2016's Tokyo Film Festival, followed by the Oxfam Award for gender equality at the Mumbai Film Festival. Among its recent honors, the film won an audience choice award at the Glasgow Film Festival. The cast includes Ratna Pathak Shah, Konkana Sen Sharma, Aahana Kumra and Plabita Borthakur.
A history of re-edits
Bollywood movies deemed too vulgar by the censor board have dealt with similar hurdles for years. The CBFC frequently orders cuts to films it believes are racy, gratuitous or risk offending religious sentiments.
In 1994, Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, based on the true story of Phoolan Devi, a lower-caste child bride who becomes a notorious bandit and wreaks revenge on a group of men who gang raped her, faced the wrath of the censors for having brutal rape scene, which is central to the story.
In 1996, CBFC raised objections to sex scenes in Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra -- A Tale of Love. As did Deepa Mehta’s Water in 2005, and more recently, Anupam Sharma’s UnIndian, Shonali Bose’s Margarita With a Straw and Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh.
In 2016, the censor ordered 94 cuts to Udta Punjab that dealt with drug abuse in Punjab state, including the removal of any reference to Punjab or drug use.
Hollywood is also under scrutiny
It isn't just Bollywood films. CBFC also banned several Hollywood films being released in India, such as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, 50 Shades of Grey and Blue Jasmine. In 2015, it even called for cutting out a kissing scene in Bond film, Spectre, which attracted international ridicule. The same year, there was international outrage when CBFC banned Leslee Udwin's documentary, India's Daughter, about the brutal gang rape of a 19-year-old student, who later died of her injuries.
Expletives have also landed films in hot water. (CBFC chair Pahlaj Nihalani once issued a list of expletives he wanted banned from Indian films.) Just last week, the censor board ordered that a documentary about the economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen be altered to remove words including “Hindu” “India” and “cow.”
Audiences will decide for themselves
A landmark decision from the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal granted Lipstick Under My Burkha an adult certificate, but the fight over censorship isn't over. The country’s conservative government has been pushing for more restrictions on what it sees as a western colonization of traditional Indian values in India cinema, while the furor has also become a microcosm for the industry’s frustration with the inconsistency and arbitrariness of the board's decisions: It regularly approves adult comedies containing derogatory jokes about women.
A "Lipstick rebellion" started by co-producer Ekta Kapoor to promote the film has had the backing of the powerful film fraternity with many Bollywood stars expressing their support for the film.
“I feel that the release is not just about Lipstick but is also a victory and celebration that women can tell their stories,” Shrivastava told AFP. “It always makes you wonder what people are expecting but that's only until Friday and then it will be clear what the film is and how ridiculous all this drama was," she added.
More on Forbes: The Oscars Of Bollywood Hit NYC As U.S. Embraces Indian FilmA Los Angeles artist who has been making paintings that depict local branches of multinational banks on fire has caught the attention of L.A. police, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times.
The artist, Alex Schaefer, was working on a painting of Chase branch in L.A. last month when police approached him and began asking questions. “They asked if I was a terrorist and was I going to follow through and do what I was painting,” Mr. Schaefer asked.
Mr. Schaefer told The Times that he told the police that he did not plan to take any action agains the bank, but he gave them his contact information. “The flames symbolize bringing the system down,” he said. “Some might say that the banks are the terrorists.”
Last week, Mr. Schaefer says, police officers visited him at his home and asked him additional questions about his works, though they did not detain him.
Given the omnipresence of Chase Bank branches in many parts of the country, it is perhaps unsurprising that this is the second time in recent memory that they have have figured in a contemporary artwork. Last year, New York artist Liz Magic Laser presented a film called chase at the Derek Eller Gallery that was shot in the ATM vestibules of New York banks, including many Chases.
As art blogger Tyler Green has pointed out, Mr. Schaefer’s series has precedents in works by the L.A. painter Ed Ruscha, like Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965-68) and Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire (1964). (In a 2004 interview with artist Doug Aitken last year, Mr. Ruscha coyly said that, in the case of Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, he was “thinking like an abstract artist.”)
Mr. Schaefer is currently at work on a painting depicting a Bank of America branch on fire. He said that he does his banking at a small community bank.CLOSE Dress rehearsal for the “Down Right Beautiful” Benefit Fashion Show at the Phoenix Children's Hospital. The luncheon and show will take place at 11am, Sunday March 20, at the Warehouse, 215 E. Grant Street, Phoenix. Mark Henle | azcentral.com
Jackson Crain (4) walks down the runway, March 16, 2016, during rehearsal for the “Down Right Beautiful” Benefit Fashion Show at the Phoenix Childen's Hospital, 1919 E. Thomas Road, Phoenix. The luncheon and fashion show will take place at 11am, Sunday March 20, at the Warehouse, 215 E. Grant Street, Phoenix. (Photo: Mark Henle, Mark Henle/The Republic)
Dressed in a fresh Minnie Mouse shirt and white, swirly skirt, Zoey Maske showed off her new moves: Spinning and jumping.
The jumps were learned in dance classes but came in handy Wednesday as the 4 1/2-year-old Zoey hopped down the runway during rehearsal for her second-ever fashion show.
She is one of nearly two dozen children with Down syndrome who will star in the third annual Down Right Beautiful Fashion Show and luncheon for more than 200 guests Sunday in downtown Phoenix.
The event, which precedes World Down Syndrome Day on March 21, benefits the the Pediatric Down Syndrome Clinic at Barrow Neurological Institute at Phoenix Children's Hospital. The multi-disciplinary clinic is the first of its kind in Arizona, and one of several in the Southwest.
The stars of the show range from 2 to 17 years old and will be escorted down the runway by Miss Arizona pageant winners and contestants. Jamie Brewer, an actress with Down syndrome best known for her role on "American Horror Story," is the guest of honor.
From barely standing up to strutting
Zoey had heart surgery at Phoenix Children's Hospital when she was 6 months old and has attended the clinic since it opened, said her father, Michael Maske.
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Maske, 40, is a single father, veteran, Arizona State University graduate and business owner. He remembers celebrating her first steps with cheers and her first time putting on her shoes with pride. Now she's walking the runway, smiling and giggling, showing off for the crowd.
"That is the miracle of what happens here at Phoenix Children’s... the heart surgery, all of the proactive things we know has translated into longer, healthier, happier lives," he said as Zoey clung onto his legs. She's cuddly.
"That was fun," Zoey said, her face lighting up as dad picked her up and held her.
"I used to walk into rooms with her and she could just sense people, and she would go up and give somebody a hug and they would come to me and say, ‘I needed that today.’ I don’t know how you do that! You're pretty smart," he said, smiling down at her.
"We do as much as we can for events like this to help support the hospital," he said. "For me, it’s important that, for all of these people who take such great care of our kids, just to say 'Thank you.' "
Celebrating greatness, both the clinic's and the kids'
More than 300 children have been patients at the clinic since it opened in 2013, and there are about 120 on the wait list, said Dr. Robin Blitz, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician, director of the clinic and Zoey's doctor.
The clinic provides a spectrum of care -- something of a one-stop shop for children with Down syndrome. For example, they've had some patients work with the hospital's sleep clinic and discover they have severe sleep apnea, which is impeding their ability to learn.
As for the show, it's a big deal and fun for everyone, Blitz said.
"It’s great for their families seeing them up there being stars," Blitz said. "We don’t always celebrate our kids with special needs in our communities.
"We celebrate great athletes and we celebrate maybe the winner of the spelling bee and kids who get scholarships, but sometimes our society forgets kids with special needs. It’s a way to celebrate their greatness."
Down Right Beautiful Fashion Show
The fundraiser is 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Sunday, March 20, at Warehouse 215 at Bentley Projects, 215 E. Grant St., Phoenix. Tickets are $100, or $75 for family members of a person with Down syndrome. Tickets are available until noon Saturday, March 19. Learn more and buy tickets at www.DSFashionShow.org.
Katie Ross (left, volunteer) high-fives Riley White (3), on March 16 at the rehearsal for the Down Right Beautiful Fashion Show to benefit the Down Syndrome Clinic at Phoenix Children's Hospital on March 20, 2016. (Photo: Mark Henle/The Republic)
Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1ppd3f6Why do you train in budo?
I don’t think there’s one (or even two) right answers, really. There might be better ones, silly ones, stupid ones and awe-some bodacious ones, but one, or two right answers? No. But there are two paths a student can take when motivated to begin martial arts. One road ennobles, another adds insult to injury to a broken, crooked spirit.
As a student, and as a teacher, and even as a student who has trained long enough to be asked to help instruct, that’s something you have to consider when approaching a student to offer instruction.
You need to consider this when, perhaps, trying to figure out why a person may be hesitant in performing a particular kata, or stumbles this way instead of that way, or is too eager to learn too many kata instead of focusing on improving what he already knows, or is much too involved in attaining (or, in the case of a teacher, charging money and giving out) rankings.
Even as I say this, I’m actually not quite sure what kind of answers I’d get from my own little group of students. What they tell me may be markedly opposed to what I really want to know, because people learn to be good at giving “right answers” in a social environment.
“I want to learn how to better myself, to develop my health, and to learn about budo philosophy…” Yeah, sure. Then you watch them and they are all over the place, stumbling over themselves, not pushing themselves after classes to learn for themselves, and engaging in some pretty un-healthy lifestyle choices. Hmmm. There’s some cognitive dissonances going on there.
I write this because my wife, bless her heart, wants me to better organize my budo paperwork for my club. “What is your mission statement? What are you DOING?” she asked. “Why do you train?”
“Uh…because it’s…fun?” I answered.
“Not good enough,” she replied, putting down her pen and looking at me. “Why don’t you ask your students why they train?”
I do, and did, I replied. Whenever a new student joins, I ask them why they want to train.
So?
Well…I get answers all over the map. Because they want to learn koryu: the history, the theory, the philosophy of classical martial arts. Because they enjoy the training but can’t do competitive training anymore. Because they want to learn how to twist wrists and throw people around.
She sighed. That’s not going to help. You need a concise, precise five-sentence statement.
I’ll try, I said. But really, ask five different people, and you may get five different answers or non-answers (like a shrug of the shoulders and a, “I dunno. ‘Cuz it’s fun!”). And even at that, the answers may not truly be why they train, in their heart of hearts. You often have to watch them and observe their attitudes and performance when they train to get at the heart of what their goals are.
The other reason for my musing on purposes for training is because I was just at a street celebration for Chinese New Year. As is the tradition in our Chinatown, a parade full of dignitaries, politicians, military marching units, high school bands, and assorted crowd favorites walked down the main street of the Chinatown section of Honolulu. Along with those folk were quite a number of local martial arts groups. There were Chinese martial arts/lion dance groups that livened up the festivities. And there were a lot of tenuously Chinese-y or totally non-Chinese martial arts groups walking down the street, in their training outfits and running shoes, stopping to perform mini-demonstrations midway.
All the groups looked to be McDojo types (I say this more in a descriptive way; not as a pejorative): lots of tykes and teenagers in ill-fitting outfits, lots of younger people in various stages of grunginess, as if being unshaved and without a visit to a barber in months lent more street cred toughness to them in their white, blue, black or combination of all the above plus red, white and blue colors.
I watched with some amusement (my wife dissected my gaze and said, “You’re just a snob!” to which I will admit to) and then told her that we didn’t have to stay and watch the martial arts very long. We could go find a stand that sold jai, noodles and gau to take home. The demo’s were bor-ing. Same old same old punch and kick, or some half-okole “ju-jits” moves stolen from legitimate Gracie systems.
One thing I’ll say though, I thought I understood why many of us, and many of the students I observed, took up martial arts. It was to appear (note that word, “appear”) tough. Join a dojo, wear some cool pajamas, learn a couple of killer moves, and then think you are a tough, badass assassin. Be “strong.” And you don’t have to work too hard at it, from the looks of their techniques. It’s an alluring incentive, especially for youngsters (think of how they channel themselves into being dinosaurs, monsters and wizards), and for young men and women seeking to find some self-confidence as awkward adolescents, but without trying too hard. I would hazard that even I started off in budo that way: I was tired of being beat up in schoolyards so I joined a judo club to get physically stronger and tougher.
The “Be Strong” allure is a powerful one, and I suspect that’s what brings a lot of people into budo training (and a lot of other martial arts besides Japanese budo). Attaining a sense of physical dominance is a natural impulse across cultures.
One of my students served in military intelligence, and he noted that modern combative training emphasized MMA-style grappling. When he complained to the drill instructor that they wouldn’t encounter nearly naked grappling fights on a modern-day battlefield, the instructor replied, basically, that he knew that was true, but with only a few days for hand-to-hand training in between cardio and marksmanship, at least the raw recruits would develop a SENSE of competency in hand-to-hand, even though they really weren’t going to learn much of anything. At least they’d FEEL more confident.
When my student served overseas, he analyzed captured terrorist videotapes used at their camps. Funny thing, he wrote. There’s a lot of stuff where the new recruits in those terrorist camps are being taught en masse to punch and kick, like a karate class. When was the last time you saw a terrorist attack a mall, bus or building using karate? Never, right? But the training itself lent a James Bondian sense of being a killer elite to the terrorists recruits who would probably sooner strap a bomb to themselves than attack someone with their bare fists. So it’s all about creating an imagined, if not a real, sense of physical strength.
There’s a lot of “churning” going on in those factory-style dojo, however, for various reasons. Sooner or later, a student’s self-delusion about being the next James or Jane Bond, secret agent, is dashed when he is beat too many times in a contest or tourney. Or he realizes through a fog of self-delusion that there are a whole lot of people better than he is, and he is hampered by a mess of obstacles (physical, social, mental, and congenital) along the way to being Batman, Superman, Kwai Chang Caine or the next incarnation of Bruce Lee.
When that happens, the student inevitably drops out. He learned enough to be dangerous to himself, full of inflated self-confidence. Now he can brag about being a yellow belt to his drinking buddies, but he doesn’t have to do more work to get any higher, because, hey, his hands are deadly “fists of fury.”
On the other hand, one shouldn’t diss all such beginnings to become “strong.” I was like that too. I did become physically healthier. Doing judo opened up a whole new world for me, a bookworm: that of athletics. From judo, I went on to high school football, a bit of wrestling, then aikido, karate do, and finally ending up in koryu.
In my case, I didn’t quit because what supplanted my quest to “become strong” was a quest to learn more about the whole nature of budo, and how it could become a part of my body, my mind, and my life in ways that went beyond physical brute strength, combativeness and “looking tough” to actually “being tough” mentally.
For me, I think the problem is when some people enter the martial arts seeking such outward, superficial machismo and never grow out of it, moving on to becoming seniors and even teachers without ever deepening their understanding of their own nature and that of other people. When their own physical limitations, old age, infirmities, etc., stymie them, they drop out, sometimes sooner, sometimes later.
Several of my own teachers have noted that this attitude can be a problem. There are many kinds of martial arts, they admonished me. All of them can lead up to the top of a mountain along different paths, but they all have the same goal, technically, physically, and philosophically. So don’t be so critical of other schools or their approaches if you understand that they are attempting to reach the same goal but in a different way.
On the other hand, they also noted that there ARE some paths that lose their way, that go downwards into a dark valley instead of a mountaintop, that become not a path for self-cultivation to becoming a better individual, but a dark road to selfish brutishness. And that can include any kind of martial arts, modern or classical, eclectic or traditional.
“That is the way of the Demonic World (of Buddhism),” one sensei told me. “People act like vicious, violent animals, selfish, greedy and self-centered. That is hell on earth, which comes about from ignorance about one’s true humanity.”
The goals of training, therefore, lie along those two paths: to one’s betterment (however it may be, such as physical, mental, spiritual and so on) or to the negative path of being prone to violence, pride, self-centeredness. The tools (budo training) are the same. It’s how you approach the budo and use it that makes all the difference in the world.
The teachings of the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu heiho, and even one of the okuden in one of my own school of koryu is the concept of “Satsujinto, Katsujinken.” In discussions with other people with more experience, I’ve been told that the concept has several levels of understanding, from the personal to the tactical, to the political. A full discussion of all the meaning of this phrase, meaning “The Sword that Kills, the Sword that gives Life,” is beyond the scope of this short blog essay.
However, I am led to understand that one of the meaning is that the sword symbolizes one’s training in martial arts. Like a sword, martial arts by and of itself is neither inherently good or bad. It is how the practitioner uses it, and approaches it, that creates either a weapon that is used either for good or for evil, for the development of positive physical and mental virtues, or for the creation of a thug.
Why do you train? Ask yourself this. And/or ask your students this. Watch their lips move, but then observe how they train, and decipher their true motivations from how they act, not what they say. Becoming stronger is admirable. Becoming healthier, wiser, smarter, better. But beware of fostering the flip side of the coin: by becoming “stronger,” does that mean becoming meaner, crueler, stronger without compassion, powerful but more selfish? Whatever the answers, is the student looking for a Sword of Life or a Blade of Death?Strategy games have, in my opinion, always benefitted from the portable playstyle. In the past, I have found it much easier to develop a crippling addiction to games like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics when I can take them anywhere in my pocket. This way, I can invest hours upon hours while relaxing in bed at home, or I can play a quick fifteen minute match on the metro. The flexibility inherent in the portable platforms makes them perfect for pick up and play strategy, and Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention is superior to its console counterpart inherently because of this. A host of other improvements, subtle as they may be, also serve to elevate Absence of Detention above the original version of the game.
If you played Disgaea 3 on the PS3 when it released in 2008, you will notice the following changes. First, and most significant, is the fact that the DLC from the PS3 version of the game has been included here right off the bat. This includes the fairly significant chapters that center around Raspberyl that pop up towards the end of the game. A few improvements have also been made to the ways in which characters interact with each other outside of battle, with improved cutscenes featuring minor animation of the character portraits where there was none before. It’s pretty reminiscent of the way that Disgaea 4 handled the cutscenes, although unfortunately the sprites have not received the same loving HD treatment here as they did there.
In addition to these minor improvements to the core formula, a major update has been applied in the form of completely new chapters centering on new and returning characters. Raspberyl and her friends Kyoko and Asuka will take front and center again in one of the chapters, while new characters such as the alluring Stella and half-demon Rutile will be under your command in another. All in all, there will be three brand new chapters included in Absence of Detention, making an already lengthy experience significantly longer. My only minor complaint about this bevy of new content is that you will
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first job for UPI was reporting on women's issues. She wrote a celebrity column then moved to cover the justice department, FBI and other federal agencies.
She was assigned to cover then President-elect John F Kennedy in late 1960 and so began a reputation for relentless questioning that exasperated American leaders. Kennedy said of her: "Helen would be a nice girl if she'd ever get rid of that pad and pencil."
It was a sentiment echoed down the decades. "Isn't there a war somewhere we could send her to?" Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state, once asked.
Thomas's determined questioning and forthright reporting chipped away at what had long been an all-male and all-white club of reporters that was often regarded as far too cosy with the officials they were writing about, and still is. For many years she was frequently the only woman in the room.
In a photograph of White House correspondents questioning President Lyndon Johnson, Thomas is the only female face. She was also the only female print reporter among the journalists accompanying President Richard Nixon on his historic visit to China in 1972. Barbara Walters was there as part of the NBC television news team.
She became one of the instantly recognised faces on television at presidential press conferences. She was so well known that she played herself in two films, Dave and The American President.
Thomas quit UPI in 2000 after it was bought by the Moonie leader, Reverend Sun Myung Moon. She called the purchase "a bridge too far". She had worked for the agency for 57 years, nearly half of them as UPI's White House bureau chief. That might have been the end of her career. She said she had planned to "hang up my daily news spurs" at the time. But she was approached by Hearst newspapers with an offer to become a columnist.
"I gratefully said, why not? After all those years of telling it like it is, now I can tell it how I want it to be. To put another point on it, I get to wake up every morning and say, 'Who am I mad at today?'" she wrote in her memoir Thanks For The Memories, Mr President. Many of her colleagues were surprised to hear that she regarded herself as having held back until then.
But first there was the question of her seat in the front row of the White House briefing room. Technically it should have gone to someone from one of the major news organisations. But Sam Donaldson, the boisterous former White House correspondent for ABC news, said she kept it because no one could imagine asking her to move to the back of the room. That marked another first for Thomas – an opinion columnist in a reporter's seat in the White House briefing room. Her colleagues noticed an even more strident and opinionated tone to her questioning.
President George Bush had just taken power in a disputed election. In the coming years, Thomas made no secret of her opposition to the war in Iraq, offering a determined line of questioning that some of her colleagues appeared to shy away from in the post 9/11 atmosphere in America.
In 2002, she asked a question that few others at the White House would have dared: "Does the president think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression?"
Her questions were sometimes deemed to be so laden with hostile opinion that one of Bush's press secretaries, Ari Fleischer, once said: "We will temporarily suspend the Q&A portion of today's briefing to bring you this advocacy minute."
But she has not been averse to giving liberal presidents a hard time too. Scott Wilson, White House correspondent for the Washington Post, said Thomas did not go easy on Obama. "She did have a knack for trying to hold this administration accountable, particularly for its Middle East policy. She asked the question about which countries in the Middle East have nuclear weapons," he said "They couldn't not take her seriously. Her questions demanded an answer."
Mostly they didn't get one, but that was no less frustrating for those on the receiving end. "What's the difference between your foreign policy and Bush's?" she asked the presidential press secretary, Robert Gibbs.
A fortnight ago she challenged the president over what is increasingly known as "Obama's war". "When are you going to get out of Afghanistan?" she asked. "Why are we continuing to kill and die there? What is the real excuse? And don't give us this Bushism, 'If we don't go there, they'll all come here'."
She was no less forthright in offering her opinion on the recent Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla, calling it a "deliberate massacre and international crime". The New York Times said in its story about her resignation that two sets of rules applied to reporters covering the president: "those for the regular White House correspondents, and those for Helen Thomas."
But an alternative view might be that Thomas was a courageous voice in an often craven White House press corps.
Even if White House correspondents sometimes grew exasperated with her, some said they respected her pedigree and generally put her shortcomings down to age. She grew so frail that other reporters had to help her walk from her desk to her chair in the briefing room, and she would sometimes fall asleep. She appeared less and less at the daily briefings.
Perhaps the best evidence that Thomas had lost touch was her failure to understand the consequences of saying that Israel's Jews should go back to Poland and Germany to a rabbi with a video camera at a White House event to mark Jewish heritage month. It is possible that given her Lebanese background, that is what she has thought all along. But she should not have been surprised at the storm of protest.
Donaldson, who describes Thomas as a friend, said that while he would not defend her comments they probably reflect the views of many people of Arab descent. He then called her a "pioneer" for women. "No one can take that away from Helen," he said.King County Metro Transit has recommended a $2.75 flat fare across its network. King County Executive Dow Constantine has endorsed the proposal and asked the King County Council to enact it. County Councilmembers Claudia Balducci and Rob Dembowski have sponsored the proposal. Despite the momentum a $2.75 flat fare, policymakers still need to grapple with the impact of raising fares 25 cents on one-zone riders off-peak.
Although a great many variables are at play, it appears some courses of action could unlock virtuous cycles. Metro Transit suggests fare simplification would speed up boarding, which in turn could save Metro Transit service hours. Faster service could also attract more riders. More riders means more revenue, which can be invested in better service.
But if a $2.75 flat fare attracts riders for its simplicity and faster boarding, wouldn’t an even simpler $2 fare provide even faster boarding and attract even more riders with not just faster boarding, but also a better deal? And would a lower fare accentuate the gains in ridership? Contrarily, would off-peak ridership take a hit under the proposed simplification given the 25 cent fare hike?
Metro Transit studied a $2.50 flat fare, but nixed it for reducing its 2020 revenue forecast by $9 million. The study did find that a $2.50 flat fare would raise annual ridership, though not by much, Metro’s Public Affairs Director Scott Gutierrez said.
“A $2.50 flat fare for full-fare adults was estimated to have a relatively minor impact on ridership, with an increase of about 300,000 annual boardings compared to our current fare structure,” Gutierrez said. “Revenue was estimated to be reduced by $9 million annually, bringing the estimated farebox recovery to 24.5 percent in 2020–compared to 26 percent under our proposal.”
Meanwhile under a $2.75 flat fare scenario, Metro’s model showed ridership decreasing slightly. 2020 ridership would drop 0.3% over a no change scenario–which translates to annual ridership decrease of about 400,000.
Ridership Modeling
Despite the projection showing ridership taking a slight hit under a $2.75 flat fare, Metro Transit thinks simplification might actually increase ridership even with some riders seeing a fare hike.
“Simplification could also impact transit ridership and use,” Gutierrez said. “Though Metro’s fare model projects a very slight decrease in ridership, the proposed fare simplification could potentially have the opposite effect. Simpler fares will likely appeal to more riders, and simplifying fare payment could speed up service and result in ridership increases or cost savings. A 2009 study by the Passenger Transport Executive Group reviewed case studies from major urban areas in Europe, North America, and Australia. The study found that fare simplification resulted in increases in ridership, some revenue increases, and decreased confusion. Metro anticipates some degree of ridership increase could occur here as well.”
It’s a question of which effects are stronger. Two-zone riders (those crossing the city limits of Seattle) will see cheaper fares; that should drive up ridership. One-zone riders will see more expensive off-peak fares, which will likely depress ridership somewhat. And of course, simplification may have its own effect, driving up ridership through less confusion and easier marketability. Of course, larger factors out of Metro’s control may ultimately have an bigger impact, for example jumps in gas prices have historically boosted transit ridership–and the inverse is also true. (Side note: A carbon tax could help boost Metro Transit ridership by making transit more competitive with driving and internalizing some of the externalized costs of single occupant vehicles.)
How Accurate is the Modeling?
Metro Transit is confident in its ridership model. Gutierrez pointed to the Appendix C of Metro Transit’s 2014 Transit Fares Report, which showed relatively high accuracy.
“In an analysis for 2002 to 2012, we forecasted ridership in each year based on actual changes in King County employment and inflation-adjusted changes in gasoline prices and, in years without fare increase impacts, on inflation-adjusted changes in average transit fares,” Gutierrez said. “In years with fare increase impacts (2002, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011), ridership impacts were estimated separately. Metro’s econometric model forecasts and fare impact estimates tracked actual ridership closely, with the exception of the years 2007 and 2008. These two years saw gas prices rise above $4, as well as significant increases in local employment. These two factors coincided in a manner unprecedented in our historical data, and working together resulted in ridership increases well beyond our forecasts.”
When calculating their model’s accuracy, Metro Transit made a case for excluding the outlier year 2008, which one could argue is fair given the economic crash that year.
“Over this 11-year period, our ridership forecasts, including estimated fare change impacts, differed from actuals by an average absolute 1.8 percent. (Calculating the average absolute difference avoids the problem of positive and negative differences canceling each other out when calculating the average.) The average absolute percentage difference for the five years with fare change impacts was slightly higher–2.3 percent. Excluding 2008, the year with the most dramatic difference between forecast and actual, the average absolute percentage difference for the 10 remaining years was 1.4 percent, while the average for the four remaining fare impact years was 1.3 percent.”
While the model missing the mark by an average of 2.3 percent in fare change years sounds slight, that difference could have a significant impact on fare revenues. Metro Transit saw 121,547,395 annual boardings in 2016. A 2.3% error would mean almost 2.8 million boardings based on that number–which would seemingly throw revenue projections off by more than $5 million.
It will be interesting to see if Metro Transit’s model continues to hold up during the height of the population boom we’re experiencing. We led the nation in ridership growth last year with 4.1% year-to-year growth, although Link was instrumental in that jump. The ridership model also faces the challenge of accounting for the huge population gains Seattle has seen in recent years.
Expanding ORCA LIFT’s Role
Metro Transit has squared a flat fare with equity goals by pointing to its reduced fare programs such as ORCA LIFT. The reduced fare in these programs will stay the same under the program, insulating participants from the off-peak fare hike. More than half those eligible participate ORCA LIFT, according to Metro’s tally and an estimate of the number eligible.
“ To date, 51,975 have enrolled in ORCA LIFT. Metro estimates a potential market of 66,000-86,000 eligible customers, based on Census data showing the total income-eligible population in King County, minus those who would already participate in employer pass programs, U-Pass, or disabled, youth or senior passes,” Gutierrez said. “We continue exploring ways to increase participation in and awareness of ORCA LIFT and increase access to transit.”
The almost 52,000 enrolled would suggest a participation rate of between 60% and 79%. That’s not bad–Metro Transit should seek to raise participation even higher to help more low-income transit users. Perhaps the larger issue is one the Transit Riders Union identified: the County has set a high bar to qualify.
“The US Department of Housing and Urban Development considers a family of four making $72,000 in King County to be low-income. The low-income eligibility threshold for ORCA LIFT for a family of four is less than $50,000,” General Secretary Katie Wilson said. “Many households that do not qualify for reduced transit fares are cost-burdened, and the increase from $2.50 to $2.75 will impact them. At the very least, all additional revenue from the fare restructure should be directed to programs that make transit more affordable for lower-income riders.”
Because full fares kick in below the $50,000 household income level, many families who struggle mightily with transportation and housing costs do not qualify for LIFT. The Transit Riders Union suggests a program be devised to further lower fare, perhaps raising the limit so many families qualify. This would be make the bitter pill of higher fares off-peak easier easier to swallow. Metro hasn’t yet indicated how it’d spend projected revenue increases, but the Fare Simplification Ordinance Report did respond to equity concerns.
Overall, the survey data implies that lower-income off-peak only riders will not disproportionally pay the fare increase. The survey indicates that while approximately 23 percent of all riders make less than $35,000 per year, less than 10 percent of off-peak only riders paying cash or non-subsidized ORCA fares fall into this income category. Similarly, approximately eight percent of off-peak only riders paying their own fare make between $55,000 per year and $75,000 per year, while approximately 13 percent of all riders fall within this income range.
Even if that impact is not disproportionate, one could argue the lower-income riders who do pay the higher fare will still feel it most.
Fairness and Dynamic Pricing
One factor Metro Transit tracked in its Fare Simplification Ordinance Report was whether a fare structure reflected cost of service. The flat fare proposals don’t score well in that regard because express service to and from the suburbs is more expensive to operate and typically sees weaker fare box recovery rates, particularly compared to busy Seattle routes that maintain high levels of demand all day. Express buses often suffer from one-directional demand, coming in full to downtown Seattle in the morning but not see another spike in demand until the end of the workday when workers return home. Thus, among the many things a flat fare does, one is hide the true cost of providing suburban commuter bus service.
On the other hand, Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) has used dynamic pricing when setting highway tolls. Crossing the SR-520 floating bridge is more expensive at peak hours, and certain express freeway lanes begin charging tolls at peak hours. A transit system shouldn’t necessarily operate the same way, but Metro Transit has at least thought about higher peak fares as a “modest disincentive for discretionary peak travel” as the chart above shows. Peak hours are when the worst bus crowding happens.
Farebox Recovery Conundrum
Despite studying a $2.50 flat fare, Metro Transit see its hands as tied by the 25% farebox recovery rate requirement the King County Counil has imposed on the agency.
“Any proposed change to Metro’s fare structure must ensure that Metro’s farebox recovery remain above 25 percent. If a proposed change were to bring Metro’s farebox recovery under 25 percent, Metro might have to consider cutting service or delaying service adds as one way to reduce costs. A baseline forecast with no fare changes and current expenditures projects Metro’s farebox recovery ratio to be 25.9 percent by 2020. The $2.75 flat fare would increase net fare revenue by an estimated $3.5 million, or about 2.2 percent, by 2020. This would increase the farebox recovery ratio in 2020 by 0.5 percent, bringing it to 26.4 percent.”
A sensible climate strategy would likely put maximizing transit use as a higher priority than a bureaucratic benchmark for farebox recovery. Nonetheless, Metro Transit’s funding has to come from somewhere, and the State–often aided by anti-tax charlatan Tim Eyman–hasn’t done the agency any favors on that front.
“In 2016, the Council established a farebox recovery target of 30 percent and a floor of 25 percent,” Gutierrez said. “Metro is limited in terms of other funding mechanisms that are available; Metro’s largest source of funding is the sales tax, and we currently levy the maximum sales tax allowed by state law.”
As Metro Transit tries to roll out more RapidRide lines and makes big investments to upgrade bus service across its network, identifying a stable source of funding that doesn’t involve turning the screws on riders seems a must. If Seattle’s income tax prevails in court and sets a new precedent, a King County income tax would be a way to more progressively fund transit.
“I definitely think the 25% farebox recovery minimum should not be a goal in itself,” General Secretary Wilson said. “We should be looking for new progressive funding sources, and lowering fares should be the goal. Of course there needs to be a balance between lowering fares and adding service, but in general we should be incentivizing riding transit and lowering fares is a way to do that, as long as it doesn’t result in an overburdened system that people with choices don’t want to ride.”
“I think it makes a lot of sense for businesses to contribute to the transit system through taxes, in a way that would enable everyone–including workers–to have unlimited transit passes,” Wilson added.
However we do it, charting a better course for financing Metro operations would make the fare increase easier to accept in the short-term. If Metro is insistent on a flat fare, perhaps that fare can be lowered in the future when existing legal constraints are removed. That would attract more riders and increase transit’s mode share, goals that could take on a new urgency as the planet warms and climate change ramps up.
Contact information for King County Councilmembers can be found here for those looking to sway their representative.
Author’s note: The article has been updated with TRU General Secretary Katie Wilson’s comment on farebox recovery.
We hope you loved this article. If so, please consider supporting our work. The Urbanist is a non-profit that depends on donations from readers like you.BERLIN (JTA) — The Jewish community of Frankfurt dropped out of the German city’s interfaith Council of Religions, saying it failed to condemn anti-Israel statements by local Islamic leaders.
Leo Latasch, the head of social affairs for the Jewish community, cited the council failing to censure statements made by members of the Islamic Religious Association of Hessen.
“These are not people with whom we can continue to work,” Latasch told Germany’s Jewish weekly, the Juedische Allgemeine.
As an example, the Islamic association in a press statement accused the Central Council of Jews in Germany of using the issue of anti-Semitism in Europe “to divert attention from the war crimes of the Israeli government.”
Unal Kaymakci, deputy director of the Islamic association and a member of the Council of Religions, also posted on Facebook a link to an article in which Israel was charged with state terrorism and crimes against humanity, the Jewish weekly reported.
Selçuk Dogruer, who represents Muslims on the interfaith council, said Frankfurt’s police chief should not have apologized to the Central Council for losing control of an anti-Israel demonstration there. The police handed a megaphone to the demonstration leaders in hopes that they would calm the crowds, but the leaders instead chanted anti-Israel slogans in German and Arabic.
Latasch told Juedische Allgemeine that it was not enough for the Council of Religions to say that Facebook comments and other public statements were not official statements.
Dieter Graumann, head of the Central Council of Jews, accused the interfaith group of failing to hold up its end of the bargain.
The Jewish organization “has always stood up for Muslims in Germany,” he said. “But solidarity from Muslims towards Jews remains missing.”Well, hello there. Nice to see you. Let’s chat a little ‘bout some minor league goings on, shall we?
I’m feeling particularly organized today, so we’ll go in ascending order of affiliates.
Extended Spring Training
-Some notable names are trying to get their grooves back. Ronald Guzman is returning from Spring Training knee surgery and hopes to join Hickory in a few weeks. Nick Williams left his scorching start (.303/.333/.618 in 18 games) in North Carolina after hurting his shoulder diving for a ball in left field. MRI results were negative but he’s been sore and out of action since April 24th. He’s in Surprise getting some work in and I expect him to rejoin his Crawdad buddies soon. Cody Buckel is in extended as well. I’ve written a bunch about him and you already know what the deal is. I’m rooting for him as a kid, but you should root for him as a player. He’s got the stuff to be a middle-of-the-rotation contributor at the big league level and he’s only 20 years old. We’ll see.
-Some other notable names getting in some learnin’ time include teenage hitting sensation Eduard Pinto, curveball prince Collin Wiles, lanky lefty Yohander Mendez, and international man of mystery Jairo Beras. I expect (read: hope) these guys to be a part of Spokane’s roster when they begin play June 14th. Except Jairo, of course, who has to wait on the starting block until July 1st before diving in. I’m not sure Jairo will be headed to Spokane rather than the Arizona Rookie league, but I know if they feel he’s ready for a challenge they’ll send the oversized spider up to the great northwest. He is super-fun to watch and I paid close attention to him in Surprise this Spring. He’s exactly what you think…except taller…and faster. His batting practice displays of power and possibilities are well-matched with his in-game showings of flailing and whiffing. He’s got a lot to learn and a ridiculous frame he’s figuring out how to handle. Physically, he’s going to be akin to Michael Jordan. Seriously, MJ was listed at 6’6” 215lbs. Jairo isn’t far from that now. Let that sink in for a second, 'cause it's weird but true. It’s an incongruous sight and the frame and motor drive him down the line in about 4.2 seconds while using what appears to be 2.5 steps. He’s going to be a fun prospect to track and one whose progress might be incremental.
Hickory
-Lots has been written and said about this crew, so I won’t beat a dead horse. They strike out an absurd amount and hit home runs at a comical clip. The end.
- Jorge Alfaro: If he keeps this up, he’ll be the #1 prospect in the entire Texas system going into the 2014 season. 9 homers in 43 games is nearly double the 5 he hit in 74 games last season. More importantly, he will soon eclipse the number for most games he’s caught in a season. In 2012, he caught 29 games for Hickory and he caught 36 the season before in Spokane. In 2013 that number currently stands at 34. This is key. He’s been a passed ball machine, but who cares, because he’s learning the position. Catching is hard as hell, which is why fellas who can catch, never really die. Catchers are DFA’d, reassigned, promoted, and demoted everyday. But they never die, because it’s hard. I spoke at length with a scout who has seen him for the last couple of years and already this season. According to him, Jorge’s problem is that his hands are stiff. That isn’t something that will really change, but it is something that he can improve. His footwork is vastly improved, as is his game calling/management. And the arm is a gift, just a gift. I asked the scout the same question I always ask, “can he be a big leaguer at his position?” “Yes. He can be an All-Star there someday.” Okey dokey.
-Let’s talk about Ryan Rua for a moment. Rua, a 6’2”, rock solid 180lb, 2011 17th round pick from Lake Erie College in Pennsylvania, is old for his level. He’s 23. That’s not his fault. He also currently sports a.248/.364/.614 line and has the same number of home runs (13) as Miguel Sano and George Springer. One more homer than teammate Joey Gallo. I don’t know what to think of the kid and haven’t spoken with too many scouts who’ve seen him this season, but you hit like that, as a second baseman, and we’re going to notice. No matter how old you are. You’re on the map Rua.
Myrtle Beach
-This might be the most fun team in the whole system. They can pitch, they can hit, and they have a few kids really taking the next step in their development.
-Alec Asher has the most complete Colby Lewis starter kit you’re likely to find. I don’t mean wild-ass, pre-Japan, mid-to-upper 90’s Colby. I mean post-Japan, big presence, low-mid-90’s, commanding and locating Colby. The club had Alec, last year’s 4th round pick, skip Hickory and we now know why. Only 21, but having been through some stuff, he’s mature and has a plan. Basically, he looks like he’s not more than a few years away from being a middle/back of the rotation starter for a big league club. That’s a lot to project on a kid in low-A, and he needs to stay healthy, but if you needed to peg someone as the next Justin Grimm/Nick Tepesch-type of pitcher, Alec would be my pick.
-Luis Sardinas, who turned 20 last week, (.300/.356/.371) and Roogie Odor, age 19, (.291/.358/.468) make up what is one of the most exciting, young, middle-infields in all of minor league baseball. They can hit, they can run, and they can play defense. They’re fun, and I don’t care if they’re traded, I’m likely to always root for them. And if they are traded, it won’t be for something cheap.
-Myrtle Beach reliever Ryan Harvey has a very good slider. Another 2012 draftee (18th Round out of Seton Hall) who, like Asher, skipped Hickory. Harvey walks a few too many guys right now, but he has a nasty pitch, and that's what you need to stand out as a reliever. I’m watchin’ ya Harvey. Quite a ways to go, but I'm watchin' ya.
Frisco
I’ve been to nearly all of the Rough Riders' home games this season, and it’s the pitcher’s time. There are some good arms there, and many of them are in the bullpen. If you get a chance to roll out to Dr. Pepper Park, stick around 'til the 'pen gets goin'.
- Neil Ramirez is looking like a starter again and he's been really working hard on the mental part of the game. That said, I asked him last week what he thought about pitching out of the pen, and he said, “I like it.” Then I had a scout tell me he didn’t think Neil was tough enough for a big league bullpen. I don’t know about that, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Neil pitch a little more aggressively. He’s a fairly big guy with a big fastball and I honestly wouldn’t care if he accidentally hit a batter in the first inning. Regardless, it’s something to keep in mind given his mid-upper 90’s velocity.
-Ben Rowen (0.79ERA over 22.2ip in 18apps) continues to get guys out, which he’ll have to do since no one is going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, Wilmer Font and Roman Mendez keep plodding along towards big league bullpen jobs. I get a chance to speak with a lot of scouts and front office guys at these games and the thoughts on Font and Mendez are generally the same- they’re not ready. Wilmer still can’t quite harness a secondary pitch, or secondary pitch-es. Roman is still leaving some of his sliders up. His changeup has been coming along nicely and his fastball is still 94-96. As a scout told me, “at the big league level, a slider up is a slider out.”
-Randy Henry has been on the DL for a couple of weeks with an elbow issue, hopefully he’s back fairly soon as he was pitching really well.
-Following Tommy John surgery, Justin Miller has begun his journey back to the top of the prospect heap and he’s looked pretty good in his first two outings following more than a year on the shelf. Fastball has touched 96 and the slider has some nice depth to it. I’m very anxious to see more of him. As he regains his health, he could be a very viable possibility to help the big league club sooner rather than later.
-Hanser Alberto arguably has the best hit tool on the roster. He is also the youngest player on the roster (youngest player in the entire league- actually) and he’s been as inconsistent as you imagine he might be. Defensively, the speed of the AA game has jumped up on the young shortstop a few times and the scout’s consensus is still that of a utility profile. If you’re not going to be a regular, you better have at least one really loud tool. His calling card will be hitting. He just needs to level that out a bit.
Round Rock
-Mike Olt hasn’t played since April 25th when he was hitting.139/.235/.236 with 32K in 81 plate appearances. I have no idea what’s going on, and I’m not sure the club or Mike know for certain either. I’ve asked around a little to no avail, and there’s really not much else to say at this point. We’ll see him when we see him. I'd really like to stat writing good stuff about him again.
-Martin Perez was fantastic on Tuesday night. Arguably, the best I’ve ever seen him pitch. Commanding his fastball which twice earned a 97 reading on the stadium gun and tossing a heavy changeup that was fooling everyone including left-handed hitters. He looked very confident and one might even say, a bit pissed off. If he pitches like he did Tuesday night, he is ready to challenge big league hitters.
-Engel Beltre is doing Engel Beltre. That is, playing outstanding defense and getting on base and scoring runs. He isn’t, however, hitting for much power. A year after hitting 17 triples and 13 home runs in AA, he has yet to crank either of those extra base hits this season. Nada one. Strange. His 55% success rate while stealing bases is also significantly below his 78% rate from last season. He’s on pace to strike out well more than 100 times again, but has drawn a few more walks this season.
-Lisalverto Bonilla is a very promising 22-year-old arm with an out pitch in his changeup. He is also still attempting to be a pitcher who relies on a secondary pitch as his primary pitch, and that doesn’t work out very often. He’s got a live arm and runs his FB into the mid-90’s, but seldom seems confident with it, so he goes back to the CH and sometimes, it gets ugly from there. If he begins to harness and command his FB, the CH will make people look silly and he’ll be a big league reliever for a long time.
Anyway, that’s nearly 2,000 words on some players I've been thinkin' 'bout. So, I’m tired now and you don’t want to hear me prattle on anymore anyway.
As always, enjoy baseball! Love Ya!
-TepidAt the Vandalia Public Library, a new noise greets patrons as they walk inside: a clicking, whirring noise that signals the new 3D printer is at work.
On Monday, Dayton Metro Library began allowing patrons to request a print from 3D printers in five locations around Montgomery County. The printers are located at the Fort McKinley, Huber Heights, Miamisburg, Vandalia and Wilmington-Stroop branch libraries.
Patrons cannot operate the printer themselves, said Cara Kouse, Wilmington-Stroop branch manager, but they will be able to ask librarians to add their projects to a queue.
“Libraries across the country are starting to look at literacy as more than just books, but as making,” Kouse said.“We’re trying to help people use all kinds of tools to use and make and gather information.”
Anyone who wants to print must bring in a flash drive with the file in a.STL format, Kouse said, and the project must take less than six hours to print. Objects will cost 10 cents per gram printed and must be smaller than 10 inches tall by 10 inches wide by 10 inches deep.
Chuck Duritsch, spokesman for Dayton Metro Library, said the library system had a 3D printer on loan from Southwest Ohio and Neighboring Libraries Consortium earlier this year and it received a lot of interest. In April, Dayton Metro bought five printers for $1,400 each.
Rob Rinehart, technical reference assistant at Vandalia Public Library, is one of the librarians involved in 3D printing. He was troubleshooting the printer by printing a pink airplane Monday morning.
Rinehart said he didn’t know what kinds of projects his patrons would print, but he thinks there will be plenty of creativity.
“I’m excited to see what they print because you can use it in a lot of different ways,” Rinehart said.
When word gets out, he expects the 3D printers will become popular.
Kandis Eshelman of Vandalia, who came to the library with Kaelyn, 6, and Holden, 9, said they might use it to print a dolphin, an owl, or a Star Wars figure.
Eshelman said she wasn’t expecting to see the printer when she walked in Monday.
“I saw it just starting to print and then I heard it,” she said. “I’d heard about 3D printers, but I’d never seen one.”
To use the printer, library patrons must fill out a form, available online at daytonmetrolibrary.org/3d-printing or at the five branch locations. Patrons can get pre-made designs under a Creative Commons license online, or they can make their own creations with online software.
Patrons will be notified when their object is finished and must pick it up within seven days.In 1964 the Japanese launched the world's first high-speed rail line. With an operating speed of 210km/h, it would still put our "modern" train services to shame.
More than half a century later, the island nation is eager to export its technology to other parts of the world. And the key selling points of the Japanese fast train are a matter of great national pride.
1. The Shinkansen always run on time
Carl Court The average delay is less than 60 seconds.
The average delay of the nation's fleet of bullet train, known locally as the Shinkansen, is less than 60 seconds. Believe or not, this statistic also includes unavoidable, major delays such as typhoons and earthquakes.
"I think it's fair to say the Shinkansen always run on time," said Nobukazu Nagai, a director with the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.
In a requirement that most would probably consider – well, embarrassing – Shinkansen drivers are trained to talk to themselves throughout their journey, continually logging how they are performing to schedule.
"Ten seconds of delay departure," they will bark out loud, to no one in particular, also pointing with white-gloved hands to a traditional pocket watch that is propped up on the dash.
The Shinkansen can travel many hundreds of kilometres in any one journey, but if a train arrives more than one minute late to its destination, the driver will have to give a formal explanation.
2. Flying trains
KYODO People wave flags as the first train of the new Hokkaido shinkansen, or bullet train, from Tokyo, travels near Kikonai Station.
The fastest current operating speed of the Japanese bullet train is 320kmh.
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and hid in the bushes nearby. Eventually, one of the Port Royal mariners hailed the sloop. The pirates responded by saying, “They were Englishmen, and desired them all to come on Board, and drink a Bowl of Punch.”[34] Rackham then sent over a canoe to bring the nine men over to the William. After some persuasion, the mariners agreed to come onboard the pirate sloop, still carrying their firearms and cutlasses. Onboard, the nine men and the pirates drank together. Soon after the drinking bout between the Port Royal men and the pirates began, another sloop came into sight, the vessel that ended the pirate careers of everyone onboard the William.[35]
The sloop approaching the pirates belonged to Captain Jonathan Barnet. On that day, Barnet and another sloop commanded by a Captain Bonnevie happened to be sailing on their trading voyage to the South-Keys of Cuba. Bonnevie’s sloop, sailing ahead of Barnet’s vessel, sighted the William near the shore and thought he saw the sloop fire a gun. He waited for Barnet to come up so he could tell him of this discovery.[36] Five years before to this event, Barnet received a six-month commission to hunt for pirates and to fish the Spanish Treasure Fleet wrecks off the Florida coast. It is unclear if Barnet ever renewed his privateer commission after May of 1716. Regardless, Barnet, being a, “brisk fellow,” according to Jamaica Governor Nicholas Lawes, and carrying a large crew onboard his sloop, decided to investigate what he deemed a suspicious vessel in the fading light of the evening.[37]
When the pirates saw Barnet’s sloop approach, they ran from the vessel that could pose a potential threat to the William. Rackham ordered the crew to weigh anchor and tried to get the Port Royal men to help. Though they refused at first, Rackham soon coerced them to assist in weigh anchor through violence, or at least through violent threats. Later, witnesses also noted some of these mariners helped the pirates row the sloop in their efforts to escape. Some of the pirates and other mariners stayed on deck during the chase while others stayed below and continued drinking. Barnet fired a shot at the sloop from a distance and raised British colors, but the pirates continued to run. At 10 o’clock that night, Barnet sailed close enough to hail the pirates. Barnet heard the pirates respond, “John Rackam, from Cuba.” Barnet demanded Rackham strike to British colors, which received the response of, “they would strike no Strikes.”[38] After this refusal, one or several people onboard the William fired a swivel gun, a carriage gun, small arms, or some combination of the three at Barnet’s sloop. Barnet responded in kind with a full broadside and volley of small arms fire, which caused all the Port Royal men on the pirate sloop to flee below decks. The gunfire carried away the boom on the William’s main mast, making any further attempts at escape impossible and caused some of the people onboard the pirate sloop to call for quarter. Barnet’s sloop sailed alongside to capture the pirates on the William. After securing everyone on the pirate sloop and their former prize vessel, the Mary and Sarah,[39] Barnet sailed to Davis’s Cove, where he landed twenty-six men and two women. He turned the pirates and the former prisoners of the pirates over to militia officer Major Richard James and a guard detail he recruited to escort the pirates to imprisonment and trial in Spanish Town.[40]
Over the course of three trials held between November 16, 1720 and January 24, 1721, the court found most of the men involved with Rackham’s pirate activities guilty and hanged them in public executions. Only the two Frenchmen, John Besneck and Peter Cornelian, who testified against the pirates, escaped any charges of piracy. Sir Nicholas Lawes’s Court of Admiralty used loose evidence to convict the pirates and the Port Royal mariners who happened to be onboard that day. The court considered the presence of the pirates and Port Royal men onboard a pirate vessel as enough evidence to convict defendants of being a willing participants in piracy.[41] This resulted in the court ignoring the pleas of innocence from both Rackham’s pirate crew and the nine Port Royal mariners. On November 18, Jamaican authorities hanged John Rackham, George Featherstone, Richard Corner, John Davies, and John Howell at Gallows Point in Port Royal. They took the bodies of Rackham, Featherstone, and Corner and gibbeted them in chains at Plumb Point, Bush Key, and Gun Key as warnings to pirates and others thinking of becoming pirates. On November 19, authorities hanged Noah Harwood, James Dobbin, Patrick Carty, and Thomas Earl in Kingston, Jamaica. The court executed some of the Port Royal mariners on February 17 and 18, 1721.[42]
While the court found Anne Bonny and Mary Read guilty of piracy on November 28, both of them avoided immediate execution since their pregnancies, both in their second trimesters, allowed them to “plead their bellies,” since the court could not hang the innocent unborn.[43] The court never hanged either of the women pirates. A record of burials in St. Catherine, Jamaica, notes the death and burial of a Mary Read on April 28, 1721. It is highly probable that this Read is the female pirate of the same name. The date of the death came close to the time when Read’s child was due to be born. It is possible that she died of complications from childbirth.[44] No documents shows if Anne Bonny died in prison or if authorities released her. The historical record only shows a lack of documents demonstrating that Governor Lawes carried out Bonny’s execution.
The Fictions and Mythology of Anne Bonny and Mary Read
Thanks to the work of writers and some historians, fiction and unfounded information marred the history of these two famous female pirates for the three centuries after their trial. Thanks to the mythos surrounding the two women, some readers of the previous section may have concerns about what they perceive to be missing parts of Bonny and Read’s history. While Johnson appears to have had access to some of the period accounts of these pirates, he also mixed in a significant share of fiction to make his publication more appealing to early eighteenth-century audiences. If Johnson had not added full life biographies of Bonny and Read, something he did for no other pirate in his two-volume work, he would have had no choice but to offer a chapter of only a few pages to his readers for these women pirates. Since other writers and historians did not make significant challenges to the accuracy of Johnson’s account well into the twentieth century, the line between fiction and the historical record blurred until recent years.
While few people are familiar with the trial and newspaper accounts, many more remember the colorful stories that do not appear in the historical record. Common aspects of this mythos include:
The two women dressed in men’s clothes to hide their sex.
Both discovered each other’s female identities after they met at sea.
There was almost an intimate romantic interaction between the two women because of mistaken identities.
Mary Read found a new lover from the ranks of the pirate crew, who she fought a duel to protect.
Well before their final cruise began, Rackham took Bonny to an unnamed hideout in Cuba where Anne gave birth to a child.
Bonny and Read were courageous and skilled fighters.
In the last battle with Captain Barnet, only the two women stayed on deck and offered to fight in close combat when Barnet’s crew boarded their sloop.
The women reprimanded and ridiculed their fellow male pirate crewmembers, including Rackham, for cowardice during their voyage and after their capture.
None of these things appear in the historical record regarding Bonny and Read. Of particular note, the historical record demonstrates that Bonny and Read operated together from the beginning of their careers and that their identity as females was a secret to practically no one. These pieces of the Bonny and Read mythos all originated in the pages of Johnson’s first volume of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, specifically the sections of chapter seven that covered the lives of Bonny and Read.
Chapter seven of the General History begins as a history of John Rackham, also known as Calico Jack according to Johnson’s appendix account. The nickname, from Rackham’s alleged habit of wearing jackets and drawers made of calico material, is also another potential invention of Johnson.[45] In the portion of the chapter describing his final cruise, there are no mentions of the two female pirates until the last paragraph. There is a mention of Rackham had a family in Cuba, which is likely a reference to Johnson’s claim that Anne bore Rackham a son before setting out on his final voyage.[46] Most of Johnson’s details in the Rackham part of the chapter mirror those published trial account. He also comments on the court’s decisions and use of evidence.[47] If Johnson did not have a copy of Rackham’s trial account while writing this section, he must have communicated with someone who did own a copy, or he interviewed someone who saw the trial in person. After Rackham’s history, the chapter features sections describing the histories of the two women pirates.[48] None of the content in these histories, at least not content already adopted by Johnson in his Rackham section, have a known basis in the historical record.
The portrayal of Bonny and Read by Johnson falls in line with the literary traditions of the early eighteenth century and presents a significant amount of insight into some of the era’s perceptions of sex and gender. This story of two disguised female pirates intersects well with the period’s literary traditions of tales concerning warrior women, biographies of female criminals, and long stories about cross-dressing ladies. Johnson’s account repeatedly used the bodies of these women, particular their breasts, in a significant and symbolic manner for his narrative. Female breasts held a strong position as symbols of womanhood, domesticity, and maternity during the eighteenth century. The fictional versions of these women used attire to disguise and challenge the standard boundaries of their gender adhered to during that period. However, these boundaries return immediately when the two women revealed their sex through their bodies. Johnson uses their bodies to both excite the audience and to prevent them from completely overcoming their traditional role in society.[49] As Sally O’Driscoll, one of several scholars of literature and sexuality in the early eighteenth century, stated, “female pirates, as convicted criminals, have bodies that are available to be publicly interrogated and eroticized; readers cannot fail to be concerned with their bodies and what they might signify.”[50] Johnson took two real female pirates and used them as an opportunity to create a story that delved into a growing literary tradition of the era, and played upon women’s position in society.
While Johnson is responsible for originating many of the stories about the two female pirates through his tantalizing fiction, a few other pieces of the mythos did not arise until more recently. When popular publications about piracy display the flags pirates supposedly used, they often depict a flag with a skull and crossed swords as belonging to John Rackham, which would mean Bonny and Read sailed under this flag as well. No documentation for this flag has yet surfaced, with the earliest known publication to depict it being a 1978 publication on pirates from the Time-Life book series Seafarers.[51] A popular quote attributed to Rackham, concerning the way he courted women, states that his, “methods of courting a woman or taking a ship were similar – no time wasted, straight up alongside, every gun brought to play and the prize boarded.” The quote appears to be an invention of historian Philip Gosse, printed in one of his publications from 1934.[52] While Johnson’s work might have presented imagery that could excite ideas of a lesbian relationship, he never came close to showing or stating that Bonny and Read actually engaged in same sex relations. In an unauthorized reprinting of Johnson’s work from 1725, the publisher added a poorly written and vague passage where Read testified she had entered into piracy because she was a “lover” of Anne when they first meet and allegedly thought Anne was still a man.[53] The first known publication to directly claim the two engaged in a lesbian relationship appeared to come from an article entitled, “Anne Bonny & Mary Read: They Killed Pricks,” published in 1974 and written by feminist Susan Baker.[54] Jo Stanley claimed in 1995 that the court in Jamaica used the insinuation of lesbianism to worsen the two’s reputations and improve the likeliness of a conviction at their trial.[55] While historians, feminists, and writers all made various claims, accusations, and conjectures about the type of relationship Bonny and Read had, the historical record does not support anything regarding these two pirates and lesbianism.
Of all the contributions made by the twentieth century to the mythos behind this pair of women, one claim invented by a 1960s fiction writer stands out since several late twentieth-century historians caused a fictional passage from this author to become an assumed fact. In 1964, John Carlova wrote a fictional account of Bonny and Read, entitled, Mistress of the Seas. Carlova claimed in his book’s introduction that he conducted thorough research into pirate history and listed a dozen different important sounding archives and libraries to bolster his claim. Besides inspiring several other works of fiction, some historians took Carlova’s claim of authenticity at face value, including Linda Grant De Pauw, who published Seafaring Women in 1982, and the writers of the publication Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger in 1997.[56] One of Carlova’s creations from the 1960s included the invention of names for Anne Bonny’s Irish parents, William Cormac and Peg Brennan, and the establishment of a birth date, March 8, 1700.[57] Linda Grant De Pauw is one of the historians who included the names of the parents for Anne, along with other outright fictional accounts of women at sea, as fact.[58]
In 2000, Tamara Eastman and Constance Bond produced a small publication that stated Anne Bonny’s parents were William Cormac and Mary Brennan from Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland, and that she was born in the year of 1698.[59] There are no references to documents in this section regarding where Eastman, the main researcher into Anne’s origins for the publication, found the reference to William Cormac. There is only a reference to one record of a twenty-year-old woman named Mary Brennan from Kinsale charged with theft and threatening her employers. The courts sentenced her to transportation to the American colonies with her unnamed young daughter. Eastman admits that there is no evidence to link this Mary Brennan with William Cormac or that her daughter was a young Anne Bonny.[60] It is also noteworthy that the bibliographies for this book include the previously mentioned works that used Carlova’s Mistress of the Seas for facts.[61] Considering the evidence Eastman presented and the flawed secondary sources she used, it appears that when she found the transportation document, she likely assumed the claims in the secondary sources she read were correct, but had minor mistakes regarding Anne’s birth. She then adjusted the mother’s name, place of birth, and Bonny’s birth date to fit the transport document’s data.
Carlova also became the first nonfiction publication to suggest that Anne Bonny made it away from Jamaica, remarried, and settled with a gentleman in Virginia. In Mistress of the Seas, Governor Lawes released Bonny because a Dr. Michael Radcliffe convinced the governor to release her on the promise that they would both leave the West Indies together and that Anne would cease her evil ways of living.[62] In Eastman’s work, “some documents and personal papers belonging to William Cormac and his descendants,” supposedly show that Anne married a Virginia gentleman in December of 1721.[63] The descendants of William Cormac have yet to release these sources, or transcripts of them, to the public.
Historian David Cordingly also encountered this concept of Anne Bonny being a Cormac and included it in his own work. In the 2001 book he wrote concerning maritime women, later retitled to Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors’ Wives, Cordingly states that William Cormac, Anne’s father, managed to obtain her release. After her returned to Charleston, she married a Joseph Burleigh. The two eventually established a family with eight children. They also managed to locate and bring back a boy Bonny had with Rackham in Cuba, who they named John. This Anne died in 1782 at the age of 84.[64] Cordingly references the, “Family papers in the collection of descendants,” as his source.[65] Eastman also mention that William Cormac secured the release of Anne Bonny in her 2000 publication.[66] In 2004, when Cordingly wrote the entry for Anne Bonny in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he included the birth information that is also in Eastman’s work. He also used the previously mentioned story about Anne leaving Jamaica and marrying Burleigh in Charleston for this dictionary entry.[67]
Untwisting the complex web of logic and sources regarding Anne Bonny’s life before and after her pirate career is difficult, but it is clear that the foundation for these claims are built mostly upon fictional information. In all these publications concerning the origins and conclusion of Bonny’s life, there are no substantial pieces of evidence to support them. Most of the evidence comes from a series of assumptions and conjectures. A Burleigh family probably did live in Virginia and one of them probably married an Anne Bonny or an Anne Cormac. However, there is still no period evidence showing a William Cormac or a woman named Brennan gave birth to Anne Bonny, no evidence that Bonny ever left Jamaica after her trial, and no evidence that anyone in the Carolinas or Virginia married a woman who was also a former pirate. Eastman admitted in her 2000 publication, “it has not been proven, yet, that the woman in these documents [the papers of Cormac’s descendants] is the same as the woman from pirate fame,” and that Eastman was still conducting research to find more evidence to verify the Cormac family claims.[68] Sixteen years have passed since the publication of her book. In that time, Eastman did not find the additional documents needed to verify the claims concerning Bonny’s birth or her life after piracy.[69] Until someone unveils primary sources that support these assertions, and make them available to the public for scrutiny, there is no reason to assume they are fact.
The Next Two Sections, Regarding Other Female Pirates and Women in the Maritime World, Are Continued on PAGE TWO (Click Here)
ENDNOTES
[1] One document, discovered by historian E. T. Fox, contains a few details resembling the origins of Mary Read mentioned in the first volume of Johnson’s General History of the Most Notorious Pirates. The coincidences of this one document are nowhere near enough to confirm the accuracy of Johnson’s account or that this Mary Read of Bristol was the pirate of the same name, as Fox admits openly in his editorial notes to the document. E. T. Fox, Pirates in Their Own Words: Eye-Witness Accounts of the “Golden Age” of Piracy, 1690-1728 (Fox Historical, 2014), 359-360.
[2] A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 615 (abbreviated as GHP in all future footnotes).
[3] Manuel Schonhorn mentions that Rogers may have provided these details after his return to England in 1721 in his notes to edition of GHP Schonhorn edited and published in 1972. David Cordingly expands on this point, mentioning that the publication of GHP helped Rogers recover his reputation in the mid-1720s. Pirate historian E. T. Fox has also made this observation regarding Johnson’s appendix. Nathaniel Mist published the first four editions of the first volume of GHP from 1724-1726. The second volume appeared in 1728. It is plausible that the information published in the appendix account came from Rogers between 1726 and 1728. Since Johnson’s work spoke so well of Rogers, Rogers may have willingly supplied Johnson information while attempting to gather new stories for his second volume. Considering the manner in which Johnson wrote and his tendency to add in fictional details to improve the narrative of his text, it is possible that Johnson made additions to Rogers’ account. While portions of Johnson’s appendix account are plausible, until more period accounts surface to corroborate it, there is no way to decisively verify or discount this account’s accuracy. GHP, 695; David Cordingly, Spanish Gold: Captain Woodes Rogers & The Pirates of the Caribbean (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 204-205, 250-252. E. T. Fox, e-mail message to author, April 15, 2016.
[4] John C. Appleby, Women and English Piracy, 1540-1720, Partners and Victims of Crime (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013), 192, 194.
[5] GHP, 623-624. Based on the series of events mentioned in Johnson’s account, Anne Bonny arrived in the Bahamas sometime in 1717 or 1718. In regards to Anne Bonny’s maiden name, the proclamation made by Woodes Rogers concerning the Rackham’s crew says, “Ann Fulford alias Bonny.” It is possible that Fulford is Anne’s maiden name. One other possibility is, working with an assumption that the GHP appendix account is accurate and came from Rogers, Anne Bonny possibly took Fulworth’s surname when Anne Bonny tried to pass Fulworth as her mother and someone made mistakes with these names afterwards. Rogers could have made a mistake either with the Boston Gazette or with Johnson years later and accidently changed the second half of this surname, or Johnson made this mistake when publishing the name to the appendix account of Anne Bonny’s life. Until further documents arise, identifying Anne’s real or original name remains unresolved. For James Bonny’s acceptance of the King’s pardon, the exact date and location are unknown. He does not appear on the “List of the Names of such Pirates as Surrender’d themselves at Providence, 3 June 1718,” ADM 1/2282, TNA. He may have surrendered to the authorities of another colony or to Woodes Rogers when he arrived in Nassau in July of 1718. For Anne Bonny’s potential engagement in prostitution, this comes from a combination of Anne’s young age, her marital situation, and her economic circumstances, which left women in Bonny’s position few choices for a means of making a living. Suzanne J. Stark, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 29, 35; B. S. Capp, When Gossips Meet Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 36-39.
[6] GHP, 623-626. For John Rackham’s earlier surrender in 1718, see “List of the Names of such Pirates.”
[7] Natalie A. Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670-1776 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 169-174.
[8] GHP, 623-626. The date of Anne conceiving a child comes from deducing evidence from her trial in November. The two women were able to conceal from the court that they were pregnant, yet doctors could still verify after an inspection that they were with child. Considering the state of medicine in the period, this suggests that both women were in their second trimester, meaning both women conceived their children while in New Providence, probably sometime in August E. T. Fox, e-mail message to author, April 15, 2016.
[9] “By his Excellency; Woodes Rogers, Esq; Governour of New Providence, &c. A Proclamation,” Boston Gazette, October 10-17, 1720.
[10] Ian McLaughlan, The Sloop of War, 1650-1763 (Barnsley, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2014), 30, 60-61, 280-281; William A. Baker, Sloops & Shallops (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1966), 68; Aji Vasudevan, “Tonnage measurement of ships : historical evolution, current issues and proposals for the way forward” (master’s thesis, World Maritime University, 2010), 15-17; Christopher French, “Eighteenth Century Shipping Tonnage Measurements,” Journal of Economic History (June 1973), 434-435; “The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and Other Pirates…” in British Piracy in the Golden Age: History and Interpretation, 1660-1730, ed. Joel Herman Baer, Volume 3 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 47 (this trial will be abbreviated as Tryals in future notes). The dimensions of this sloop came from using data concerning other sloops of the period and the 1695 measured tonnage formula, assuming a keel length to maximum beam ratio of between 3.5 to 3.75. For the William’s armament, the sloop’s beam limited the type of guns it could use. Guns close to 5 feet in length would have been difficult to operate in a sloop of this size. Short “cutt” versions of Robinet and Falconet guns, firing solid shot weighing less than two pounds, would have been the most likely guns used on a small sloop like the William, with lengths below five feet and weights of around 200-300 pounds. Two guns that would resemble ones similar to those on the William, see Cannons 19 and 21 from the Queen Anne’s Revenge Project. Cannon 19 is a Swedish gun from 1713, made of cast iron, fired a 1-pound 1.81-inch diameter solid shot, and measured 4 feet in length. Cannon 21 is an English robinet gun, made of cast iron, fired a half-pound 1.5-inch diameter shot, measured 3.5 feet long, and weighed 199 pounds according to the markings on the barrel. Nathan C. Henry, “Analysis of Armament from Shipwreck 31CR314: Queen Anne’s Revenge Site,” Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project: Research Report and Bulletin Series QAR-B-09-01 (June 2009), 8-12.
[11] GHP, 624.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 624-625. Johnson’s description of taking the William, particularly Anne’s actions, may have happened in a general manner, but it is possible some of the more specific details could be additions made by Johnson to make the theft sound more thrilling. Again, there is no way to confirm or deny the accuracy of this part of Johnson’s account.
[14] “A Proclamation,” Boston Gazette, October 10-17, 1720; “New Providence, Sept. 4,” Boston Gazette, October 10-17, 1720.
[15] GHP, 625-626; Tryals, 15; “New Providence, Sept. 4,” Boston Gazette, October 10-17, 1720. Rogers’s proclamation mentioned vessels Rackham’s crew attacked. If this attack on Turnley did occur, the sinking of a vessel would be a significant omission for Rogers to make.
[16] GHP, 626; “A Proclamation,” Boston Gazette, October 10-17, 1720.
[17] “New Providence, Sept. 4,” Boston Gazette, October 10-17, 1720.
[18] Tyrals, 15-16. £10 in Jamaica money refers to the value of British currency or the British monetary value placed on any goods while in Jamaica. The colonies received little currency from Britain, frequently resulting in coinage shortages and British money holding higher value than it would have in Britain. The shortages also encouraged the regular use of Spanish currency in the British colonies. A piece of eight held a value of five shillings in Jamaica at this time. £10 in Jamaica money held a value of £7.407 in Britain in the year 1720 (or roughly £7.08.00 – Sums of British currency listed in pounds, shillings, and pence will utilize this format: £[Pounds Here].[Shillings Here].[Pence Here]). John J. McCusker, Money & Exchange in Europe & America, 1600-1775, A Handbook (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 246-247, 251.
[19] “A Proclamation,” Boston Gazette, October 10-17, 1720.
[20] The English Pilot. The Fourth Book. Describing the West-India Navigation, from Hudson’s-Bay to the River Amazones (London: Rich. and Wil.l Mount, and Tho. Page, 1716), 46-47.
[21] Tryals, 16. £1,000 in Jamaica money is equivalent to about £740.15.00 in Britain.
[22] Ibid., 16-18.
[23] Ibid., 18.
[24] “A Proclamation,” Boston Gazette, October 10-17, 1720; “New Providence, Sept. 4,” Boston Gazette, October 10-17, 1720; Tryals, 15. Another possible explanation is that Rogers or the newspaper printers made a mistake when gathering intelligence on the pirates before publishing his proclamation. There may have never been an Andrew Gibson on Rackham’s crew if this is an error.
[25] Stark, Female Tars, 55.
[26] Tryals, 16-18, 21. The trial account used the term pimento for allspice.
[27] Tryals, 17-18, 27-28.
[28] Ibid. £300 in Jamaica money is worth about £222.04.04 in British money.
[29] Ibid., 27-28.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid. This part of Dorothy Thomas’s testimony is more significant when considering that both Bonny’s and Read’s pregnancies were well into their first trimesters at this point, a time when said pregnancy begins to cause a woman’s breast to increase in size.
[32] Ibid., Stark, Female Tars, 71.
[33] Tryals, 27-28.
[34] Ibid., 18, 46-47.
[35] Ibid., 46-47.
[36] Ibid, 18; Governor Sir Nicholas Laws to the Council of Trade and Plantations, Jamaica, November 13, 1720, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series (from now on abbreviated CSPCS), March, 1720 – December, 1721, item 288. Barnet’s vessel was not one of the two sloops, with 100 men each, commissioned to fight the pirates and Spanish privateers harassing Jamaica. As indicated in the trial, Barnet operated as a merchant vessel on a trading voyage. Mentions of these privateers are in the previously referenced letter from Laws to the Council of Trade and in the London Journal, January 14, 1721. The London Journal account appears to think that one of these privateers caught Rackham. The account is one of the less accurate newspaper reports regarding the capture of Rackham. It states that Rackham had a crew of fourteen, which does not match any of the potential ways to count the pirates and the prisoners they carried (see fn. 40 for more on counting Rackham’s crew when captured).
[37] Tryals, 18.; Cordingly, Spanish Gold, 190-191; Jonathan Barnett, Deposition of Jonathan Barnett, Jamaica, August 10, 1716, Jamaica Council Minutes, f.63. Deputy Secretary of Jamaica, to the Secretary of State, CO 152/11, no.16ii, TNA. In 1715, when Governor Hamilton commissioned a sizeable fleet of privateers, Jonathan Barnet received a commission on November 24, 1715 for the Snow Tiger, of 90 tons, 80 men, and 12 guns, with Lewis Galdy and Daniel Axtell providing funds for the security bond required of privateers. While Barnet sailed to the channel between Florida and the Bahamas, he did not attack any Spanish targets. The courts spared Barnet from any of the charges of piracy faced by most of the privateers commissioned by Hamilton. Barnet might have been suspicious of the William since he had sailed the waters of Jamaica for years and did not recognize the small sloop as a typical visitor among Jamaica’s maritime traffic, or the vessel somehow appeared out of place in that location.
[38] Tryal, 18, 46-47.
[39] The trial account never stated the pirates released Captain Dillon’s vessel, the Mary and Sarah, so it is assumed the pirates still had someone onboard that sloop to watch over Dillon and his men during October 22. What the vessel did during any of the events of that day is unknown.
[40] Ibid., 18-19, 46-47; “Philadelphia, Dec. 8,” American Weekly Mercury, December 8, 1720. According to the American Weekly Mercury, Rackham had a crew of twenty-six men and two women. While it is possible that this number is the result of inaccurate reporting, this number might include not only the pirates, but also the prisoners they took before their capture by Barnet. Rackham, the eight male pirate crewmembers make up nine of the twenty-six men. Add to this the two Frenchmen Rackham forced onto the pirate sloop and the nine Port Royal mariners, and that accounts for twenty of the twenty-six men. The pirates never let Captain Thomas Dillon and the crew of the Mary and Sarah leave before Barnet’s arrival. Dillon also testified against the pirate at their trials. The six remaining men could have been Dillon and five men belonging to the Mary and Sarah, a typical crew size for a trading sloop in the Caribbean.
[41] Tryals, 2.
[42] Ibid., 23, 48.
[43] E. T. Fox, e-mail message to author, April 15, 2016. For more details regarding when the two female pirates became pregnant, see footnote 8.
[44] Tamara J. Eastman and Constance Bond, The Pirate Trial of Anne Bonny and Mary Read (Cambria Pines, CA: Fern Canyon Press, 2000), 40-41. Eastman sites the following document for the record of Mary’s death: Early Parish Records of burials for St. Catherine, Jamaica. National Library of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica. I have yet to see the original record to verify if it says this Mary Read died in prison and thus prove it is the pirate Mary Read, though the timing of the death makes it highly probably that it refers to the pirate. Johnson’s main account of Mary Read says she died of a fever while in prison. This claim is probably an educated, though probable, guess on Johnson’s part, but no known documents corroborate this claim of death by fever.
[45] GHP, 620. The attribution of this nickname and habit of wearing calico attire come from Johnson’s appendix for the first volume of his pirate history. As previously discussed, the appendix is a potentially more accurate account featuring information from Woodes Rogers. This does not mean that all of the information in this section is accurate. In this situation, there are other doubts to add to the analysis of this particular claim. In all the other documents concerning Rackham, “Calico Jack” never appeared as an alias for John Rackham. The fact that Johnson did not include this nickname in his first volume version of Rackham’s history is also significant. Period accounts have yet to verify any of the other descriptions of clothing worn by pirate captains included in Johnson’s text. Finally, calico also held a more feminine connotation during this time, making its use by someone such as Rackham even more unusual.
[46] Ibid., 149-150,165.
[47] GHP, 149-152.
[48] Ibid., 153-165.
[49] O’Driscoll, Sally. “The Pirate’s Breasts: Criminal Women and the Meanings of the Body.” The Eighteenth Century 53, no. 3 (2012): 357–379. This article discusses this issue in more detail than can be covered in the current article. Her arguments explore the nuances and significance of this topic that can, and did, expand into longer studies of their own.
[50] Ibid., 374.
[51] E. T. Fox, Jolly Rogers: The True History of Pirate Flags (Fox Historical, 2015), 16, 63.
[52] Philip Gosse, The History of Piracy (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1934), 203; Neil Rennie, Treasure Neverland: Real and Imaginary Pirates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 263.
[53] The History and Lives Of All the most Notorious Pirates, and their Crews (London: Edward Midwinter, 1725), 72. In her article in Jo Stanley’s greater work, Bold in Her Breeches, Julie Wheelwright discovers an 1813 publication that lifted this passage from this unauthorized printing of Johnson’s work. Wheelwright did not know of the passage came from this addition published by Edward Midwinter. Julie Wheelwright, “Tars, Tarts, and Swashbucklers,” in Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages, ed. Jo Stanley (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 192-193.
[54] From Baker’s work, Steve Gooch received his inspiration for subtly suggesting the two had a lesbian relationship in his 1978 play, The Women Pirates Ann Bonney and Mary Read. Rennie, Treasure Neverland, 256-257; Rictor Norton, “Lesbian Pirates: Anne Bonny and Mary Read”, Lesbian History, updated 14 June 2008, http://rictornorton.co.uk/pirates.htm. Klausmann, Meinzerin, and Kuhn also site Baker in their book when they discussed the possibility of a lesbian relationship between Bon
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photos of an impossibly cute little grey ki...
Those of you who follow my Instagram, will have no doubt noticed my feed being swamped with photos of an impossibly cute little grey kitten with the most incredible markings. Smokey was mine for just a couple of weeks after we took him into 'foster' care, but he made such a big impact on my life!
The reason we took him on is all down to my mum actually, or at least my mum's cat. Her name's Fluffy - the cat, not my mum - and she's a Norwegian Forest cat. She's a beautiful cat with thick, longish white and grey fur that's so soft and silky. Outdoors she displays all the characteristics of a wild cat, hunting, fighting and controlling her little territory but indoors she is supremely tame, the contrast is quite startling.
Fluffy's first Photoshoot
Anyway, Fluffy keeps getting pregnant and having her litters away from the house. This is obviously terrible for the kittens, as they'll be devoid of any kind of human contact in their formative weeks and will turn out pretty wild, living the streets as strays. Smokey was one of those kittens born outdoors in the streets, but on one particular day, Fluffy brought him back to my mum's house at about 6 weeks, probably to eat some of the catfood they put out.
By chance, my sister was at the window and noticed the little grey ball of fluff and quickly tried grabbing him. She eventually caught him, but he was absolutely terrified of her and made a good stab at avoiding capture. He was running around all over the place, hissing, growling and hiding. It was obvious he'd had no human contact at all and would turn out to be just another stray roaming the alleyways of my mum's neighbourhood.
Their neighbourhood already has a big problem with strays as it is, people take on kittens, dump them when they grow up and 'cease' to be cute enough to feed. My mum has taken in all manner of these strays in the past, so never a day went past in my childhood where there wasn't a cat in the house which definitely explains why I love them so much. There were times when she'd set her alarm at 4am to bottle-feed kittens that had been separated from their mother and just abandoned on our street, neighbours always seemed to bring news of stray cats to my mum first!
Now my mum has a new problem with Fluffy, where people know that Norwegian Forest Cats are rare(ish) and expensive, so they always feed her chicken, fish, lamb and all sorts of various bits of animal in an attempt to lure her in. Fortunately she's too clever to fall for that, but they also target her kittens. Her kittens are always beautiful. Smokey had his amazing markings, but another that does roam the streets still is called Poochie, and is wild beyond saving. Which is a great shame, as he's pure white with heterochromia - one eye is emerald and the other is azure blue - I almost died of cute overdose when I first saw him!
Poochie: he of the Heterochromia
So, my mum didn't want Smokey to become just another stray cat, and my sister wasn't having much joy in trying to tame him. So, knowing I have three tame cats of my own, asked me if I'd try to tame him, and give him away to a better home where he'll be looked after. I didn't really want to, as I knew that two of my cats would hate him, but when I looked at his little face, I just couldn't say no!
Could you say no to that little face?
Nope, me neither!
We we took him back to our house, and lo and behold, Alisa and Willie both hated him immediately. They wouldn't even come into the house by their own volition for the first week of him being here! The other half looked out of the bedroom window and noticed them both curled up, sleeping on the grass in the pouring rain because they just didn't want to come indoors.
Girl loved him though, she loves everyone as she's lost a lot of her cat instincts. She gets on with a lot of the cats in the area as she isn't threatened by them in anyway, and she poses no threat to them either! Smokey didn't seem to enjoy living with us at first, still acting a little wild whenever we approached him. He'd hiss, growl, hide and then run off. He did get quite attached to Girl very quickly, and I think she actually taught him how to be a cat. He'd never drank water before, only milk, so when he first saw the water bowl, he just walked straight in to it!
He poses, even while he sleeps
At full stretch - look at those markings!
After a couple of days spent with Girl, and us picking him up and stroking him occasionally, he began to settle down a bit and enjoy himself. He'd still hiss, growl and run off, but he was doing it much less often. He began to respond to his name for the first time and to purr for the first time too - he sounded like a little machine! After that first week, even though he'd improved, he still wasn't quite ready for rehoming. He was still in his shell a little and still a bit afraid of us, so we kept him on for another week.
One is impossibly good looking, the other's wearing a nice pair of glasses
The Money Shot
By the end of week two, he was sleeping on our bed at night, waking us up in the morning and just generally acting like a domesticated cat would. But most importantly he'd came out of his shell too and was beginning to get really playful, to the point of being a cheeky little sh*t! He was starting to crave attention, playfight with Girl and even try to engage in such tomfoolery with Willie and Alisa, though they'd both give him a loud hiss and a swipe.
He had the most adorable trait, something I'd never seen in a cat. Whenever we'd approach him to stroke him, he'd let us for a few seconds, before literally collapsing to the floor so that we could stroke his belly! I was telling my sister about this, and apparently Fluffy and a lot of her kittens share this trait. Maybe it's a Norwegian Forest Cat thing? Either way, it was seriously cute and hilarious!
Sun's out, tongues out
Baring his tiny little teeth
By now, the boy was ready for rehoming. But was I ready for him to be rehomed? No chance. He was like a part of our little family already, but I couldn't keep him as my cats were so clearly unhappy and just not getting used to him at all. He had to go, but we were determined to make sure he went to a serious cat person. We listed him on Gumtree with a bit of a price-tag, to filter out all of the timewasters and anyone who might fancy getting a kitten on a whim. It worked, as the woman who eventually took him travelled from Leeds to pick him up.
When he left, I actually cried. I loved the little guy to bits and was devastated to see him go. The house felt a little empty and lot more boring without him running around all over the place, as kittens do when they're beginning to discover what they can and can't do. As great as it was, I promised myself I'd never do it again, it was just too painful to have to give him away at the end of it all.
The Playboy Pose
tête-à-tête
Hands up, don't shoot.
One for the portfolio
Mmm you look so tasty...
Concerned Face
It's been a long day
Final Goodbyes...
No sooner had I gotten over it though, I was back at the parents' for Eid and Fluffy gave birth to another brood of kittens. This time, there are 6. My mum shot me that look that only mothers can, which basically said: "You take some of them."
I fired back my own look: "No."Chief Justice Sarah Parker administers, right, the oath of office to North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory at the North Carolina State Capitol in Raleigh, North Carolina, Saturday, January 12, 2013. (Jeff Siner/Charlotte Observer/MCT via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON -- Any race-related emails that North Carolina Republicans may have sent in connection with the voter restrictions they passed last summer could soon be public, thanks to a ruling by a federal judge.
Before the Supreme Court's decision to strike down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act, simply demonstrating a discriminatory impact could be enough to overturn a discriminatory law. Now, in order to have North Carolina's voting law struck down, civil rights groups and the Justice Department have to demonstrate that state lawmakers deliberately engaged in racial discrimination against voters.
The sweeping law requires voters to show certain forms of photo identification, eliminates same-day registration and reduces early voting -- all measures which voting rights advocates say are intended to make it harder for Democratic-leaning minorities to vote.
The emails sent by legislators are crucial to proving racial motivations played some role in the legislation.
North Carolina wanted to keep legislator emails secret. But U.S. Magistrate Judge Joi Elizabeth Peake ruled Thursday that the state couldn't withhold all the emails. She did, however, say that North Carolina might be able to argue that emails only between legislators and their staffers could be kept private.
Of course, if legislators have nothing to hide about the motivations for passing the restrictive laws, they can individually waive their legislative immunity, as Peake noted.
Voting rights advocates welcomed the judge's decision.
"North Carolinians have a right to know what motivated their lawmakers to make it harder for them to vote," Dale Ho, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, said in a statement. "Legislators should not be shrouding their intentions in secrecy. The people deserve better."A group offering itself as an alternative to the National Rifle Association and focusing on training African Americans in the proper use of guns says it has seen a spike in its membership, particularly since the election of Donald Trump.
The National African-American Gun Association says that some black gun owners are particularly concerned about protecting their homes and family from crime, while others are concerned about the current political climate, which has shown a spike in hate crimes and a rise in hate groups, CBS46 notes.
“With the recent election and Trump getting into office, we anticipated a spike in gun ownership within the African-American community, and we were right,” Mitch Mitchell, a NAAGA safety instructor, said.
“I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say... that there’s an apprehension in the community based on some of the political rhetoric, regardless if you’re a Republican or Democrat, left or right. A lot of folks are just concerned with the way the country’s being run right now,” Phillip Smith, president of NAAGA, which is based in Atlanta, added.
Nezida Davis, a group member who is currently in training, says that she is in this to survive.
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“Besides just crime in your community, there could be crime coming from anywhere. And we’re not just talking about terroristic threats—domestic terrorism, you know, white supremacists, whatever you want to call them,” Davis said.
While NAAGA has existed for just about two years, its membership currently stands at around 20,000, with the president telling The Root that the group grew from four chapters in 2016 to 30 chapters in 2017.
However, the group insists that its core principles have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with safety, protection and acceptance as more and more black citizens believe that owning a gun to be a good thing.
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“We are now getting to the point where folks are saying, ‘You know what? I can get a gun and protect my family if I’m a single mom or a dad,’” Smith said.
Read more at CBS46.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
Chile has been given yet another stadium ban by FIFA after their fans failed to stop using homophobic chants at matches.
The country has received two previous stadium bans during the 2018 World Cup qualifiers.
As well as the ban, which means they will play two more games away from their Estadio Nacional, the country will be forced to pay 30,000 Swiss francs (£23,500).
“The proceedings relate to homophobic chants by the team’s fans and follow previous sanctions for similar incidents during the preliminary competition of the 2018 FIFA World Cup,” a statement from FIFA reads.
Having already rearranged a match with Venezuela for March to take place in a different stadium, Chile will also be made to rearrange games against Paraguay and Ecuador.
The national team previously couldn’t play Bolivia at the national stadium and were fined 70,000 Swiss francs (£55,000).
FIFA today issued bigger fines to England’s football association for wearing poppies than it has to countries whose fans chanted homophobic abuse.
The boss of one country fined, Mexico, has previously claimed homophobic chants are not discriminatory and should not receive fines at all.
The country’s fans frequently scream the anti-gay slur “puto”, a derogatory word for a male prostitute or gay man.
GLAAD has previously criticised FIFA for not taking action on homophobic chants at the last World Cup.If you want to know how homogeneous President-elect Donald Trump’s picks for Cabinet are, imagine playing the hardest game of Guess Who you’ve ever played in your life.
With the exception of Ben Carson, Linda McMahon, Elaine Chao, Betsy DeVos, and Nikki Haley, Trump’s picks so far are male, white, old, and extremely wealthy. Trump clearly mostly trusts one kind of person: people who remind him of himself.
Put simply, the team Trump has created is setting out to be one of the least diverse Cabinets in recent history. This doesn’t just risk omitting the perspective of many different identities; it also reverses the progress the country has made when it comes to the representation of women and people of color in government. That has trickle-down effects for the hiring of the staff inside those agencies and limits whose ideas are heard.
Diversity, or lack thereof, impacts both policy and civil society. For instance, one study from the Annual Review of Political Science in 2014 found that having minorities serve in government not only helps make their issues a priority but also galvanizes political participation of that minority group. Women also make more effective policymakers. But despite the long list of advantages, Trump doesn’t seem concerned with diversity.
To make matters worse, Trump’s male Cabinet picks have worryingly narrow-minded views about the marginalized people who aren’t represented in the Cabinet. For instance, attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions once proclaimed in 2006 that immigrants from the Dominican Republic don’t contribute skills to the American economy. “Fundamentally, almost no one coming from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming here because they have a provable skill that would benefit us and that would indicate their likely success in our society,” he said. Ben Carson, who is poised to become housing and urban development secretary, argued just last year that Muslims shouldn’t be president and tied abortion to slavery.
When it comes to women’s issues, the men in Trump’s Cabinet all seem to agree that women should have fewer reproductive rights, not more. Most if not all of them support defunding Planned Parenthood and restrictions to abortion and birth control access.
Trump’s controversial pick for health and human services secretary, Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, has been described as a “dream for those with a nostalgia for the time before Roe v. Wade.” He sponsored draconian “personhood” bills that could potentially ban most forms of birth control twice, in 2005 and 2007, and drew controversy in 2012 for arguing that no woman has ever faced financial barriers to contraception access.
No wonder the demand for IUDs has risen by 900 percent since the election. Women are afraid to go back to a time where birth control wasn’t accessible or available.
Given that Trump handed the phone to his daughter Ivanka when House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi brought up women in a phone call after the election, it’s not shocking to see him make female voices an afterthought in his administration. Meanwhile, it’s still unclear how Ivanka would balance the issues that concern half the population and continue to attend meetings with foreign leaders that benefit her family’s company (although her official role is “settling her children into their new homes”) — hey, maybe women can have it all.
But maybe the voices of female politicians don’t matter. After all, Trump believes men have it worse than women (and according to new data, his supporters agree). So perhaps women should celebrate the fact that Trump is finally giving a voice to white men in politics.Image copyright Getty Images
Scientists have created a computer program they say is the perfect poker player and never makes a mistake.
The developers told Science journal they had "solved" the two-player game Fixed-limit Heads-up Texas Hold 'em.
And the algorithm had a strategy so close to optimal "it can't be beaten with statistical significance within a lifetime of human poker playing".
The poker-ace algorithm is also now available online for people to test, query and even play against.
'Perfect information'
Since scientists first started to develop game-playing artificial intelligence, there have been a series of famous cases where computer algorithms developed strategies better than the very best human players.
In 1997, for example, IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
But these machine victories have been in what are termed "perfect-information games" - where all players are informed about everything that has occurred in the game before making a decision.
This is not the case in poker, where players do not know which cards have been dealt to other players.
This new poker-playing program has taught itself to overcome this. It has played trillions of hands of poker and been designed to learn by "regretting" and remembering every decision that does not lead to the optimum outcome.
Fixed-limit heads-up Texas hold 'em
The two players are each dealt two cards only they can see
On the basis of these alone, the first player can choose to bet a set amount against the other or "fold" awarding the game to their opponent
The second player can then choose to match the bet, double it or fold
If the bet is doubled, the first player then has the option to match it or fold
Three further cards are laid face up on the table by the dealer
The two players bet against each other for a second time based on poker hands they could potentially complete by combining their two concealed cards with the three on the table
Another card is laid face up on the table by the dealer
The two players bet against each other for a third time - but now the set amount is doubled
A fifth and final card is laid face up on the table by the dealer
The two players bet against each other for a fourth and final time - with the set amount remaining the same as in the previous round
"Our model has spent two months playing poker again and again," said lead researcher Michael Bowling from the University of Alberta.
"It's playing 24 trillion hands of poker every second for two months.
"That's more poker hands than all of humanity - so in some sense it's not surprising that it has developed the perfect strategy."
While this might seem a playful project, the use of game theory on which the research is based could have serious implications, including for security.
Automated systems for airport checkpoints, for example, could be designed to incorporate this type of uncertainty and missing information.
In this instance, though, when Dr Bowling was asked whether he thinks purist, professional poker players might be irritated by the breakthrough, he said: "I have no idea. We'll have to see how much hate email I'll be getting come Thursday afternoon."
Follow Victoria on TwitterA Delray Beach man is in the Palm Beach County Jail after he allegedly fired several shots from a handgun while standing near a child care center, according to an arrest report.
Cliff G. Theus is facing charges of firing a weapon on school property and marijuana possession. Theus, 22, is being held without bail because he was already facing charges of burglary, grand theft and motor vehicle grand theft in connection with an incident on Dec. 26.
A witness told Delray Beach police he was at the intersection of Davis Road and Udell Lane when a large group of people gathered to watch a fight between two females. The witness said he saw Theus raise his hand and fire four to six rounds from a revolver, the report said.
Police say that Theus fired the shots while standing just outside the fence line of the Kidsville Early Learning Center at 2200 Lake Ida Road. Theus allegedly fired the shots around 4 p.m. when the center was in operation.
Theus was arrested around two blocks from where he allegedly fired the gun. During a search, Theus was found to be carrying seven baggies containing a total of 10.5 grams of marijuana.PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 11 — D-Wave Systems Inc., the world’s first quantum computing company, announced that Los Alamos National Laboratory will acquire and install the latest D-Wave quantum computer, the 1000+ qubit D-Wave 2X system. Los Alamos, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, will lead a collaboration within the Department of Energy and with select university partners to explore the capabilities and applications of quantum annealing technology, consistent with the goals of the government-wide National Strategic Computing Initiative. The National Strategic Computing Initiative, created by executive order of President Obama in late July, is intended “to maximize [the] benefits of high-performance computing (HPC) research, development, and deployment.”
“Eventually Moore’s Law (that predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years), will come to an end,” said John Sarrao, associate director for Theory, Simulation, and Computation at Los Alamos. “Dennard Scaling (that predicted that performance per watt of computing would grow exponentially at roughly the same rate) already has. Beyond these two observations lies the end of the current ‘conventional’ computing era, so new technologies and ideas are needed.”
“As conventional computers reach their limits in terms of scaling and performance per watt, we need to investigate new technologies to support our mission,” said Mark Anderson of the Laboratory’s Weapons Physics Directorate. “Researching and evaluating quantum annealing as the basis for new approaches to address intractable problems is an essential and powerful step, and will enable a new generation of forward thinkers to influence its evolution in a direction most beneficial to the nation.”
“Los Alamos is a global leader in high performance computing and a pioneer in the application of new architectures to solve critical problems related to national security, energy, the environment, materials, health and earth science,” said D-Wave U.S. President Bo Ewald. “As we work jointly with scientists and engineers at Los Alamos we expect to be able to accelerate the pace of quantum software development to advance the state of algorithms, applications and software tools for quantum computing.”
D-Wave’s quantum annealing technology leverages quantum effects to quickly find the lowest points in a virtual “energy landscape”. These low points correspond to optimal or near optimal solutions to a given problem. In addition, D-Wave’s superconducting processor generates almost no heat, so the system’s power requirements, currently less than 25 kW, will remain low as the computer continues to scale. This is in stark contrast to current supercomputers that can require many megawatts of power, a huge impediment as the need for computational resources continues to grow.
The D-Wave 2X system is expected to be installed at Los Alamos in early 2016.
About D-Wave Systems Inc.
D-Wave Systems is the first quantum computing company. Its mission is to integrate new discoveries in physics, engineering, manufacturing and computer science into breakthrough approaches to computation to help solve some of the world’s most complex challenges. The company’s quantum computers are built using a novel type of superconducting processor that uses quantum mechanics to massively accelerate computation. D-Wave’s customers include some of the world’s most prominent organizations including Lockheed Martin and Google, whose system is hosted at NASA’s Ames Research Center. With headquarters near Vancouver, Canada, D-Wave U.S. is based in Palo Alto, California. D-Wave has a blue-chip investor base including Bezos Expeditions, BDC Capital, DFJ, Goldman Sachs, Growthworks, Harris & Harris Group, In-Q-Tel, International Investment and Underwriting, and Kensington Partners Limited. For more information, visit: www.dwavesys.com.
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Source: D-Wave SystemsEver since they were selected with the 28th and 30th picks of the 2010 MLS SuperDraft, Justin Morrow and Steven Beitashour had been inseparable as teammates on the San Jose Earthquakes. They roomed together on the road, and both broke through to start for MLS against Chelsea in the 2012 All-Star Game.
Now it seems as though they will exit the Quakes’ roster together as well.
Morrow, supplanted in the starting lineup in 2013 by newcomer Jordan Stewart, was traded to Toronto on Tuesday in exchange for an undisclosed amount of allocation money. And Quakes general manager John Doyle told MLSsoccer.com by phone that he doesn’t think the out-of-contract Beitashour will return.
“I’ve spoken to [Beitashour] and asked him what he’s thinking, and he’s thinking that he wants to try it in Europe,” Doyle said. “And I don’t blame him. He’s a younger guy, he wants to see if he can make it there. The salaries in Europe are higher than in MLS, and with his recent stint with the Iranian national team, I think he feels his value’s at its peak right now and wants to take advantage of that. I understand that.”
If Beitashour joins Morrow in departing, the Quakes will retain his rights but would need to find more depth along their back line in the meantime. Doyle said that veteran Ty Harden, who deputized for an injured Beitashour at the start of 2013 before needing a season-ending surgery on his right hip, will be in the mix for the starting job at right back.
“Ty Harden did really well, then got hurt,” Doyle said. “We have Ty there, and then we’ll be looking for a right back.”
With Victor Bernardez and Clarence Goodson set as center backs, San Jose should have a stout back four, but one that raises concerns about age and international duties. Harden will turn 30 three days before the Quakes’ season opener, while the other three starters are already 31. And Bernardez (Honduras) and Goodson (United States) are both likely candidates to serve on their countries’ World Cup squads.
Find more Quakes news at SJEarthquakes.com
The Quakes’ decision to trade Morrow was not a total shock. The 26-year-old inked a significantly improved contract in October 2012, and Doyle had already made it clear that San Jose would be doing some salary-cap pruning ahead of plans to sign attacking help this winter.
“You want to be like the old San Francisco 49ers, where you had three [starting-caliber] quarterbacks – Joe Montana, Steve Young, and [Steve] Bono,” Doyle said. “In Major League Soccer, you can have players making a good salary, but the players who aren’t starting? Those players need to be on a lower salary.... In our end-of-the-year session, it was clear: he’s on a starter’s salary and Jordan was going to be the starter.”
In addition, with the Quakes revamping their tactics under new coach Mark Watson, San Jose is trying to concentrate their payroll in the center of the park, rather than along the wings. Doyle identified an attacking force at midfield as the Quakes’ top priority after scoring just 35 goals this year.
“You have to look at the impact positions, and usually that’s down the middle,” Doyle said. “I don’t want to discount the sides, but the players in the middle usually command a higher salary than the guys wide.”
Even with the salary-cap room afforded by the Morrow move, the Quakes may not be done selling. Winger Marvin Chavez, who has told Honduran media that he wants out of San Jose, is in a similar situation to Morrow, having been replaced by the less-expensive Cordell Cato.
“I think we’re moving in the right direction,” Doyle said of the Quakes’ budget. “We’re creating space, but who knows if it’s enough space? We’re looking at a lot of players.... So I don’t know where it will land yet.”By Vincent Dowd
BBC News, Washington
Mr Bush's message was taped and later broadcast to other marchers
Mr Bush was speaking before thousands of anti-abortion activists attended a March For Life rally in Washington.
"You're here because you know that all life deserves to be protected... I'm proud to be standing with you," Mr Bush said to organisers of the annual march.
There are an estimated 1.2 million abortions in America annually.
White House invitation
On 22 January 1973, the US Supreme Court legalised abortion in America when it ruled on the Roe versus Wade case.
In that case the court decided under the constitution individual states did not have the right to prevent abortion.
America is better than this, so we will continue to work for a culture of life
President Bush
Each year there is a well-attended March for Life rally in Washington to urge the Supreme Court to overturn its ruling.
Campaigners hope a court which has become more conservative under Mr Bush is more likely now one day to do that.
Mr Bush invited 200 of the marchers to the White House to offer his support. He said each unborn child was a separate individual with his or her own genetic code.
"America is better than this, so we will continue to work for a culture of life," he said. A taped version was broadcast to other demonstrators later.
Abortion reform has not featured large in the current campaign for the presidency but it retains the potential to become an issue.
Of the Republicans only the former New York Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, does not want to overturn the Roe versus Wade ruling - and this has alienated some in his party.Business alliance between Kaula, Inc. and AZAPA Co., Ltd. aiming to build blockchain technology and service in the automotive market
Kaula, Inc. (HQ in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, CEO: Katsuji Okamoto, hereinafter referred to as “KAULA”), a blockchain technology company, and AZAPA Co., Ltd., (HQ in Nagoya, Aichi-ken, CEO & President: Yasuhiro Kondo, hereinafter referred to as “AZAPA”), a leading company in the automotive field, have concluded a business tie-up. We will work on development of practical application services that increase economic values of data derived from automobiles by adapting the blockchain technology.
Background of the Alliance
A paradigm shift of the automotive market is near at our hand, especially due to China’s EV shift. Regulations on CO 2 emission is being required around the world to solve serious air pollution problems, shifting from gasoline cars to electric cars is going on and EV battery management attracts attention now.
Battery is the heart of EV. It is the most expensive, heaviest and dangerous. KAULA and AZAPA together will make a new sharing economy around the battery to maximize its value and manage its life cycle, acquiring battery residual value data, distributing battery usage forecast using AI and writing them into the blockchain to guarantee authenticity and non-tampering.
Overview of BRVPS
The Battery Residual Value Prediction System (BRVPS) acquires data from BMS (Battery Management System) such as temperature, humidity, pressure, voltage, current, etc. in the battery unit and information from OBD (On-Board Diagnostics) and then stores them in the battery residual value forecast engine. BRVPS steadily executes AI/ML and writes the results to blockchain which EV/battery owners and users can access via cloud services. This enables you to extract the maximum battery value through freely accessing the present and future SOH (State of Health), including charging efficiency, and usage forecasts based on the past battery usage tendency.
The Next Deployment
Through cooperation with EV and battery manufacturers, we aim to develop new markets centering battery data. Implementing each step of EV and battery supply and demand balance, energy consumption planning, reservation, use and settlement, we accelerate the spread of EV and create additional services so that EV and battery owners and users can switch from consumers to prosumers.
In addition to the rising of global environmental consciousness, automatic driving and other technologies, newly services have been born and growing rapidly. We will broadly provide highly value-added services through KAULA’s blockchain technology and AZAPA’s automotive technology and network to build a new business model together.
Establishing a Consortium
We will set up a consortium to form an ecosystem, ahead of mega platform formers, to establish “IoT-blockchain based technology” aiming at a practical service model which covers from sensing to data utilization.
The paradigm shift surrounding automotive industry is progressing and closely related to the deepening of IoT, and the economic value of data obtained from automobiles has already been widely acknowledged. The current telematics, however, the type and granularity of acquired data are not standardized and its service is so limited. We will together promote applications created by utilizing data and their standardization including blockchain and security as backplane technologies.
Outline of Kaula, Inc.
Head office: 2-9 Kanda Jimbocho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
Business: In collaboration with leading companies and organizations in the global blockchain area, supplying consulting services for blockchain application building, development of services of record management and the IoT field, and blockchain education business.
Kaula is a member of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) and Edge Platform Consortium.
URL: https://kaula.jp/
Outline of AZAPA Co., Ltd.
Head office: Nishiki 2-4-15, Naka-ku, Nagoya
Business: Researches of new systems and providing business solutions in each field (*) of automobiles. Promoting the Tier 0.5 concept.
* Model base, measurement technology, new control theory, energy, IoT, artificial intelligence, kansei technology
URL: http: //www.azapa.co.jp
Contact:
Kaula, Inc.
Hiroyasu Nohata, CIO,
E-mail: Kaula.laboratory @ kaula.jp
TEL: 03-6265-4888
AZAPA Co., Ltd
Satoshi Nishida, Business Planning Dept.
E-mail: satoshi-nishida @ azapa.co.jp
TEL: 052-221-7350 /FAX: 052-221-7351I’m gonna lead with the thank-yous this time.
A big thank you to Bacon, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms Explosives for having sponsored the comic for the last two weeks. Thank you to all of you readers who went and checked out the blog during the sponsorship. He says he had a nice bump in traffic in the last two weeks. If you’re interested in sponsoring Basic Instructions, please drop me a line.
Thank you to everyone who has used or is using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada). They are performing well enough that I’m seriously considering removing the traditional pay-per-impression ads from my site permanently and just throwing up Amazon banners to products I personally like whenever I don’t have a sponsor. That way I know there’s never an auto-playing audio/video ad, or an ad for something I don’t want to endorse.
Finally, thank you to everyone who has subscribed to the comic. Progress remains slow but steady, which is fine by me. I’ve moved the progress meter to its permanent home in the upper right-hand corner of the page. From here on in, expect a brief progress report once a week. For the numerous people who have contacted me expressing concern about using Paypal, I am looking into options. You are not being ignored.The GnuCash Project has had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the eighth maintenance release of the free, cross-platform, and open-source GnuCash 2.6 accounting software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows platforms.
According to the attached release notes, GnuCash 2.6.8 is here to fix many of those annoying bugs that have been reported by users since the previous release of the application, among which we can mention the inability to save values in the "Display Symbol" field, and the non-obvious "Months Remaining" spinbox in the Loan Assistant component, which now has a tooltip that informs users about its existence.
Moreover, there's a fix for a bug where the attached file could not be found on Microsoft Windows operating systems, the Transaction Report "Filter By" function now works correctly, the Finance::Quote TZ Date::Manip config variable has been deprecated, the PKG_PROG_PKG_CONFIG variable is now being used by GnuCash, and various non-fatal asserts have gotten cleaned up.
The save location and path of any account starting with ".gnucash" are no longer being wrongfully invalidated, there are no more invalid pointers on duplicated transactions if setting the Use Split Action Field for Number function, and the Market Index, Bond, Mutual Fund, and Stock account types now correctly use the template accounts, but users are being informed that the Mutual Fund and Stock account types are not yet compatible with currency.
The GnuCash documentation has been greatly improved
Furthermore, GnuCash 2.6.8 cleans up the deprecated GTK+ functions in order to prepare the software for the upcoming migration to GTK+ 3, the Date::Manip class that is required for gnc-fq-helper has been restored as an explicit dependency of the gnc-fq-update component, backend Sync errors are now being reported correctly, and the GnuCash documentation has been greatly improved.
Last but not least, the storage of prices in the price database has been improved to allow for storing of only one instance per day, as well as to implement a preference list that determines the sources that can overwrite currently stored prices. The Dutch, Danish, German, and French language translations have been updated. Download GnuCash 2.6.8 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia.Actress Roseanne Barr slammed Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) during his resignation speech on Thursday, pointing out that the disgraced Democrat was “blaming Trump for his being a pervert.”
“I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving, while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office,” Franken said during his speech on the Senate floor.
In response, the 65-year-old Roseanne star wrote on Twitter that Franken was “
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walls began to rise steeply up on either side. When he was younger he had read many stories about epic sar’benawath battles between male sar’benawath pairs and between male sar’benawath and male Tevarin. He knew they were ferocious and utterly fearless. He also knew they were deviously cunning. So he was looking all around and not letting his eyes rest for a second as in that second it could mean life or death.
He calmed his breathing and began to work in his mind the best location in this area for him to make a stand. As he looked around he noticed an area that had a slight over hang and was made of rock with a kind of darker area under the large rock that he could get into and still stand up and it would protect his back. So he decided that was the area that he would defend from. As he was gliding towards the area over the sand and stone he noticed a slight almost imperceptible sound of something large coming in contact with the ground behind him. He whirled around expecting the sar’benawath right behind him. As soon as he whipped around a large two meter tall round boulder rolled out from behind the bushes and stopped in the pathway.
He backed up warily until he felt the coolness of the rock pressed against his back. He then crouched down and waited patiently for the hunter to reveal himself. It was getting darker by the minute as it had not reached full niz’itop yet and Asri knew if the male that was stalking him would attack it would be during the night time if he stuck to what Asri knew of his hunter. So he kept his eyes slightly shut and waited patiently. As he was sitting there waiting he kept going through his mind what he knew of the sar’benawath. He kept his muscles twitching so as not to allow the coolness of the night to set in and cause him to cramp up when he needed them to do their job the most.
As the niz’itop reached it darkest point, there rose from the ground itself it seemed a large dark form, as if by some sort of evil Rijoric sorcery. The shape was a good three meters taller than Asri as it stood towering over the much smaller figure. Asri waited as the massive shape stalked closer and closer without a sound. He could now hear it’s breathing as it huffed in the air around it with deep breathes and he noticed he could see the slight luminesces of its eyes as they glowed with yellow and red it had four eyes two set in the front and two on the top of its head. It kept shifting it head from side to side to keep its blind spots checked as it closed in on its defenseless prey. As it got well within the reach of Asri’s macca Asri’s hand moved slightly and the giant figure frozen in place and a growl began deep within the massive body. Asri leaped from his position straight up in the air about three meters and stabbed downwards with his macca. Gouging the large beast on its head the beast bellowed as it stood up on its hind legs to its full height of seven and a half meters tall and swiped with its large clawed front feet at the creature that wounded it. It missed and while it was recovering from the swing Asri leaped up again and stabbed at one of the yellow and red eyes glowing in the night sky. He watched with satisfaction when the light when out and felt a thud of contact and pulled his mecca back quickly as another bellow from the beast erupted. He felt a searing pain across his right side as the animal managed to swipe him with a grazing of its nails. He landed in the sand and rolled away from the large animal. He rose with his macca pointed in the direction of the growling beast. It warily began to stalk around him in the sand as Asri put his back again next to the cool rock wall. It then melted into the inky blackness with an unsettling swiftness and as soundlessly as death itself.
Asri let out a sigh of relief as the area around him began to spring to life again with the sounds of the jungle around him. He knew that he had won round one. He examined the wounds on his right side and knew they were superficial but also knew they could attract borrowing insects that would kill him if he left them unattended. So he decided to find some water and clean the wounds and tend them with a plant that provided a natural antiseptic and healing agent. So he quickly and quietly left the area and went to find water to clean the wound but not to drink as that would be considered to be a violation of nessi.
He walked out of the ravine and noticed that the branches he had put on the path had not even been disturbed and there were no foot prints down the path where such a massive creature would have made some sort of indication that it passed that way.
He knew once he took care of his side he needed to find the path that the creature took into his defensive area.
It was still night but it was getting lighter out and the stars overhead were fading somewhat as the light of day began to outshine the brightness of the stars. It was a few hours after sun rise when he located a stream and examined the waters to ensure it was ok to use without any side effects or kur’stiries(leach like creatures that are only a few centimeters in length that will suck a person dry of blood without them even realizing it and swell to two to three meters long leaving the person a dried out husk). He carefully cleaned the wounds with the water and then located a plant close by that he used to cut the leaves with his voc and smeared the sticky paste all over the wound. Immediately the stinging subsided and when looking at the wounds he noticed they were not as red as they had been. He took a few more leaves with him and headed back to his defensive position to try and catch some sleep before the niz’itop came again and the hunt began anew.
The Seraphim Regiment -
The Seraphim - Star Citizen Division -
The Seraphim - Star Citizen RSI Website - The Seraphim Regiment - www.seekHim.com The Seraphim - Star Citizen Division - http://seraphimstarcitizen.enjin.com/home The Seraphim - Star Citizen RSI Website - https://robertsspaceindustries.com/orgs/SERR Posted Jun 19, 15 · OP [ADM] Thoughtfulwander01 a Posts: 2,014 Admins Admiral He napped in the cool sand under the rocky over hang that was his shelter and defensive position. He woke up about midday and went to look for the path that his hunter took to try and kill him. As he was walking along the ridge on the western side around his refuge he noticed a large indentation and a place that looked like a boulder had been there. He looked closer around and did not see anything other than pressed down weeds and grass. He decided to put some surprises around the top of the ravine to see if he could detect where it was the beast would come from.
He worked swiftly with his voc and some stiff sticks from the tree of a wegoafile(bamboo like tree) and some vines that he found lying around. He made about twenty of the sharp little wegoballs. He took some of them and put them around the place where the boulder spot was. Then he placed the others in strategic places around the ravine making a few more as he walked around it. As it was getting dusk he headed back to the refuge to prepare for the battle to come.
As dusk began to settle in he noticed the jungle sounds surround him again and he enjoyed hearing the sounds and identifying the sounds and putting them with the creatures they belonged to. A few minutes after darkness he again rose and bellowed the male challenge to his hunter, it was almost immediately answered by a challenge and close by as well. He went back to his sitting position and waited for the hunter. As he was sitting there he noticed that he could hear faint sounds to the west and along the ridge of the ravine. He gripped his macca tighter as he waited for the attack to come.
While has was waiting and looking to the western side the night darkened further to almost the middle of the night as the hours slipped by. He was slightly sweating now and he kept twitching his muscles every so often to keep the blood flowing to his extremities for quick action when he was attacked. He knew a storm was coming as the humidity had risen considerably throughout the day. He kept watching for signs that the hunter was approaching as the rain began to come down in a soft patter. He was fairly dry under his overhang but every once and a while a drip would come off the top of the overhang and drop on him. He sat quietly and allowed the drips of the water to keep him awake and waited patiently. He chuckled to himself as he realized most of his kin would be up prowling around for the hunter even in this storm. He never understood why his kindred where so impatient. He had learned from a young age that impatience can produce very bad results. He had been told to help with the fields when he was a boy and in his impatience he had overlooked an infestation of cara’bonikic(plant burrowing insects) and they destroyed his families crops for the whole year. That was a very bad year as his grandmother died from what some said was old age however Asri knew it was from the stuthoric’throm(wasting disease – or malnutrition) and he vowed he would never miss something like that again.
He sensed a flicker of movement to his right and looked in that direction but did not move his head. He saw one of his little wegoballs come to rest close to him. He knew it did not come from above him so he kept his eyes and senses focused in front of his refuge his hand tightened on the macca. The rain began to start come down harder and he could not see the ridge around his refuge. He ignored the wegoball as it might have rolled down from all the water coming down and he knew that his quarry was out there because this was too good of an opportunity to pass up to hunt while the jungle was so covered in the blanketing noise of the rain.
He steeled himself for the inevitable attack. And still the rain came down…
He began to feel the tiredness creeping in on him and knew he had to stay awake. He stood up and began to move around not in impatience but to keep himself awake from the steady pounding of the rain on the jungle around him.
Keeping his eyes and senses keenly aware of his surroundings to watch for the hunter, he now noticed that the flow of water from the area where he had found the entrance to his refuge had increased and was coming down in almost a small stream. He was getting concerned that this could become a trap for him. He began to look for a way out of the situation and noticed some vines coming from the trees overhead hanging down into his little ravine within reach if he jumped up. He had never heard of the hunter using trees to get around or even climbing them so he decided it would be his best way to get himself out of the situation at hand.
He made a quick glance around to make sure the area around him was clear squinting in the darkness and rain to discern the hunter’s shape. Not seeing anything he decided it was a good time to make his way to safety in case of a flood of his ravine was coming. During this time the stream had rapidly gotten bigger and had some branches and small bushes swirling by in the swift murky waters. He leaped up to grab the vines swinging slightly in the wind overhead and his hand caught and clung tightly to as he started to grasp the vine with both hands there suddenly came a loud challenging roar from below as the ferocious hunter exploded out of the murky water it was hiding in to try and get at him as he was hanging above it.
He pulled himself up as fast as he could but he felt the terrible claws rack his back and he almost lost his grip on the vines as he held on the pain was even worse because it was also close to his right side that was already wounded. He grunted with exertion and pain but pushing through it he continued on up the vines onto the tree branch about thirty meters off the ground. The rain was still coming down and Asri was thankful that it was coming down so hard he could sense the hunter below on the ground and wondered if his assumption had been correct about them not climbing trees. But not seeing any sign of it climbing up the vines he proceeded to head on closer to the trunk of the large tree and to try to get some of the healing leaves juices on the wounds as soon as possible. He began to really get thirsty as the adrenaline started to settle down and he knew he had to get the wounds cleaned quickly. He resisted the urge to drink his fill of the rain coming down and used the deluge to clean off his back and side of the scratches made by the hunter. After he had cleaned them with the rain water and the stinging and burning had started to really set in as he cleaned all the grime off and it began to bleed again. Drops of his blood fell from his perch and he could hear growls and even something almost sounding like a cooing coming from below him. He knew his friend was below and waiting. He cut up the leaves and smeared them on his back as best he could and leaned back against the tree truck with his head on the trunk and his neck arched so that his back would not touch the trunk and relaxed letting his feet hang of the large limb on either side he closed his eyes thinking to just relax….
He woke with a start and realized it was itop’bawaki(daylight) already and the rain had stopped. He was very disappointed with himself because the hunter could have killed him at any moment while he slept. He checked below for any sign of his adversary and noticed there was no sign of it below. He then decided he needed more of the beneficial leaves for his back and side. As he climbed down the tree his back and side with their crusty coating of dried blood and dried leaf juice broken open again and started to bleed. He saw drops of his blood on the bushes at the base of the tree as he examined the surrounding area for the healing leaves he needed. He found a bunch of them at the base of a tree about thirty meters away from the tree he spent the night in. Harvesting them he then proceeded to pull off the worst of the crusty parts that he could reach and opening up the wounds again his back was covered with blood as it flowed freely down his back and dripped on the ground. He knew he was not losing a lot of blood but every little bit counted as he had not eaten or drank anything in over eight days. He began to smear the medicinal leaves with their oozing salve all over his back and side as the healing and herbal pain deadener started to work the wounds began to stop bleeding and the pain subsided. We went to the ravine he had used as his refuge and it was totally chocked with debris and standing water from the rains. He decided his stand would be in the tree he used for shelter last night. He knew that the hunter would be back tonight and he also knew he had to end it tonight if he continued this he would be to tired and weak from not eating and drinking anything to continue. He examined his surroundings and looked at the tree trunk. He noticed a depression in the soil and an area of the tree that was concaved in and was probably the right size for what he had in mind. He began to make everything ready for his final night of the hunt and the hunted.
The Seraphim Regiment -
The Seraphim - Star Citizen Division -
The Seraphim - Star Citizen RSI Website - The Seraphim Regiment - www.seekHim.com The Seraphim - Star Citizen Division - http://seraphimstarcitizen.enjin.com/home The Seraphim - Star Citizen RSI Website - https://robertsspaceindustries.com/orgs/SERR Posted Jun 19, 15 · OP [ADM] Thoughtfulwander01 a Posts: 2,014 Admins Admiral The hunter awoke and calmly surveyed his surroundings. He was slightly disoriented as he looked around with his four eyes and noticed that one was dark and there was a dull ache on his head. His eye that looked at the night sky and behind him was dark and he remembered why. It was that two legged meal that had gotten away. He growled to himself as he prowled down to the stream that was close by his lair and to take a good long drink. After drinking he began to sniff the night air for scents of prey. He knew it was close to nighttime and nighttime meant time to hunt for meat. He began his usual circuit around his lair and surrounding areas looking and checking his area for any trespassing males of his kind. He did not notice any scents of male or females in his immediate domain as he suddenly heard a sound that immediately made his senses spike dramatically as he went into hunt mode upon hearing a challenging male was in the area. He bellowed a challenge and headed to the area where the challenge had come from. It was a familiar area because this is where the two legged had been. He became wary as he approached the challenging male location based upon his hearing. He noticed it was very close to the ravine where he had almost had a two legged meal during the rain storm last night. He became very cautious as he sensed something was not right about the area as his night vision adjusted to the darker light as the last signs of any light on the horizon faded totally from view.
He smelled blood and it smelled like two legged blood. He crouched lower down in the bushes and long bladed grass that grew sparsely in the area around him inching toward the smell of fresh meat. As he drew closer he noticed a depression with a few leaves scattered around and he looked cautiously around up in the trees and vines hanging down to ensure he was safe and did not see anything. But still something was not right about this he sensed something was wrong with this. He looked at the depression closer and inched closer as he noticed it was covered in blackness with leaves and a stick sticking out of the ground that was black as well. He smelled the scent of blood even stronger now as his kill senses went crazy but he was still not sure about his surroundings as something still was not right….
Asri watched from a short distance away as the giant beast slinked up to the depression. He watched with interest as well as to study his opponent to provide clues on defeating the beast.
He smelled the scent of the two leg on the leaves and the stick was covered in it. He licked the blood and it sent a shiver of anticipation through him. He smelled the blood so strongly now that he could not stop himself as he tasted more blood and it smelled so sweat to him as he lapped it from the stick in the ground that was covered with it and the surrounding leaves. Get a few leaves in his mouth he swallowed them with the blood that he was lapping up he was in such frenzy now that he could not stop licking the blood.
What Asri noticed about this was the beast was strangely licking his voc that he had placed in the ground with its blade up and coated with his blood. As it was licking his voc it was cutting its own tongue and bleeding more as the blood flowed freely from its own mouth it kept licking it from the sharp voc. Asri had not ever heard of this behavior and was fascinated by what he was observing. He remained in place and watch even though this had not been his plan he wanted to see what would happened and if the beast would notice he was flaying his own tongue on the razor sharp blade. He had wanted the beast to come to him under the tree and try to climb up the trunk and then he would stab him with his macca from his hiding spot in the alcove made by the growth of the tree and his peeling off of the bark from another tree in the area and draping it from one side of the space to the other to form a hidden area in plain sight.
The beast was getting weary now as its licks and growls had reduced to occasional growls. It then laid down on its side to rest is what it looked like. Asri noticed that the tongue that hung out of its mouth was savagely lacerated and was still oozing blood onto the ground of the jungle around the beast. The beast was panting and its sides were heaving as the blood lust slowly left it.
Asri thought his time to strike would be now as he did not know if the beast was recouping its constitution or faking it to get him to come out so he could kill him. But he knew he had to do something it was now or never.
Through the foggy sight of near death the beast watched as if by magic the tree opened up and a two leg came out cautiously as it stalked towards him. He rumbled a growl at the creature but it came out as a wheezing moan. This emboldens the two leg and it began to stalk forward again. As the two leg raised the big metal stick the beast was wondering in it’s foggy brain why he could not move to kill this little creature. Then it felt a brief sharp pain in its head and then the powerful beast ceased to exist.
After pulling his macca out of the powerful beast skull where he had ended its existence Asri shook his head as he tried to figure out how this beast killed itself on licking his voc rather than charging up the tree and trying to get to the dead quetalupeth hanging from the branch overhead by a string of vines. Asri had planned for the beast to try to get to it and then he would have driven his macca into its side and pushed it towards his voc to hopefully push it onto his voc and get this nessi over with. Now he was totally confused and thinking about why this had happened. Maybe the sri’astriamitha(forest rangers) could tell him more once he completed this final act of the nessi.
He retrieved his voc and bent down pulling up the head and pulled his sharp voc across the throat of the hunter as the skin and muscle parted and the head came free he held it up in the air and roared a conclusion of challenge to the surrounding jungle as loud as he could. This was not a male sar’benawath call but his new lifelong hunting and battle cry(rijo’asri). He slung the head over his back with the wabinathoth he had made days ago in preparation for this and proceeded to cut up pieces of meat off the flesh of the beast quickly with his voc. This last step was just as important to the nessi as was the hunt and he did not want to fail in any of it.
The Seraphim Regiment -
The Seraphim - Star Citizen Division -
The Seraphim - Star Citizen RSI Website - The Seraphim Regiment - www.seekHim.com The Seraphim - Star Citizen Division - http://seraphimstarcitizen.enjin.com/home The Seraphim - Star Citizen RSI Website - https://robertsspaceindustries.com/orgs/SERR Posted Jun 19, 15 · OP [ADM] Thoughtfulwander01 a Posts: 2,014 Admins Admiral Once he had the prescribed three pieces of flesh from the back (strength), neck (awareness of surrounding) and leg (speed) he began to eat them raw. He was not unaccustomed to eating flesh raw as he liked to eat the flesh of the tro'bawock with very little preparation from time to time. It was considered to be a delicacy if the hunter that killed it ate it right after the kill. But this had even more symbolism as this was his necci and was a very important Rijora rite. Once he had finished the fresh meat he wiped his yellow-blooded hands on the only part of the beast that had fur and it was longish in length about 7-8 centimeters in length going from the top of the head all the way down the spine and was light orange and blue in color. He saluted the beast and then let out another rijo’asri and began a lopping run towards the cave of the beginning of his nessi with his trophy slung onto his back and his macca in his left hand.
As he ran he was still wondering about the actions of the beast he had just killed and couldn’t help wonder why it had behaved is such a strange manner.
He was lost in thought as he began the trek up to the nessi cave where this all started as he got closer to the cave entrance he felt like something was watching him. He stopped and looked around but did not see anything as he carefully peered at every bush and tree within 100 meters. Satisfying his concern he decided it was time to get inside and get some food and drink. He decided it was ok to spend the night then head out again in the morning as it was getting later on and he had about 35 kilometers to cover before he could get to his rendezvous point for extraction back to his Rijora completion. So he went to the secured area in the back of the cave where he knew there were family supplies that were kept there for emergencies as well as his supplies that he brought to the neccia and took a meal out of it as well as water and some Sujin tea leaves. He started the portable stove that was in the family supplies and heated up the water and found his favorite mug in his pack. He noticed it was niz’itop outside so he decided to get his trophy cleaned up while he had some time. He put on his regular clothes after taking off the ma’worath and wrapping it in the prescribed manner of the Rijora he packed it up for the trec tomorrow. He then put on his clothes and boots and belted on his blaster and seb’rish with seb(sheath). He took out the laser blaster he always carried and his seb’rish(sword similar to katana) he laid that to the side and almost reverently took out the head of the beast he had killed from the vine sling he had made. He trimmed up the ragged edges of the cut with his seb’rish but there wasn’t much he noted with satisfaction. The next step he began with setting his blaster on the lowest setting and increased the focus to a pinpoint and turned the beast’s head around till it was facing away from him with the neck and arteries exposed and oozing yellow blood very slowly. He started by cauterizing those areas first then he worked methodically back and forth over large areas until the whole end of the beast was cartelized and ready for transport and eventual mounting for his families bla’wasteh(trophy) wall.
The cave he was in was hollowed out over centuries of use by his family as each family had their own special nessi caves for their family members to be tested with. His family had four of these and he had seen one in his life time due to a family member being lost and stumbling on it close to his home when he was a child. He had not told anyone because then it would be considered a violation of Nessia and he did not want to disgrace his family that way because he could scout out the areas around and know the terrain before he went there for his Nessia. He had heard of some un-honorable Tevarin’s doing just that and knew that was not the path for him.
As he was eating and thinking about his testing he noticed the niz’itop sounds outside. He also loved to drink a small mug of suj before bed at times as this gave him a brief but soothing warm feeling and helped him go to sleep quicker at times if he was not too keyed up. He also put more healing medication on his wounds and noticed they were healing already pretty well. He cleaned up and put all of the borrowed utensils back after cleaning them as well. He would probably have to come back for a visit sometime this year to stock up the provisions he had used as now he had completed his testing so he could come and go to the nessi caves anytime as long as no one was taking their Rijora’Nessia there at the time.
He was pretty tired but he knew he had to sleep lightly tonight as this was still a very uncivilized area and he knew that the jungle was still a dangerous place to anyone.
So lying down on the ground in the cave he left the light on in the cave and sat with his back against the cave wall with his cloak bundled up behind him he was as comfortable as he could be on the ground and he nodded off…
He woke with a start and noticed that cave entrance had two small sar’benawath cubs rolling and playing in the entrance. He quickly reached for his macca and pulled out his blaster. He was hoping his sudden movement would scare the cubs off. But as soon as they noticed him moving in the back they began to stalk forward and growl in an almost comical imitation of his trophy he had. He knew the mother and maybe even the father was close by and knew he had to get out of this situation or kill them without their parents hearing it and then put them outside of the cave but he knew then the parents would hunt him down as their scent would be everywhere. All this went through his head quickly and then he heard the noise he was hoping he would not be hearing…
The huffing snort of an adult sar’benawath right outside the cave entrance made his heart stop…
He knew he could not kill the cubs now… He was hoping they would get disinterested in him but they kept coming closer. They were only a meter tall and looked cute until they opened their mouths and you saw the baby teeth that no baby should have.
Asri finally had an idea he would slide into the hidden storage room and wait it out till they got disinterested and left.
The cubs turned as they had heard a closer huffing growl of their mother or father and turned to see if they were behind them. When they turned back around Asri was gone and they were left with an area of warm ground that they promptly laid down on and went to sleep.
Asri stayed in the back area behind the hidden door and waited uneasily. He did get some sleep while he waited but it was fitful at best. He finally woke up knowing it was itop’bawaki (daylight) by the time on his huy’yuw(tablet computer). As he slowly opened the hidden door he saw the biggest sar’benawath he had ever seen cuddled up with her cubs in her front arms and asleep on the floor of his family’s nessi cave. He did not want to kill the cubs and certainly did not want tangle with the female in this confined area. He had everything he needed so he silently as possible closed the hidden door. As the lock latched in place with a faint click his heart skipped a beat because he thought he saw the female stir and her eye lids open a very little bit.
He froze in place….
Seeing a two leg this close to her cubs made her instantly angry as the two leg froze and did not move but she just watched it as it stood so still in front of her. The two leg moved very slowly at first towards the entrance to the cave. She let him go but watched through almost closed eyes as the two leg backed quietly and quickly out of the cave. She had smelled the presence of the two leg but with her cubs and the bright light now in the sky she knew she could not hunt him.
But her mate could…
Asri breathed a sigh of relief as he glided out of the cave he could have sworn that the female was watching him. But she must have been sleeping or something…
He began to run in his lopping run to get to the rendezvous point 30 kilometers to the west. He had gotten down to the bottom of the mountain that the nessi cave was in and heard a strange thumping thrill sound that reverberated in the air around him the sound originated from up on the mountain where he had come from. It was immediately answered by a much deeper response to the east. He was not entirely sure what that sound was but it obviously sounded like communication to him and with him being the only one in the area he knew it must mean something bad. He had heard about certain animals hunting Tevarin and he knew of course the sar’benawath were always an issue but had never heard about them hunting during the itop’bawaki(daylight). So it concerned him but he knew he needed to get moving to get to the pickup site before niz’itop so he continued his lopping run to the pickup site.
As he ran he would stop from time to time to check his direction as well as his trail behind him.
He heard something and felt he was being watched after running for about 10 kilometers during one of his resting spots while getting some water and a trail snack from his pack. His blaster was in his hand in an instant and he was looking around trying not to miss anything and he looked at the thick canopy of trees and bushes on both sides of the narrow trail. The jungle was quiet except for insects chirping and the miscellaneous quel’verath(bird like creatures with wings like a winged dinosaur on earth of varying colors depending upon species and size as that also depended on the species) hooting call. He saw movement and it was close. To close for his comfort so he decided to figure out what it was to make sure it was not dangerous. He held his blaster on it and knelt down and picked up a couple of small stones from the path. He tossed one at the area he thought was where he saw the movement…
Nothing…
The Seraphim Regiment -
The Seraphim - Star Citizen Division -
The Seraphim - Star Citizen RSI Website - The Seraphim Regiment - www.seekHim.com The Seraphim - Star Citizen Division - http://seraphimstarcitizen.enjin.com/home The Seraphim - Star Citizen RSI Website - https://robertsspaceindustries.com/orgs/SERR Posted Jun 19, 15 · OP [ADM] Thoughtfulwander01 a Posts: 2,014 Admins Admiral He tossed the next stone a little farther into the dense under brush and heard it hit a branch but he did not hear it hit the ground.
He thought that was odd but as nothing came out at him and he still heard the forest sounds he figured it was not a big predator so he turned to go…
Suddenly he was hit from all sides by flung oichio. He immediately started to run as he knew these were those pesky quetalupeth. Some of them were vocalizing with their hooting as they tried to drive him from their area. He quickly and willingly retreated along his path cursing the stinky little creatures as he ran to get away from the smelly projectiles. They pretty quickly realized he was leaving and stopped their smelly assault.
He continued on running and started to come to the end of the jungle as the trees grew further apart and were shorter and scrawny from lack of water. He also noticed that the ground was going up so he knew he was about 15 kilometers away from his destination so he decided to stop for a break to get some water and eat something.
He stopped in an area that was just outside the jungle area and had some large boulders strewn around like some giants play toys. He went to the one closest to the path that was in the shade and opened his pack and got his water and snack out. He began to drink and eat as he rested before heading out again. It was then that he heard the sound again that he had heard back at the mountain but this time it was not far away but close and between him and his destination.
He then heard a sound that he thought he would not hear again for a while…
The roar of a very large sar’benawath…
He knew he would have a very hard time getting to the rendezvous unless he actually fought this hunter. However he wanted to face it without it having established the battleground. So he decided to retreat back into the jungle some and wait for the night.
Once in the shade of the jungle he decided to make this a nessi as well. His sense of honor was conflicted by his own nessi and results and he wanted to make a mark as the only one to kill two sar’benawath in one nessi. To test himself with such a magnificent creature as this one had to be would bring great honor to his family.
So he began to prepare himself as he still heard off in the distance the hunter occasionally bellowing out it’s challenge. He put all of his modern weaponry away in his pack and put back on his ma’worath and voc. Then he proceeded to complete the Rijora rites for each item in their prescribed tradition for honor to his family and for honor to the hunter.
As he was preparing he noticed the jungle getting very quiet and the sun beginning to start to go down on its path from hwe’itop(mid day). Once he had completed all the rites as prescribed he decided to get some more information about this creature as it was still itop’bawaki(daylight). He moved off towards the roaring as he wanted to see this beast for himself in the bawaki’itop before the nessi was started later during niz’itop.
As he moved from the cover of the jungle he surveyed the area to try and find some way up onto the heights above the path where he assumed the hunter was. He found some handholds along the face of the cliff to the right of the trail he had been following. He slung the macca over his shoulder and began to climb the cliff face.
He was about half way up the face when he noticed the occasional bellowing of the hunter had ceased or at least the times in between the challenges had increased. Which he found strange but nothing surprised him about the hunter. The fact that this one was out in the itop’bawaki was strange to say the least. He mentally shrugged to himself and kept climbing as he slid over the top and looked around he noticed that there was another level to the hill a little further away and it slopped up but the ravine where the path cut through was to his left and could be seen as a dark ribbon against the reddish brown soil of the barren area he had scaled. Further off in the distance he could see the mountains and even see some signs of Tevarin buildings in the distance on the mountains.
As he was surveying his surroundings and trying to figure out his next course of action he heard the roar of the challenge and looked towards the hill in the distance and saw the beast that was hunting him moving warily down the hill towards him…
He quickly glanced around to survey the situation and to see if there were any areas that provided an advantage to one or the other of the hunters. Seeing none he shrugged to himself and prepared mentally for the battle to come
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rawn Cocktail Flavour Crisp. Follow that with Herr's Baby Back Ribs Rippled Potato Chips (would you like a side of Humpty Dumpty Au Gratin Ripples Premium Potato Chips with that, or perhaps a Kettle Chips Fully Loaded Baked Potato chip?). A few courses later, have your entrée: Walkers English Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding Flavour Potato Crisps. Finish with dessert: Walkers Chili and Chocolate Chips. Something to wash it all down? How about some Hot Potatoes Spicy Bloody Mary Potato Chips?
Yes, some chips have gotten carried away. Then again, to some, apparently, there are few things in life as important (Fredric Baur, who invented the Pringles can so Procter and Gamble could ship them without using a bag, was said to have been so proud of the achievement that he told his kids he wanted to be buried in the iconic can).
So who ranks highest amongst some of the most ridiculous flavors? Whether current selections named after nonexistent flavor profiles, limited-edition crisps, or things you'll find overseas, here's an addendum to 2011's 10 Crazy Potato Chip Flavors, an updated guide to some of the craziest flavors around. Careful, once you pop...
- Arthur Bovino, The Daily Meal
More from The Daily Meal:
America's Best Doughnut Shops
10 Best Non-Burger Fast-Food Dishes
8 Tiki Restaurants to Warm Up the Winter Blues
Who Makes the Best Store-Bought Chicken Soup?
America's Best Buffalo WingsEarly years
Born to Lyn and Bob Irwin in Essendon, a suburb on the outskirts of Victoria's capital Melbourne, Irwin moved with his parents as a child to Queensland in 1970. Bob was a reptile enthusiast and when the family moved, his parents started the small Queensland Reptile and Fauna Park, where Steve grew up around crocodiles and other reptiles. Steve became involved with the park in a number of ways, including taking part in daily animal feedings, as well as care and maintence activities.
On his 6th birthday he was given a srub python. Bob educated Steve on reptiles, with Steve getting involved physically with crocodiles at the age of 9. He became a crocodile trapper, removing crocodiles from near populated areas, performing the service for free with the quid pro quo that he kept them for the park. Steve followed in his fathers' footsteps, becoming a volunteer for the Queensland Government's East Coast Crocodile Management program.
Steve's father, Bob, described Steve as "a monster" (Discovery: Steve's Story) that was fascinated in animals. Even much so, his father recalled that before their (rare) vacations everyone was ready and packed when steve was out 'chasing and studying' lizards and other animals.
Career
Rise to fame
The park was a family business, with Lyn and Bob turning it over in 1991 to Steve. He took over the running of the park, now renamed the "Australia Zoo", and in 1992 met (at the park) and married Terri. The footage, shot by John Stainton, of their crocodile-trapping honeymoon became the first episode of The Crocodile Hunter, which became wildly successful in America and the UK. His exuberant and enthusiastic presenting style, broad Australian accent, constant wearing of khakis and catch-phrase "Crikey!" became known worldwide: The Crocodile Hunter aired in over 122 countries worldwide.
Under Irwin's expansive leadership, the operations grew to include the zoo, the television series, The Steve Irwin Conservation Foundation, and International Crocodile Rescue. Improvements to his Australia Zoo include the Animal Planet Crocoseum, the rainforest aviary, and Tiger Temple.
Film
In 2001, Irwin appeared in a cameo role in the Eddie Murphy film Dr. Dolittle 2. In 2002, his first feature film, The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, was released. In general, reviews of this film were negative. In 2003 Irwin was reportedly in line to host a chat show on Australian network television, a series that never eventuated.
Animal Planet
Animal Planet then released a Crocodile Hunter special called "Crocodiles & Controversy", which attempted to explain both the "Baby Bob Incident" and the Antarctica incident (see below). This special argues that Irwin's son was never in danger of being eaten by the crocodile, and that Irwin could not have endangered animals in Antarctica.
Animal Planet ended The Crocodile Hunter with a series finale entitled "Steve's Last Adventure". The last Crocodile Hunter documentary went for three emotional hours with footage of Irwin's across-the-world adventure, visiting locations like the Himalayas, the Yangtze River, Borneo, and the Kruger National Park.
Irwin went on to star in other Animal Planet documentaries, including The Croc Files, The Crocodile Hunter Diaries, and New Breed Vets.
Later projects
In January 2006 as part of Australia Week celebrations in the USA, Irwin appeared at the Pauley Pavilion, UCLA Los Angeles, California. During an interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Irwin announced that Discovery Kids would be developing a show for his daughter, Bindi Sue. The show, Jungle Girl, was tipped to be similar to The Wiggles movies, with songs that surround a story. A feature-length episode of Australian kids TV show The Wiggles entitled "Wiggly Safari" appears dedicated to Steve, and he features in it heavily with his wife and daughter and a pie named "Sweety". The show includes the song "Crocodile Hunter, Big Steve Irwin".
Steve Irwin was active in politics and was a supporter of the conservative Liberal Party of Australia. In particular, he strongly supported the incumbent Prime Minister John Howard, describing him once as "the greatest leader Australia has ever had" and the "greatest leader in the entire world"; comments which drew a cynical reaction in the Australian media.
Media Work
As well as being a general ambassador for Australia due to the nature of his work, Irwin was also involved in several media campaigns. He was employed by the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service to promote Australia's strict quarantine/customs requirements, with advertisements andposters featuring slogans such as, "Quarantine Matters! Don't muck with it" [don't mess around with it].
In 2004 he was appointed ambassador for The Ghan, an Adelaide to Darwin train that began operations in 2004.
He was also a keen promoter for Australian tourism and in general and Queensland tourism in particular. In 2002 the Australia Zoo was voted Queensland's top tourist attraction.
Honours
In 2004 he was nominated for Australian of the Year, which was won by Steve Waugh.
Environmentalism
Irwin believed in promoting environmentalism by sharing his excitement about the natural world rather than preaching to people. He was concerned with conservation of endangered animals and land clearing leading to loss of habitat. He urged people to take part in considerate tourism and not support illegal poaching through the purchase of items such as turtle shells. He considered conservation to be the most important part of his work: "I consider myself a wild-life warrior. My mission is to save the world's endangered species."
He founded the Steve Irwin Conservation Foundation, which was later renamed Wildlife Warriors Worldwide, and became an independent charity. He and his wife remained patrons and major supporters along with the AFL clubs of Australia.
Family
Steve Irwin was married to Terri Irwin (1992) and had two children: a daughter, Bindi Sue Irwin (born 24 July 1998), and a son, Robert Clarence "Bob" Irwin (born 1 December 2003). Bindi Sue is jointly named after two of Steve's animals: Bindi, a salt water crocodile, and Sui, Steve's dog, who died in June 2004.
Irwin was as enthusiastic about his family as he was about his work. He once described his daughter Bindi as "the reason he was put on the Earth". His wife Terri once said, "The only thing that could ever keep him away from the animals he loves are the people he loves even more."
Interesting Facts about Steve IrwinTesla Model S Wins 2013 World Green Car Of The Year
March 29th, 2013 by James Ayre
These awards seem to very accurately represent public opinion on the Model S. AutoblogGreen recently ran its own poll to determine what its readers thought was the car of the year. The results weren’t even close, Tesla’s Model S won a full 82% of the vote, crushing the primary competitors, the Renault Zoe and the Volvo V60 plug-in hybrid.
Tesla’s been on something of a roll lately, even with its recent spat with The New York Times. As of February 2013, the company has already sold 5,350 units, well on track to reach its goal for this year. And over the past couple of weeks it has been producing an impressive 500 Model S’s every week.
It even announced recently that it is set to pay back its DOE loan 5 years early.A Tuscumbia couple has been indicted for manslaughter in the accidental shooting death of a 2-year-old boy who was visiting their home.
William Braxton Whitfield Jr., 22, and his wife, 22-year-old Chelsie Desirae Whitfield, are charged in the July 14 death of Robert Micheal Reaves. The boy, son of Spring Valley Volunteer Fire Chief Keith Reaves, accidentally shot himself with a handgun he found in the Whitfields' home.
The indictment, handed down by a grand jury last week, states that the couple "recklessly" caused Reaves' death by "leaving a loaded firearm, with a live round in the chamber, in an area easily accessible by a small child."
According to the Times-Daily, the couple turned themselves in on Friday and were released on on bonds of $5,000 each.
The toddler was visiting the Whitfield home with family members the day of the shooting. He was rushed to Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, where he died.
Investigators have said that there were other loaded weapons in the bedroom where the shooting took place, as well, the newspaper reports.
A lawyer for the couple, Billy Underwood, told the Times-Daily that Chelsie Whitfield is "beside herself with grief" over the death of the toddler and that William Whitfield is being charged for something that happened when he was not even home.
He called the indictment a "classic clash of Second Amendment rights."
Colbert County District Attorney Bryce Graham Jr. said, however, that the indictment is not about the Second Amendment or gun ownership, but about "recklessness and irresponsibility."
"I'm a gun owner; we are privileged to live in a country where you can own a gun," Graham said. "But this is about being responsible with that gun."Trigger warning: this piece contains details regarding a healthy and fulfilling sex life. If it offends you in any way, or triggers your memories of unsatisfying and boring sex, you are welcome to step away from the computer and run to the nearest safe space.
Dear Mr. McIntosh,
a few weeks ago I jokingly addressed your tweet, calling it oppressive on the premises that I am a woman who loves to give blow jobs.
You blocked me.
What disappoints me the most is not that my tweet was dismissed as trolling/harassment, but that my curiosity was left unsatisfied. The reason why I am writing this letter is because I am curious to know why I should feel demeaned by something I like.
I do not like blow jobs because they make me feel “empowered,” I physically enjoy them.
Just the other day I squirted in the middle of giving one, how is that not deriving pleasure from a sexual interaction?
What makes you think you know what people derive pleasure from? Who are you, Jonathan McIntosh, to tell my boyfriend what he should or should not let me do to his body? If I am such an empowered woman I have the right and the means to inform my sexual partners of what I am or am not willing to do in bed.
Women are free not to like blow jobs, but men are also free to feel sexually incompatible with these women.
The same happens when a woman who can only orgasm when receiving oral sex dates a man who hates to give it: they will probably break up.
In the end, every couple works it out their own way.
What makes you think discouraging blow jobs is more effective than encouraging a healthy dialogue within the couple?
Your tweet reminded me of priests, when they tell teenage boys that if they masturbate “Jesus cries.”
The kind of men who care about your tweets want to be respectful towards women just as much as those teenage boys want to be respectful towards Jesus.
It is no mystery that your target audience consists of people who already agree with you, since you seem to block everyone who doesn’t.
These men already think they are contributing to rape culture without knowing it, would you at least leave them alone about the one thing that can only happen consensually?
Third wave feminism, like Marxism and like most religions, just doesn’t seem to take human nature into account.
You can theorise that people will be okay with sharing all resources equally, regardless of their personal merit;
or choosing God over sex for the rest of their lives;
or basing their sex life solely on pleasing their partner.
It’s just not going to happen.
Your statement is in fact much more demeaning toward women than a blow job itself.
You talk about anyone who is not a cis male as a unified mass sharing the same sexual preferences.
But even in cases where a preference is shared by the majority of people, there is always a minority who disagrees.
Take orgasms, for example: 75% of women cannot orgasm without some kind of clitoral stimulation.
It’s a vast majority, but it does not represent everyone. The remaining 25% is divided in lucky women who can orgasm either way, and girls like me who can have exclusively vaginal orgasms.
Sex education and feminism are the reason why it took me so long to be able to enjoy sex.
One was telling me that in order to orgasm I had to do things that, in reality, weren’t even turning me on; the other was telling me that the things I enjoyed (like doggy style) were demeaning and unacceptable.
But I am aware of being an exception, I don’t expect the way we talk about orgasms to change for me.
Men who like blowjobs on the other hand are the rule, and their preference should matter.
I don’t think consensual sex should be a feminist issue, I think it should be the field of more open minded people with at least a notion of how the human body works. But if feminists are truly so concerned with people’s sex life they should concentrate on promoting healthy interactions and self exploration rather than shame.
Today women are encouraged to explore their sexuality and pursue what satisfies them, while men are encouraged to do the opposite, and “check their privilege” every time they get turned on.
How are boys expected to grow into functional (let alone good) sexual partners if they don’t learn to understand and fulfill their own needs?
How is sex ever going to be enjoyable for boys if they associate arousal with guilt and shame for their own desires?
You are a writer, and unlike me you have the advantage -I guess you would call it privilege- to be a native English speaker.
This is not trolling, it is not harassment.
These are all legitimate questions, and there is no reason for you not to answer.
Sincerely,
Sugar Kane
P.S. Because you don’t seem to know much about blow jobs, here is a cool infographic I think could help you keep an open mind in the future.
AdvertisementsThe 2016 Presidential race’s most dynamic candidate Bernie Sanders continued his surge this week with the introduction of a new bill to completely end federal cannabis prohibition.
More than 40 states have either legalized recreational cannabis, medical use, medical marijuana derivatives or industrial hemp.
Yet about 700,000 Americans will be arrested each year for cannabis — and the vast majority of those arrests are for simple possession. Marijuana comprises the majority of drug arrests American police make, and drug arrests are the most frequent type of arrest police make. Sanders states the pot war saps resources from police investigations into more serious, violent crimes.
The ‘Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2015’ would remove “marihuana” from the federal list of the world’s most dangerous drugs while still preventing inter-state or international transfers of the product.
“The time is long overdue for us to take marijuana off of the federal government’s list of outlawed drugs,” the Independent Vermont Senator said on the Senate floor, Wall Street Journal reported.
About 58% of Americans support ending federal cannabis prohibition, but no Presidential candidate reflected the will of the voters with regard to cannabis until Sanders came out last week in favor of ending prohibition.
“The science is clear that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, and that should be reflected in our nation’s marijuana policy,” Marijuana Policy Project’s Mason Tvert stated. “Sen. Sanders is simply proposing that we treat marijuana similarly to how we treat alcohol at the federal level, leaving most of the details to the states. It is a commonsense proposal that is long overdue in the Senate.”
The Congressional voting record shows the legislature is not quite there yet, though. Congress passed a law in December blocking the use of federal funds to interfere with medical marijuana in the states, but a full end to the federal ban on medical marijuana — called the CARERS Act — is still pending.
[Sponsored link: Join 1,000 tech CEOs, venture capitalists, journalists, and cannabis entrepreneurs. Downtown San Francisco. Two days. The time is now. www.NewWestSummit.com]After the Osweiler trade, all signs are pointing to the Texans trying to pursue Tony Romo. There's one guy who really doesn't want that to happen though.
Jerry Jones is reportedly trying anything to make sure Romo to Houston doesn't happen.
Jones had lunch with Tony Romo Wednesday and told him he would be released Thursday. According to Josh Innes Show NFL Insider Ben Allbright, “Tony’s understanding was he would be released on Thursday.”
So why didn't that happen as planned? Allbright says he has strong sources that know Jerry does NOT want Romo playing in the state of Texas. "Jerry is trying to leverage to get Tony to where HE wants him to go. Jerry wants him to go to Denver, he wants him out of the state, he wants to protect the Cowboys brand, he doesn’t want Tony Romo, a Texas hero, to go to another Texas franchise and eat into his market," says Allbright.
It seems Jones will do whatever he can to sabotage Houston. Albright explained, "Jerry has always been very protective of the Cowboys brand to the point when Mark Davis was exploring moving the Raiders to San Antonio, he steered him and helped to pull together financing for him to move to Las Vegas. He’s very protective of the state of Texas, wants the Cowboys to be the top brand there, and doesn’t want any infringing on that."
Allbright, who works as a radio host in Denver, says The Broncos will not trade for Romo. They will pursue Romo in free agency and have a price point of about $12-$14million plus incentives. If that doesn't work out they're fine rolling with Lynch and Siemian.In her first weeks as secretary of the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos faced an extraordinary amount of scrutiny — both for her family’s history of supporting homophobic legislation and her lack of qualifications. A group of students attempted to block DeVos from entering a Washington middle school shortly after her confirmation.
But DeVos, a charter school advocate with a history of donating to anti-gay causes, isn’t the only education appointee that should worry LGBT people, as well as just about everyone else who wants safe, affirming education for America’s youth. Liberty University's president, Jerry Falwell Jr., who has been tapped by the Trump administration to lead a task force on reforming higher ed, is a nightmare waiting to happen. His appointment — to an undisclosed advisory position — will put at risk every student across the U.S. already vulnerable to harm. With DeVos and Falwell at the helm, all children will be left behind.
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Although Falwell has been unavailable for comment since his role in the administration was announced, a spokesman for the evangelical campus founded by his late father, Jerry, spoke on his behalf. The Liberty representative told NBC News that the right-wing leader’s goal will be to clean up the “overregulation and micromanagement” of U.S. colleges. How does Falwell Jr. plan to do that? By gutting sexual assault response programs at universities.
“Falwell... wants to cut federal rules on investigating and reporting sexual assault under Title IX, the federal law that bars sexual discrimination in education,” Religion News has reported. “The Liberty University head believes on-campus sexual assault investigations are best left to police.”
In 2011 the administration of President Barack Obama issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to universities introducing new regulations under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to encourage universities to take measures to prevent on-campus sexual assaults. Whereas campus rape cases can often drag on months without resolution, the letter advised colleges that most incidents should be fully investigated and resolved within 60 days. Rather than basing decisions on a “clear and convincing evidence,” the guidance put forward a standard for judging cases: a “preponderance of the evidence.”
During her confirmation hearing, DeVos dodged a question about whether she would uphold those changes, arguing that commenting on the subject would be “premature,” and Falwell’s background on sexual assault is troubling.
Liberty University hired Ian McCaw, the former athletic director for Baylor University, in the midst of an ongoing rape scandal at his former college. Jasmin Hernandez, a student at the university, claimed McCaw knew that one of his star athletes, Tevin Elliott, had a history of sexually assaulting women and ignored his record. Hernandez further alleged that after not being made accountable for his prior actions, the football player went on to rape her. In a press release, Falwell Jr. personally praised the hiring of McCaw, saying that his example “fits perfectly with where we see our sports program going.”
If it surprises you that Falwell Jr. would applaud someone accused of covering up sexual abuse, know that the Liberty University president also once told CNN’s Erin Burnett that he would vote for a presidential candidate found guilty of rape. When asked about accusations from more than 10 women that Trump, then a White House hopeful, had groped them without consent, Falwell Jr. said, “We’re not electing a pastor. We’re electing a president.”
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But if you’re looking for an indication of how Falwell Jr., who was first offered the secretary position before turning it down, would advise the Department of Education, his university’s anti-LGBT history offers a sterling example.
Falwell’s father, famously known as the face of the Moral Majority movement in the 1980s, created the nonprofit, Christian institution in 1971 to uphold his far-right conservative values. Liberty University, based in Lynchburg, Virginia, and founded in 1971, espouses Creationism. Kevin Roose, who spent a semester undercover at Liberty, wrote in New York magazine that prior to the elder Falwell’s death in 2007, he had instructed members of the student body that should the culture at Liberty ever become liberal, they “should return to campus and burn it down.”
As Roose claimed, Liberty University's student body has become increasingly progressive in recent years, but the college has not. The Baptist university’s honor code strictly forbids “homosexual conduct or the encouragement or advocacy of any form of sexual behavior that would undermine the Christian identity or faith mission of the University.” That policy boils down to a simple mandate: You can be gay at Liberty but can’t act on it.
The Christian Post has reported that students found to be in violation of the honor code face a “$500 fine and 30 hours of disciplinary community service.”
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Liberty University has come under fire in recent years for denying discounted tuition to military spouses in same-sex relationships. The university charged $590 per credit in 2015, but anyone in a legally recognized relationship with a member of the armed forces could pay just $275 — at least, as long as they were heterosexual. School policy states the credit is “available to'spouses' as defined by Liberty University as a husband or wife of a service member who together are in state-sanctioned marriage and are natural-born members of the opposite sex.”
In addition to openly discriminating against same-sex couples, Liberty University removed a chapter about the origins of human sexuality from the textbook of its Psychology 101 course.
Responding to claims that deleting the content constituted homophobic bias, Falwell Jr. claimed in a press release that nothing “could... be further from the truth.” In a clever bit of pivoting, he added, “At Liberty, we believe firmly in academic freedom for our faculty and a commitment to the free and open exchange of ideas. This is in stark contrast to many major universities where students are often ridiculed in the classroom for expressing ideas that faculty deem to be politically incorrect and protests often result in speakers being disinvited from appearing because of their viewpoints.”
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The second-generation evangelical leader has attempted to market himself as being more compassionate to the LGBT community than his father, a notoriously anti-gay bigot. The elder Falwell repeatedly compared queer people to alcoholics and adulterers and blamed society’s tolerance of homosexuality for the 9/11 attacks. His son, meanwhile, applauded Trump for mentioning LGBT people at the Republican National Convention, saying that he backed the his platform “100 percent.”
That statement, while seemingly supportive of the LGBT community, isn’t as affirming as it sounds. As many pointed out throughout the election, Trump didn’t have an LGBT platform, and the few stances he adopted changed throughout the race. After North Carolina's legislature passed House Bill 2 in March, Trump criticized the notoriously anti-LGBT law, which prevents transgender people from using the bathroom that most closely corresponds with their gender identity. Then shortly afterward, Trump flip-flopped, saying he supports the rights of states to set their own restroom policies.
Falwell Jr. sat on Trump’s religious advisory board, a group that helped push him to the right on issues on which he was once viewed as being socially liberal. That board was a Who’s Who of anti-gay figures on the far right. It included Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist preacher who believes LGBT people are pedophiles; Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition who claims hate crime laws are designed to criminalize the Bible; and Ronnie Floyd, who wrote an entire book on how the so-called gay agenda is “dividing America.”
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For someone who believes Liberty University doesn’t discriminate against gay people, Falwell Jr. sure likes to hang out with bigots. His college also works closely with Liberty Counsel, the right-wing law firm that defended Rowan County clerk Kim Davis, the Kentucky woman was briefly jailed two years ago for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
The Liberty president will now work closely with a woman who has spent her entire life fighting against equal rights for LGBT people. As I previously wrote for Salon, Betsy DeVos has a long track record of donating to anti-gay organizations, including the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, a group that has referred to the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision on marriage equality as a “fatwa.” Reports claim that DeVos, whose father and father-in-law are both anti-LGBT activists, gave at least $300,000 to campaigns in Florida and Michigan to limit the constitutional definition of marriage to one man and one woman.
If DeVos plans to roll back recent gains on LGBT student rights under President Obama, there’s no reason to believe Falwell would stop it. Last year the Obama administration issued guidance to schools advising them to allow trans students to use the restroom of their choice.
Having forces in the Education Department who have worked to dismantle LGBT protections in their path could be devastating for these vulnerable populations.A sheriff's deputy fired eight shots early Sunday morning at a man he believed had just robbed a West Hollywood liquor store, only to learn that his target was the clerk who had been held up, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
The clerk was not hit, and the suspects, described as a black man armed with a handgun and a black woman, escaped.
The shooting happened about 1:15 a.m. near Havenhurst Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard, said sheriff’s Deputy Lillian Peck. “Deputies responded to a robbery call of a liquor store in the 8200 block of Santa Monica Boulevard,” she said. “The call indicated the suspects were armed with a handgun.”
Peck said one deputy fired after seeing a man who matched the description of one suspect run from the area of the liquor store, holding what he believed to be a gun. “The man was detained by deputies and was determined not to be a suspect,” Peck said.
Windows at a store across the street from the robbery site were shattered by the gunfire.
--Martha GrovesA good fake news story calls for fake hookers, and nobody knows that better than Lyndon Antcliff. The internet marketer whipped up a phony story about a 13 year-old boy in Texas who used his father’s credit card to go on a $30,000 spending spree, culminating with a game of Halo at a motel with a couple hookers. (The kid convinced the hookers he was a midget traveling with the circus.)
The story was nothing short of genius, and it got picked up far and wide — it made it to the front page of Digg and into a segment on Fox News (in which Jeanine Pirro made a passionate argument for the prostitutes’ arrest).
It didn’t seem to matter that the story was made up.
"The thing is, I tried to make it as ridiculous as possible so it would be obvious that it would be fake," says Antcliff, a writer by trade. (Indeed, the story now has a disclaimer that it’s a parody and "not to be taken seriously.")
Antcliff, who wrote the piece on behalf of a client, estimates it garnered roughly 6,000 inbound links.
"It’s been a lesson in the power of social media and the power of people suspending their disbelief. [Traditional news organizations] are always banging about how inaccurate blogs are, but in this case, it was the opposite," Antcliff says.
We didn’t get an official response from Google about how the search engine might treat fake content that’s used as a marketing tool, but search quality guru Matt Cutts implied that the company frowns upon this sort of practice.
"My quick take is that Google’s webmaster guidelines allow for cases such as this: ‘Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites)," Cutts wrote in a Sphinn forum. "It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.’ There’s not much more deceptive or misleading than a fake story without any disclosure that the story is hoax."The field of regenerative medicine hopes one day to be able to produce new, healthy tissues and organs with patients’ own DNA by turning some of the patient’s cells into stem cells that can then be guided to develop into healthy tissue. The cutting-edge process requires doctors to remove some of a patient’s cells to do work on them in the lab.
But some Spanish researchers recently managed to turn mature cells into stem cells inside the body. They prompted the cells of adult mice to regain the ability to develop into any type of specialized cell, which is normally only briefly present during embryonic development. The results were published in September in the journal Nature.
The scientists likened the results to turning back the clock on dysfunctional human cells, giving them the chance to form again, erasing disease or other damage done over a lifetime.
“This change of direction in development has never been observed in nature,” said María Abad, the article’s lead author and a researcher in Manuel Serrano’s lab at the CNIO, as the center is known.
The experiment worked like this: Mice were genetically engineered to produce the genes that convert mature cells into stem cells. The transformation has previously only been successfully done in a Petri dish. When the genes were activated, the mice grew teratomas, or tumors made up of various tissue types akin to a failed embryo. The mice also began to circulate stem cells in their blood stream that were more diverse and plastic than even induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSs.
“The next step is studying if these new stem cells are capable of efficiently generating different tissues such as that of the pancreas, liver or kidney,” said Abad.
Scientists have been able to reprogram adult cells to develop into the types of cells that form the different layers of an embryo. But they haven’t been able to produce the cells that make up tissue that sustains the development of a new embryo, like the placenta. The stem cells Abad and Serrano induced in mice did produce those cells. The stem cells they produced were described as “totipotent” rather than “pluripotent” for that reason.
In fact—and this part is creepy—when placed in a mouse’s abdominal cavity, the stem cells formed an embryo-like structure, with the three types of cells organized in the right order. Like mouse embryos, the structures were hollow spheres filled with liquid.
Clearly the process needs some tweaks before it can be used on humans, lest it result in tumors like the teratomas that the lab mice developed.
Still, it has generated excitement from others in the field.
“It means that every cell in the body may have the potential to regenerate a new organism,” George Daley, a stem-cell researcher at Children’s Hospital Boston, told the Wall Street Journal.
Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest’s Institute of Regenerative Medicine, told Singularity Hub that regenerating organs in place is the Holy Grail of curing diseased organs but also a very risky approach.
“It goes right along the lines of what we’re looking at with these strategies, in terms of how can you bring those cells to an earlier time point. But the challenge is how do you control the process to see that you don’t go too far back and start making tumors,” Atala said.
Serrano’s lab plans to focus next on how doctors could target the process, in order to regenerate a specific area of damaged tissue without triggering tumors.
Images: anyaivanova / Shutterstock.com; Serrano and Abad courtesy CNIO; findings via NatureLearn more about the idiosyncratic Tokyo studio and its forthcoming PS Vita projects
As you may have noticed, earlier today we unveiled a trio of new PS Vita titles coming out of our JAPAN Studio over in Tokyo: Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines, Soul Sacrifice Delta and Freedom Wars. For those unfamiliar with the studio and its heritage, it’s one of Sony Worldwide Studios most interesting assets, responsible for a diverse library of hugely charismatic titles, including Puppeteer, rain, Tokyo Jungle, Gravity Rush and Shadow of the Colossus.
To find out a little more about its vision and creative mandate, as well as its three forthcoming PS Vita titles, we spoke with studio chief Allan Becker.
How has JAPAN Studio changed in the last two or three years?
Allan Becker: We have become better focused and better prepared to compete in a fast and ever changing industry. The Studio is more open to new technologies and ideas and willing to grasp those opportunities when they come along. But at the heart JAPAN Studio still retains its core ideal to make creative, novel and imaginative titles.
What sort of games do you want JAPAN Studio to be known for?
Allan Becker: I would like for us to be known for titles that innovate and are of high quality, whether they are five-hour PSN titles or big AAA pillar titles. Obviously we are in a very competitive business so we have to make titles that do well commercially. Hopefully we will do that by staying true to those two core concepts and become known for them.
Prior to joining JAPAN Studio you were in charge at Sony Santa Monica. Have they been very different experiences? Is there any kind of shared ethos that you could pinpoint?
Allan Becker: Very different. To put it simply, cultural differences affect the way individuals perceive their world. Without the ability to tune into the culture, you simply cannot get very far. I’m still learning. The commonality between the studios is that we all want to find success, albeit in different ways.
Soul Sacrifice Delta – is this an expansion, or a full blown sequel?
Allan Becker: It’s a very large scale expansion, but not a full blown sequel. There’s a lot for a Soul Sacrifice fan to sink their teeth into – no pun intended.
What exactly can those fans expect from it, and when will we see it on shelves?
Allan Becker: Soul Sacrifice Delta brings many additions and enhancements to the original title – there are new monsters based on classic fairy tales with a dark twist, more sorcerers, maps, quest and spells. But there isn’t just more of everything; we’ve made many improvements to the game mechanics with dynamic maps, adaptive and more complex AI for the monsters. The spell casting system has been overhauled too: you can now combine spells during battle to enhance them or create new ones, which adds a lot of variety and depth to the gameplay. Soul Sacrifice Delta also introduces Grim, the third faction, and tells the story of their plot against the established order and the very nature of the world. Players can now choose to pledge allegiance to one of the factions, which have their own strengths, rewards and play styles, all of which reflect the faction’s belief. And of course, game progression in Soul Sacrifice can be transferred over to Soul Sacrifice Delta, so veterans of the original title will be able to pick up the adventure where they left it.
We’re planning to release Soul Sacrifice only on PlayStation Store, from 14th May.
Freedom Wars – can you tell us a little more about this one? The concept sounds intriguing…
Allan Becker: The title brings chaos and order existing in a place where freedom is bought and worked for. It’s a role-playing game that chucks you into the middle of a dystopian underground world, where players have up to a million years sentence. The battles are fought as punishment and freedom is what you earn at the end of your fully redeemed sentence of a million years! The game is an action battle game and will include offline and online multiplayer play.
And Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines. This is a series that Western gamers might not be too familiar with. Can you bring them up to speed?
Allan Becker: We released the original Oreshika on PS1 in 1999 and a remake for PSP in 2011 but despite their popularity over here neither made it outside of Japan. At the time we
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where Launch Configuration and AutoScaling Groups come into play.
Review: Container Instances are just EC2 instance that have the ECS Container Agent on them.
When EC2 Instances have the agent on them configured to point to a cluster, they "join" the cluster. And this point they've fulfilled their entire destiny and are full-fledged Container Instances.
How do we make these Container Instances?
Well, we've already explained how to make one of them above. We either use the ECS-Optimized AMI or install/configure the ECS Container Agent + Docker.
What about making many of them? We have 2 primary options:
1) Launching All of them Individually.
This obviously isn't the route you'll likely want to take. Too much manual labor. To speed things up, you could always get an instance exactly how you want it and then create an AMI from it. This way, every time you make a new instance, there's no extra configuration.
The better way...
2) Launch Configurations and AutoScaling Groups
These allow us to automate and manage many Instances at once. Like the Application Load Balancer, it's a "supporting concept." These aren't directly related to ECS, and are used in almost anything that leverages EC2. Since they deal with EC2, which is the bread and butter of everything server related, let's dive in a bit.
Launch Configurations and AutoScaling Groups
A Launch Configuration is just a blueprint for an EC2 instance. In terms of creating one, it's exactly like creating an EC2 instance. You still select an AMI, pass it user data scripts, etc. At the end of the process you have Launch Configuration though and not a live Instance.
With the Launch Configuration in hand, we now create an AutoScaling Group. These take a Launch Configuration and automate / manage the creation and scaling of instances.
There as simple as:
a) selecting the desired launch configuration
b) selecting which VPC and Subnets to launch instances into
c) determining how many instances you'd like
d) configuring scaling actions based on CloudWatch alarms (optional)
e) setting up notifications for events
Getting these Launch Configurations and AutoScaling Groups working with ECS involves exactly 2 steps:
1) Setting up the Launch Configuration to use the ECS Optimized AMI; or using a user data script to manually configure the ECS Container Agent.
And...
2) Pointing the container agent to the Cluster you'd like them to join. Which we covered in the Cluster section.
If your Cluster is live and the Launch Configurations are set-up to either use the ECS Optimized AMI or install the ECS Container Agent; If you've also configured the Launch Configuration to point to the correct cluster; Then BOOM. That's all you have to do to launch instances into your Cluster.
One More Note About Container Instances
In order to work with ECS they need access to the internet. If you've not done much work with VPCs, this is probably confusing. This means that whatever VPC they reside in needs to be attached to an internet gateway. The subnet in the VPC then needs to either:
a) Point directly to the internet gateway
or
b) Point to a NAT Gateway or NAT Instances in a subnet pointing to an internet gateway
If this sounds like incoherent rants of a mad man, check out my guide here on VPCs.
AWS ECS just helps us manage and deploy our Docker Containers across EC2 instances. That's really it. We can bog it down with 1000 other supporting things, but it's relatively sparse.
The most confusing part of grasping ECS is due to the number of assumed supporting components. Like Application Load Balancers, AutoScaling Groups, Launch Configurations, VPCs, etc. These things are definitely used with ECS, but they're not ECS.
ECS consists of just a few basic concepts:
Task Definition - Everything your Docker Container(s) need(s) to persist on a server. CPU, Memory, volumes, Docker Images, etc. Think blueprints.
Task - instantiating a Task Definition.
EC2 Instance - the servers. These are the spaceships in our analogy.
ECS Container Agent - software installed on an EC2 instance that helps coordinate with other Agents, monitor local Docker Containers and communicate with the Cluster. These are the captains of each spaceship.
An EC2 instance with a Container Agent that belongs to a Cluster is referred to as a "Container Instance."
Cluster - The parent to which our Tasks and Agents belong to. It's a very ambiguous concept, that's more just there to represent membership.
For our analogy, think of an admiral. It's in charge of the fleet, all the captains report back to it. It reports to us so that we don't have to check in with each captain individually.
Running a Task - we hand our Cluster a Task Definition; it creates a Task and places it on the best suited server; the best suited server is found by coordinating with the ECS Container Agents.
Creating a Service - we hand our Cluster a Task Definition; it does the same thing as running a Task PLUS:
1) Monitors our Tasks and reports back metrics
2) Keeps the number of Tasks we specify always up and running
3) Updates our Tasks by handing them an updated Task Definition
4) Optionally scales out/in our Tasks based on customer demand (traffic)
5) Distributes our customer demand evenly to all Tasks via Load Balancer (if we hook one up)
The confusing aspect of ECS is that it practically requires a TON of supporting concepts. And unfortunately the docs just kind of mention them in passing. Don't mistake this requirement as a "ECS is just complicated" thing. Anything beyond playing around will require these supporting components.
What are they?
Application Load Balancers are needed to direct traffic to Containers. They allow for a variety of powerful concepts like name-spacing sets of containers as "Target Groups." This allows us to direct traffic to different sets based on rules like the request Protocol or Path.
While not required, the following help bolster our ECS setup:
CloudWatch alarms and metrics to respond to events in our Clusters and Services. This is how we achieve auto scaling.
Launch Configurations and Auto Scaling Groups to manage sets of Instances vs. setting them up piecemeal.
VPCs to create varying subnets to allow for multiple availability zone deploys
IAM to create the proper roles for your Instances, Services and Tasks
Caffeine to make sure that you don't fall asleep while reading through 100s of documentation pages.
The obvious next steps need to be an actual implementation of everything. However, now that you understand the concepts, you won't be clicking in the dark! If you've done an implementation before, hopefully this has shed some light on why things worked as they did.
I feel the need to mention this one more time, if you're looking for a step-by-step of implementation, I have a full one here:
Guide to Fault Tolerant and Load Balanced AWS Docker Deployment on ECS
The reason I opted to make this long conceptual guide is because implementing ECS is the easy part. Understanding it is the tricky part. It's just a few clicks or CLI calls. So "80% mental, 20% mechanical" wound up being true here as well.
In other news, it turns out the rest of the galaxy didn't care about physical books. Or physical movie rentals. So Edges and CubeBuster were shut down.
The majority of imagery is derived from or "inspired" directly from AWS own ECS theme. Hopefully no one takes offense.
Also, I used a lot of Star Trek references. Hopefully they're also not offended.
Finally, the planets come from Freepik and are apparently through www.flaticon.com. The little ships that I pulled down and modified also come from Freepik.
As always, please leave me a comment if you find any typos or technical glitches!
Be sure to signup for updates and new guides!!
Thanks!
More from the blogSignup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
Alabama’s Chief Justice Roy Moore has been indefinitely suspended over ethics violations over his crusade against gay weddings.
After the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of equal marriage last summer, Alabama’s Chief Justice Roy Moore tried to actively disregard the rulings – issuing a number of judicial orders to officials in a brazen attempt to re-ban gay weddings.
He declared the Supreme Court rulings “doesn’t apply” in Alabama due to state anti-gay laws and ordered probate judges to enforce a gay marriage ban – but soon learned the hard way you can’t just ignore the highest court in America.
The Judicial Inquiry Commission launched action against him for his string of illegal orders, alleging that he “flagrantly disregarding and abusing his authority” in his crusade against gay weddings.
Today the nine-member Court of the Judiciary found Moore unanimously guilty of all six charges brought against him.
As Moore is elected, he cannot be directly sacked, but he has been suspended without pay from his role until the end of his current term in 2018.
In 2018, he will be unable to stand for re-election for the office of Supreme Court justice again in Alabama as he will be past the office’s age restriction.
It is the second time Moore has been removed for ethics violations.
In 2003, Moore was removed from the same job after refusing to take down a Ten Commandments monument in the secular judicial building, despite an order from a federal court and the constitutional separation of church and state.
Moore was later re-elected by voters in 2012.
Eva Kendrick, state manager for the Human Rights Campaign, Alabama, said: “Roy Moore has flagrantly and willfully attempted to block marriage equality at every turn in Alabama, using his position of power to push a personal, radically anti-LGBTQ agenda.
“We are thrilled that justice has been done today and he will no longer be able to use the bench to discriminate against people he had taken an oath to to protect.
“Roy Moore’s bigoted rhetoric and unethical actions harmed LGBTQ Alabamians and emboldened those who would seek to hurt us further.
“We hope this is a turning point for our state. We must focus on electing politicians and judges who will move us forward, not backward.”
The justice claims he is being targeted for his religious views, while opponents say action is being brought because he ignored federal court orders and established law to pursue his own petty agenda, trying to block gay weddings.
Moore is represented by the same law firm as Kentucky clerk Kim Davis.
His lawyer Mat Staver insisted previously: “The JIC knows that it has no case and refuses to face the reality of the four-page administrative order, which any plain reading reveals did not direct the probate judges to disobey the U.S. Supreme Court. The JIC’s charges are full of colorful adjectives and lacking in substance.”
Despite Staver’s claim that Moore did not try to re-ban gay weddings, it is a matter of objective, indisputable fact and public record that he did.
Following the SCOTUS ruling, Moore wrote in an order: “IT IS ORDERED AND DIRECTED THAT: Until further decision by the Alabama Supreme Court, the existing orders of the Alabama Supreme Court that Alabama probate judges have a ministerial duty not to issue any marriage license contrary to the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Amendment or the Alabama Marriage Protection Act remain in full force and effect.”
Moore has never until now tried to deny the root of his actions.
Last year he said: “They’re toying with something that’s like dynamite, that will destroy our country. I think eventually, over a period of time, it will.”
“It definitely will, because the gender, the homosexual movement, is to force acceptance of this on everybody.”Capture the Flag in Afghanistan
It appears the Islamic State’s territorial motivations extend well beyond Syria and Iraq, as recent reports reveal the organization’s recruitment and expansion efforts in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, has established a redoubt in Zamin Dawar area of Kajaki district, according to tribal elders and senior U.S. officials. Moreover, the potential rise of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Afghanistan and the international star power their leader, Abu Bakr Baghdadi, holds presents a dilemma for Afghan Taliban seeking their own post-Karzai reconciliation, or continued resistance with the Ghani-Abdullah coalition government.
Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, a mid-level Taliban commander with deep connections to the illicit narcotics industry and who served as shadow governor of Uruzgan from 2007 to at least 2009, has established a new base of operations for ISIS in northern Helmand. Recently his militia clashed with northern Helmand shadow governor Mullah Ahmad Shah, resulting in a half dozen killed; other reports suggest up to twenty killed. According to an Afghan Army general in Helmand, Rauf is planting ISIS cells throughout numerous Helmand districts; another general insists they have spread into neighboring Herat and Farah provinces; while two senators in the Afghan parliament assert ISIS operates in the northern Faryab and eastern Ghazni provinces.
A tribal leader told members of the media that Rauf is replacing Taliban white flags with ISIS black flags, likely a symbol to residents of the evolving power dynamics. Rising a new resistance flag in Helmand will not only cause complications for Afghanistan’s nascent security forces, but also for Taliban seeking to challenge the writ of the state in an era absent of U.S. and British troops.
There are reasons insurgents may choose to switch sides. For one, Rauf has offered up to $500 per month for Taliban fighters to defect. That is significantly higher than the typical ten dollars a day Taliban foot soldiers receive, and with the amount of cash reserves ISIS holds, salaries have the potential to increase if Rauf’s new militia proves resilient. Second, the Taliban are competing with a marketing goliath, as ISIS launches a revolutionary propaganda campaign the likes of which the Western world has never seen. The rise of lone-wolf terrorists in Australia, Canada, and France may be attributable to the quality and quantity of ISIS propaganda on the unregulated Internet. On a smaller, but equally dangerous scale, last summer, ISIS promotional pamphlets written in Dari and Pashto were disseminated in Pakistan and refugee settlements along the Afghan border, and recent reports suggest ISIS night letters (resistance propaganda) have been posted in public.
Real proof of ISIS resilience may be its ability to infect local mosques in southern Afghanistan. Long considered the impetus for the rise of the ‘neo-Taliban’ in Afghanistan, any successful jihadi organization in Afghanistan requires support from the ulema (religious leaders). Some Islamist propagandists — without ties to the Taliban — have already demonstrated themselves as vociferous mouth-pieces for ISIS in Kunar and Jalalabad provinces — areas where radical foreign groups have historically found opportunity and safe havens. Coupled with the meteoric rise of Baghdadi as the new ‘Emir’ of an Islamic Caliphate challenged by the Western world, the inevitable process of bandwagoning seems possible if ISIS gains a significant foothold in southern Afghanistan.
Still, how likely is the ISIS death-cult philosophy to hold up among a pious Pashtun culture that prides itself on humility, honor, and tradition? Or are these traits part of an Afghanistan that has long been washed away by the tidal wave of empires and ideological battles? If any nation or culture is ready for an ideological revolution, it may be the Pashtuns — long split by borders, bureaucracies, and internal feuds that leave their identity in question. These are similar ingredients that proved to be powerfully contagious to the Sunni nation as it faced economic embargoes, state collapse, and bureaucratic marginalization by governing elites in Iraq. ISIS rode the wave of disenfranchisement and frustration as the Sunni Army in Iraq defected to a more barbarous, but less uncertain movement. The Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan face uncertainty and hesitation towards the Afghan government. But how likely are they to accept Baghdadi’s uncompromising call to total war?
Even the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, has limitations to acceptable measures of violence and has issued codes of conduct to battlefield units to limit barbarity and prevent civilian alienation. In 2012 and 2013, the emergence of a foreign, younger, and more aggressive Taliban in select villages of eastern and southern Afghanistan led to increased predation on the civilian population, the closure of public schools, and barbaric murders of local notables. Villages in Andar, Panjwai, and Chaghcharan districts of Afghanistan rallied vigilante movements against extremist predations and successfully took back their villages. In these districts, and many others throughout Afghanistan, villages were fed up with the violence and the arbitrary rules enforced by radicals. Many ulema and village councils backed the vigilantes and reached out to governing authorities for aid. Instead of creating a tear in the fabric of society, extremism proved to be a rallying cry against those who aim to divide.
Recently, Baghdadi allegedly mocked Taliban leader Mullah Omar as an “ignorant, illiterate warlord, unworthy of spiritual or political respect.” If true, these words are powerful indeed, and may prove costly towards any attempt at spreading ISIS to Afghanistan. Part of Baghdadi’s strategy behind deriding the “commander of the faithful” could be a growing debate between Islamist extremists regarding the true identity of the “Emir of the Believers” Taliban and their defectors may need to iron these arguments out on the battlefield.
It is clear, that the Taliban suffer from deep internal divisions and lack a coherent strategy going forward. However, for those willing to join the vast majority of Afghans supporting a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan, joining the mainstream should be top of their agenda. Now, more than ever, negotiation and reconciliation between the new Afghan government and ‘moderate’ Taliban could drive a significant wedge between extremists committed to violence and willing to unite with ISIS, and more practical factions focused on moving forward with their country rather than opposed to it.
Visual News/Getty ImagesNobody will argue that transit is one of, if not the, most important issue facing metro Atlantans. And with expansion going northward, the ability to get folks from A to B with the least amount of stress is becoming more difficult to do.
Economic development experts have long touted the need for better mass transit in this area. As we get closer to critical mass, more and more people who were initially opposed to leaving their personal vehicles at home are now “getting on the bus” so to speak.
After a series of public meetings, the MARTA’s board has settled on a so-called “locally preferred alternative” under which heavy rail would run north from its current termination at North Springs and parallel Ga. 400, running first east of the highway, crossing to the west and then arcing back east before terminating at Windward Parkway.
But that’s not a done deal, said planners. Two bus rapid transit options also remain on the table. One of them could follow the planned heavy-rail alignment, with the other in a “managed lane corrido.r” This idea will most likely center in the median along 400.
While heavy rail could cost as much as $2.4 billion, bus rapid transit could be done for as little as $500 million, said a transit agency planner. Proponents of BRT argue for it because of that cost differential and say that buses could be established sooner, while heavy rail backers say it can move more riders more quickly and without the need for riders to transfer from rail to bus at the North Springs station.
What do you think? Which plan is best for the future of the corridor? Or is there another viable solution? We want to herar from you. Send comments to [email protected] suggestions that he's waffling on Republican principles, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist reminded listeners in a televised debate Sunday that Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat.
The line turned up in a three-way chatter between FOX News Sunday moderator Chris Wallace and the two Republican U.S. Senate candidates, in which Wallace asked the governor whether he would support rival Marco Rubio or run as an independent -- if he lost the GOP primary. For the record, Crist said he’d support the GOP nominee and that he wouldn’t run as an unaffiliated candidate.
Here is an excerpt:
WALLACE: Well, I'm going to get -- I'm going to -- I'll give you an opportunity for a final statement. I just want to say, though, you are saying you are going to run in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. You will not run on the no party affiliation line.
CRIST: That's right. That's right. That's what I'm saying.
RUBIO: Chris, if I may, the governor likes to call himself a Reagan Republican. I don't ever recall Reagan being questioned about running as an independent. But Ronald Reagan asked a very important question--
CRIST: Actually, Reagan was a Democrat before he was a Republican.
We wanted to find out whether the late Republican icon Ronald Reagan was actually a registered Democrat, or whether he was an ideological one.
We turned to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library, in Simi Valley, Calif. The library's Web site notes Reagan registered as a Republican in the fall of 1962, after stumping for Richard Nixon as a Democrat.
It tells the story of Reagan making a speech at a Democrats for Nixon event and being interrupted and asked if he had registered as a Republican. He responded no. That's when "down the center aisle through the audience came a woman who declared I'm a registrar and placed a registration card in front of him. In front of his audience, Ronald Reagan officially joined the Republican Party,'' according to Web site.
Melissa Giller, director of communications and programs at the Reagan library, explained more in an e-mail to PolitiFact Florida.
"Yes, this is true. He switched to Republican in 1962,'' Giller wrote, noting a quote in which Reagan complained, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.''
Giller said Reagan endorsed the presidential candidacies of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 as well as that of Nixon in 1960 "while remaining a Democrat."
At the White House Web site, the biography of Reagan makes a brief reference to the ideological evolution in the fourth paragraph: "As president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan became embroiled in disputes over the issue of Communism in the film industry; his political views shifted from liberal to conservative."
And then Reagan, noted for his quips, said it himself in a Sept. 28, 1982, news conference exchange with ABC White House correspondent Sam Donaldson over whether the White House was to blame for the continuing U.S. recession.
Donaldson: "Mr. President, in talking about the continuing recession tonight, you have blamed mistakes in the past and you have blamed the Congress. Does any of the blame belong to you?"
Reagan: "Yes, because for many years I was a Democrat."
White House press corps: (Laughter.)
Historian Edward Yager, a government professor at Western Kentucky University and author of the 2006 biography Ronald Reagan’s Journey: Democrat to Republican, said Reagan "was registered Democrat from the time that he voted for FDR in 1932, when he was 21."
Yager said he’s never seen copies of the voter registration cards, but noted "virtually all the sources that refer to" Reagan’s party affiliation indicate that he was registered as a Democrat and that "he has two autobiographies in which he refers to his voting for FDR four times, then for Truman." Reagan was a Democrat, added Yager, even when he voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Reagan had considered switching by 1960, said Yager, but there were some in the Nixon camp who "thought he might be more effective (as a supporter) by maintaining his Democrat registration and affiliation and cutting into Democratic voters."
It may be among the great, forgotten flip-flops in political history that evolved into a laugh line for a man venerated for his ideological adherence to the principles of the Grand Ole Party. But Crist was correct when he invoked it. We find his claim to be True.Contest Closed
Welcome to #CPCRetroDev 2017, the 5th edition of the retro game creation contest of the University of Alicante. This contest awards the best and most creative developers of the retro scene, able to develop the best games for Amstrad CPC 464. The main characteristics of this year’s contest are:
OFFICIAL AWARDS ( 1.100 € ) Special Mentions 100 € – Gominolas to the best music 100 € – Carlos Abril to the funniest game 100 € – Pablo Ariza to the best Artificial Intelligence PRO Category 300 € – Best game 175 € – Second best game 100 € – Third best game 50 € – Fourth best game 25 € – Fifth best game UA Category 100 € – Best game made by UA students 50 € – Second best game made by UA students
ADDITIONAL AWARDS RetroSpiel Award German enterprise RetroSpiel will award with a physical publication, distribution and selling of an extended version of games presented by TWO selected teams.
Before submiting, please do thoroughly read contest rules. Then, develop your game and fill in the form below for submiting your entry. Please, ensure that you correctly provide your email address, so as we can contact you.
Here you may find some links to developer tools for Amstrad CPC:
SUBMISSION SYSTEM Contest Rules Group empty E-Mail empty JSON parse warning!
ZIP File, Up to 20 MB.
We want to express our deepest gratitude to jury members and collaborators for their commitment with the contest. Moreover, this year, we are specially proud of and grateful to César Astudillo (Gominolas), Carlos Abril and Pablo Ariza for supporting #CPCRetroDev. A million thanks to all of you!Capturing quality motion time-lapses and panoramas have long been feats reserved for the most adept photographers, but two Ph.D. candidates from the University of California, Los Angeles physics department are making the process available to all with a brand-new accessory.
Enter Spinpod, via Kickstarter. Daniel Aharoni and Zhiping Chen last Friday took their product to the crowdfunding platform, where it's currently eyeing a funding goal of $75,000.
SEE ALSO: Kickstarter Tops 100,000 Launched Projects
According to the pitch video, the Spinpod is a portable photo helper for select smartphones and cameras. "Thinner than a deck of cards," the gizmo grooves with the iPhone 4, iPhone 5, iPod touch and most Android phones, with or without a case.
The gadget, which can double as a music holder, sound amplifier and video-chat port, is intuitive in application. After locking your device of choice in Spinpod's dock, select between panoramic mode and time-lapse mode. The former works with camera apps capable of continuous panoramic photography to produce seamless shots, and the latter lets you try your hand at an array — thanks to its versatility — of motion time-lapse maneuvers. You can mount the Spinpod to a tripod (or even connect one to another) to capture dynamic clips, and an LED lets you know which mode you're shooting in.
Additionally, Spinpod features a five-, 10- and 15-second timer option for self-portraits. Spinpod isn't the only helper out there, though. Apple users might recall Galileo, a previous Kickstarter success that lets your iPhone do a full 360 via iPad control, as well as last year's Radian.
Trying to make the leap to the market, the tech-savvy students behind Spinpod (pictured above) are giving interested backers a chance to snag one of the devices with a $59 pledge. But keep your eyes on Spinpod's Kickstarter campaign for updates on add-ons in the near future. Aharoni told Mashable that his team is working with iStabilizer's model of a four-wheel dolly meant for cameras, modifying it with a ball-head tripod mount so the Spinpod can motorize and drive dollies.
According to Aharoni, the weight will be off the Spinpod and held on the dolly, so high-end photography equipment, such as DSLRs, will be supported for linear time-lapses. The dolly system, per Aharoni, will be able to be added to any current and future pledge, so all backers can receive a Spinpod as well as the mounting and dolly system.
“The linear system is going to expand the base of people that can use [Spinpod],” Aharoni said.
“It will be much, much more affordable than anything else that’s been out.”
At time of publication, the Spinpod was about one-third of the way to its $75,000 goal. The funding period closes July 1 at 2 a.m. EDT.
How do you feel about Spinpod? Are you willing to back the product? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
Image courtesy of SpinpodPrint Author Topic: [Interview]From Tinker to Champ (Read 3083 times) 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic. FML|Mage FML Bets Season 1 Winner
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Race: [Interview]From Tinker to Champ « on: July 21, 2014, 10:27:09 PM » Mage : First off Mog, I'd just like to say congratulations on winning your first FML Season! It certainly doesn't seem like that long ago that we had this hunt massing Tinker first maniac running around the maps harassing the hell out of players. But as with everything else in life, time flies and the players mature. I think I can speak for the rest of the community when I say it's been a pleasure seeing your game type evolve, and I expect we'll be seeing it go even further soon. So, without further ado;
Mage : How did you first find out about FML, and when did you start playing?
Mog[Skynet] : I first found out about FML from sir Worpex. I, like many others, switched over to SC2 when it first came out, and after about 6-8 months I started really missing WC3, and getting really bored/frustrated with SC2. I started playing WC3 a little again, but didn't know where to play since bnet was overrun with hackers and all my old friends had moved on to SC2 or just stopped playing entirely. I don't remember how, but I ran into Worpex randomly and he told me they needed more players for the upcoming season of FML (It was Season 13), so I checked out the site, applied, and was accepted straight into the season! I had known Worpex for many years, having played for him in solo leagues for one of his old teams, and also having played in his old league WCO. I'm sure after my first match of the season, where I tinker hunt rushed SteppinRazer on Deathrose, then got flamed for the remainder of the game before finishing in 4th place, he regretted his decision of inviting me to the league, but I'm thankful he gave me the chance!
Mage : So, after your rough beginning to the FFA Masters League, what were your impressions for the rest of Season 10? I presume that you didn't get flamed every game... hopefully
Mog[Skynet] : Well...it was season 13 I believe. But I don't really remember much of the rest of that season. I think I consistently finished in 3rd place and I don't think I got flamed much for the rest of the season. I had a very quick change in play style, and rather than being hyper aggressive solo player, I became super passive hoarder. That didn't work out either, because I was too passive, but didn't get flamed much because people would just tome me.
Mage : Speaking of your interesting play styles, you were pretty well known for a long time as a Tinker first player. How did that start?
Mog[Skynet] : Hmm... I don't really remember when it first started. I just really liked the Tinker, even in solo leagues back in the day I would go Tinker first in a lot of different matchups. I think it began because I hit a wall in solo, where my mechanics simply weren't good enough to get any better, so i took a creative route and tried to develop a unique play style to catch players off guard. It didn't really work out too well for me in solo, but I became pretty good with Tinker, so I just kept using him. Once I switched primarily to Elf, I would mass hunt rush every race, and would pick Tinker first when vs HU only. When I started playing FFA, it just seemed normal for me to pick Tinker, because I wasn't comfortable doing anything but massing hunts, and I knew my play with standard hero combinations would be subpar because I never really played with standard hero combinations.
Mage : And how did playing with a Tinker work out for you in FFA? I've seen some very mixed play with it, but it would seem to mesh better with Human if I'm being honest.
Mog[Skynet] : Clearly, at first it didn't work out for me at all. But I don't think it was necessarily the Tinker's fault, I think it was more my lack of FFA knowledge and ability. I still tried to use the Tinker like I did in solo, using him in big battles, where I would end up losing because that isn't utilizing the Tinker's strengths properly (as Persuade pointed out to me on a large number of occasions). Once I adapted my play style a bit, Tinker started working out better for me. He is really great at creeping early game, and securing a lot of easy early expansions. So on a lot of big FFA maps, I can often times creep Tinker up to level 4 or 5 with relative ease, then I just have to gain a little bit of experience through engagements before level 6, where Tinker turns into a powerhouse. I really like Tinker because he gives me the ability to win a game, even if I'm losing a lot of big fights, or behind in hero levels, or even behind in gold. Tinker has the ability to win a game singlehandedly, and with Elf, it allows the possibility of hiding trees and securing a win through building kills. You aren't wrong about Tinker meshing well with Hu, because Hu can easily hide behind mass towers and use Tinker, and mixed with tanks that can be a total nightmare for any player. But since I don't play Hu... I think he meshes well with NE also.
Mage : Fair enough, but I've noticed that recently your play style hasn't included a Tinker in it. What's the reasoning behind that, and do you think we might see a reappearance of the Tinker any time in the future?
Mog[Skynet] : I came to the conclusion that if I was ever going to be successful in FFA, I couldn't be a one trick pony, so to speak. I do still use Tinker, and if I recall correctly I won some games this past season with Tinker, including the semi-final. I think I definitely gained a reputation as just another hoarding Elf who avoids fighting all game until I can just win with mass gold or through building kills with tree hiding and lots of rebuilding etc. I'm not saying that reputation was wrong, but I wanted to do away with it by mixing up my play style more. I think by playing other strategies and utilizing other play styles, I improved my game and became more successful. So yes, the Tinker will still make appearances, but I can't say I will use him every game, because I don't want to be a predictable player who does basically the same thing every game. I want to be more well-rounded, so other players don't always know what to expect from me.
Mage : Which makes a lot of sense, and probably has a lot to do with your improvement as a player.
Mage : Along those lines, what do you attribute your progress as a player to?
Mog[Skynet] : I don't think I can attribute it to any one thing, because there were many things that helped me improve, and still help me improve. First, I listened to the feedback the more solid players of the community gave to me. My first few matches, I was lost. I had FFA experience on bnet ladder, but FML was a whole different challenge, and frankly, a whole different type of FFA than bnet ladder ever was. The constructive criticism players such as Magadansky, Renaud, Persuade, Wrecktify, and even Redkeekee (though his was more just criticism) gave me, really helped grow my understanding of FFA. Although it is going to sound really arrogant, I also have to attribute some progress to myself. I try to always have the mindset that I can learn and improve my game, and even though I don't necessarily practice playing games as much as others, I always take the time to watch my own replays, as well as replays of others. I watch my own replays to see ways in which I can improve. It is very revealing to know what was going through my own head while playing the game, and then seeing how wrong I was via replay. Early on, I would think I was in a good position, then watch replay and see I was getting manip'd hard by someone with 20+k more gold than me. My scouting and game sense were poor, and those are what I've always tried to improve on the most (and continue to try and improve). And of course I watch other players' replays to see their different playstyles, to see how they make decisions, and to find things I can take from their gameplay, and utilize in my own.
Mage : So let's go back a little bit to the end of Season 13. I presume that you enjoyed FFA enough that you wanted to continue playing. We know that you won this Season, and made the finals directly in Season 17, but what were some memorable moments in Seasons 14-16 for you?
Mog[Skynet] : I don't have many memorable moments haha. Let's see... Season 14 I didn't qualify for. Then Season 15, my first memorable moment occured when I won my very first FML match in the qualifiers by beating DarkFlameMaster and Persuade. *disclaimer, that game Persuade basically suicided into DFM, and gave me the win, but it was memorble because I played decently and finally won a game! That game was also on Sanctuary, which kind of makes Sanctuary my favorite map. After qualifying, I didn't win a single game the whole season. And I honestly don't remember Season 16.... I don't think I won any games that season
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makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
What Place Is Besieged?
What place is besieged, and vainly tries to raise the siege? Lo, I send to that place a commander, swift, brave, immortal, And with him horse and foot, and parks of artillery, And artillery-men, the deadliest that ever fired gun.
Still Though the One I Sing
Still though the one I sing, (One, yet of contradictions made,) I dedicate to Nationality, I leave in him revolt, (O latent right of insurrection! O quenchless, indispensable fire!)
Shut Not Your Doors
Shut not your doors to me proud libraries, For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet needed most, I bring, Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made, The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing, A book separate, not link’d with the rest nor felt by the intellect, But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.
Poets to Come
Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me. I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness. I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you.
To You
Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?
Thou Reader
Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I, Therefore for thee the following chants.
BOOK II
Starting from Paumanok
1 Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born, Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother, After roaming many lands, lover of populous pavements, Dweller in Mannahatta my city, or on southern savannas, Or a soldier camp’d or carrying my knapsack and gun, or a miner in California, Or rude in my home in Dakota’s woods, my diet meat, my drink from the spring, Or withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess, Far from the clank of crowds intervals passing rapt and happy, Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware of mighty Niagara, Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and strong-breasted bull, Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow, my amaze, Having studied the mocking-bird’s tones and the flight of the mountain-hawk, And heard at dawn the unrivall’d one, the hermit thrush from the swamp-cedars, Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World. 2 Victory, union, faith, identity, time, The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports. This then is life, Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions. How curious! how real! Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun. See revolving the globe, The ancestor-continents away group’d together, The present and future continents north and south, with the isthmus between. See, vast trackless spaces, As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill, Countless masses debouch upon them, They are now cover’d with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known. See, projected through time, For me an audience interminable. With firm and regular step they wend, they never stop, Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions, One generation playing its part and passing on, Another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn, With faces turn’d sideways or backward towards me to listen, With eyes retrospective towards me. 3 Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian! Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses! For you a programme of chants. Chants of the prairies, Chants of the long-running Mississippi, and down to the Mexican sea, Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, Chants going forth from the centre from Kansas, and thence equidistant, Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all. 4 Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North, Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own off-spring, Surround them East and West, for they would surround you, And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect lovingly with you. I conn’d old times, I sat studying at the feet of the great masters, Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me. In the name of these States shall I scorn the antique? Why these are the children of the antique to justify it. 5 Dead poets, philosophs, priests, Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since, Language-shapers on other shores, Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate, I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left wafted hither, I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it,) Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves, Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it, I stand in my place with my own day here. Here lands female and male, Here the heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world, here the flame of materials, Here spirituality the translatress, the openly-avow’d, The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms, The satisfier, after due long-waiting now advancing, Yes here comes my mistress the soul. 6 The soul, Forever and forever—longer than soil is brown and solid—longer than water ebbs and flows. I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems, And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality, For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and of immortality. I will make a song for these States that no one State may under any circumstances be subjected to another State, And I will make a song that there shall be comity by day and by night between all the States, and between any two of them, And I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of weapons with menacing points, And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces; And a song make I of the One form’d out of all, The fang’d and glittering One whose head is over all, Resolute warlike One including and over all, (However high the head of any else that head is over all.) I will acknowledge contemporary lands, I will trail the whole geography of the globe and salute courteously every city large and small, And employments! I will put in my poems that with you is heroism upon land and sea, And I will report all heroism from an American point of view. I will sing the song of companionship, I will show what alone must finally compact these, I believe these are to found their own ideal of manly love, indicating it in me, I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were threatening to consume me, I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires, I will give them complete abandonment, I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love, For who but I should understand love with all its sorrow and joy? And who but I should be the poet of comrades? 7 I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races, I advance from the people in their own spirit, Here is what sings unrestricted faith. Omnes! omnes! let others ignore what they may, I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part also, I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is—and I say there is in fact no evil, (Or if there is I say it is just as important to you, to the land or to me, as any thing else.) I too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a religion, I descend into the arena, (It may be I am destin’d to utter the loudest cries there, the winner’s pealing shouts, Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above every thing.) Each is not for its own sake, I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake. I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough, None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough, None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is. I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion, Otherwise there is just no real and permanent grandeur; (Nor character nor life worthy the name without religion, Nor land nor man or woman without religion.) 8 What are you doing young man? Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours? These ostensible realities, politics, points? Your ambition or business whatever it may be? It is well—against such I say not a word, I am their poet also, But behold! such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion’s sake, For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential life of the earth, Any more than such are to religion. 9 What do you seek so pensive and silent? What do you need camerado? Dear son do you think it is love? Listen dear son—listen America, daughter or son, It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess, and yet it satisfies, it is great, But there is something else very great, it makes the whole coincide, It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands sweeps and provides for all. 10 Know you, solely to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion, The following chants each for its kind I sing. My comrade! For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and more resplendent, The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion. Melange mine own, the unseen and the seen, Mysterious ocean where the streams empty, Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me, Living beings, identities now doubtless near us in the air that we know not of, Contact daily and hourly that will not release me, These selecting, these in hints demanded of me. Not he with a daily kiss onward from childhood kissing me, Has winded and twisted around me that which holds me to him, Any more than I am held to the heavens and all the spiritual world, After what they have done to me, suggesting themes. O such themes—equalities! O divine average! Warblings under the sun, usher’d as now, or at noon, or setting, Strains musical flowing through ages, now reaching hither, I take to your reckless and composite chords, add to them, and cheerfully pass them forward. 11 As I have walk’d in Alabama my morning walk, I have seen where the she-bird the mocking-bird sat on her nest in the briers hatching her brood. I have seen the he-bird also, I have paus’d to hear him near at hand inflating his throat and joyfully singing. And while I paus’d it came to me that what he really sang for was not there only, Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes, But subtle, clandestine, away beyond, A charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born. 12 Democracy! near at hand to you a throat is now inflating itself and joyfully singing. Ma femme! for the brood beyond us and of us, For those who belong here and those to come, I exultant to be ready for them will now shake out carols stronger and haughtier than have ever yet been heard upon earth. I will make the songs of passion to give them their way, And your songs outlaw’d offenders, for I scan you with kindred eyes, and carry you with me the same as any. I will make the true poem of riches, To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and goes forward and is not dropt by death; I will effuse egotism and show it underlying all, and I will be the bard of personality, And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other, And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me, for I am determin’d to tell you with courageous clear voice to prove you illustrious, And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to beautiful results, And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death, And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact, And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any. I will not make poems with reference to parts, But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble, And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with reference to all days, And I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but has reference to the soul, Because having look’d at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one nor any particle of one but has reference to the soul. 13 Was somebody asking to see the soul? See, your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands. All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them; How can the real body ever die and be buried? Of your real body and any man’s or woman’s real body, Item for item it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners and pass to fitting spheres, Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Not the types set up by the printer return their impression, the meaning, the main concern, Any more than a man’s substance and life or a woman’s substance and life return in the body and the soul, Indifferently before death and after death. Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern and includes and is the soul; Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it! 14 Whoever you are, to you endless announcements! Daughter of the lands did you wait for your poet? Did you wait for one with a flowing mouth and indicative hand? Toward the male of the States, and toward the female of the States, Exulting words, words to Democracy’s lands. Interlink’d, food-yielding lands! Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice! Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land of the apple and the grape! Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! land of those sweet-air’d interminable plateaus! Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie! Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where the south-west Colorado winds! Land of the eastern Chesapeake! land of the Delaware! Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan! Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! land of Vermont and Connecticut! Land of the ocean shores! land of sierras and peaks! Land of boatmen and sailors! fishermen’s land! Inextricable lands! the clutch’d together! the passionate ones! The side by side! the elder and younger brothers! the bony-limb’d! The great women’s land! the feminine! the experienced sisters and the inexperienced sisters! Far breath’d land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez’d! the diverse! the compact! The Pennsylvanian! the Virginian! the double Carolinian! O all and each well-loved by me! my intrepid nations! O I at any rate include you all with perfect love! I cannot be discharged from you! not from one any sooner than another! O death! O for all that, I am yet of you unseen this hour with irrepressible love, Walking New England, a friend, a traveler, Splashing my bare feet in the edge of the summer ripples on Paumanok’s sands, Crossing the prairies, dwelling again in Chicago, dwelling in every town, Observing shows, births, improvements, structures, arts, Listening to orators and oratresses in public halls, Of and through the States as during life, each man and woman my neighbor, The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her, The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me, and I yet with any of them, Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river, yet in my house of adobie, Yet returning eastward, yet in the Seaside State or in Maryland, Yet Kanadian cheerily braving the winter, the snow and ice welcome to me, Yet a true son either of Maine or of the Granite State, or the Narragansett Bay State, or the Empire State, Yet sailing to other shores to annex the same, yet welcoming every new brother, Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones from the hour they unite with the old ones, Coming among the new ones myself to be their companion and equal, coming personally to you now, Enjoining you to acts, characters, spectacles, with me. 15 With me with firm holding, yet haste, haste on. For your life adhere to me, (I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself really to you, but what of that? Must not Nature be persuaded many times?) No dainty dolce affettuoso I, Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck’d, forbidding, I have arrived, To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe, For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them. 16 On my way a moment I pause, Here for you! and here for America! Still the present I raise aloft, still the future of the States I harbinge glad and sublime, And for the past I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines. The red aborigines, Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names, Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla, Leaving such to the States they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names. 17 Expanding and swift, henceforth, Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick and audacious, A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching, A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests, New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts. These, my voice announcing—I will sleep no more but arise, You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms. 18 See, steamers steaming through my poems, See, in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing, See, in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter’s hut, the flat-boat, the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village, See, on the one side the Western Sea and on the other the Eastern Sea, how they advance and retreat upon my poems as upon their own shores, See, pastures and forests in my poems—see, animals wild and tame—see, beyond the Kaw, countless herds of buffalo feeding on short curly grass, See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce, See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press—see, the electric telegraph stretching across the continent, See, through Atlantica’s depths pulses American Europe reaching, pulses of Europe duly return’d, See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing the steam-whistle, See, ploughmen ploughing farms—see, miners digging mines—see, the numberless factories, See, mechanics busy at their benches with tools—see from among them superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, drest in working dresses, See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me well-belov’d, close-held by day and night, Hear the loud echoes of my songs there—read the hints come at last. 19 O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only. O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly! O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild! O now I triumph—and you shall also; O hand in hand—O wholesome pleasure—O one more desirer and lover! O to haste firm holding—to haste, haste on with me.
BOOK III
Song of Myself
1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. 2 Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me. The smoke of my own breath, Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine, My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs, The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind, A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms, The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag, The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides, The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun. Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. 3 I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world. Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn. Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age, Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself. Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing; As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead? 4 Trippers and askers surround me, People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait. 5 I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice. I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love, And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed. 6 A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps, And here you are the mothers’ laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. 7 Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it. I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots, And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good, The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good. I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth, I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself, (They do not know how immortal, but I know.) Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female, For me those that have been boys and that love women, For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted, For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers, For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears, For me children and the begetters of children. Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded, I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no, And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away. 8 The little one sleeps in its cradle, I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand. The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill, I peeringly view them from the top. The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom, I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen. The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders, The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor, The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls, The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs, The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital, The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall, The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd, The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes, What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sunstruck or in fits, What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes, What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum, Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips, I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come and I depart. 9 The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready, The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon, The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged, The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow. I am there, I help, I came stretch’d atop of the load, I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other, I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy, And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps. 10 Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt, Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee, In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night, Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game, Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves with my dog and gun by my side. The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud, My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck. The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me, I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time; You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle. I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl, Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders, On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand, She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet. The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside, I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him, And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet, And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north, I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner. 11 Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome. She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window. Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair, Little streams pass’d all over their bodies. An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray. 12 The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market, I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and break-down. Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil, Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire. From the
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and advised all reporters not to use ‘primitive’ while referring to tribal people. The Office of the Readers’ Editor recommended an ‘exercise of caution’ in this regard.
Sophie Grig, coordinator of the Proud Not Primitive movement, said, ‘This important success with The Hindu is just the beginning. We need to stamp out all use of this derogatory and dangerous language in reference to India’s tribal peoples. No media should be using these terms.’
Aakar Patel at The Express Tribune said, ‘I support Proud Not Primitive because we must rise above hurried judgment about cultures that are not our own’.
So far, The Hindu and the Business Standard have taken a stand for tribal peoples in India by correcting articles which labelled them as primitive. © Survival International
While the Indian government abandoned the use of ‘primitive tribal group’ to describe remote tribal peoples in favour of ‘particularly vulnerable tribal group’ in 2006, the phrase continues to be widely used in the Indian media.
The Hindu’s correction is the second major success of the Proud Not Primitive campaign. Following complaints by supporters of the campaign, the editor of India’s Business Standard apologised for the use of the term ‘primitive’ in an article in July, 2013, which has since been corrected.
Proud Not Primitive aims to challenge negative stereotypes which underpin discrimination and lead to the theft tribal peoples’ land in India. Thinking of tribal peoples as ‘primitive’ or ‘backwards’ assumes that their way of life is inferior and not part of today’s world. This leads to the notion that they should be ‘developed’ and ‘brought into the mainstream’, often with devastating consequences.
An elder of the Paniyar tribe in southern India said, ‘For us Adivasis [tribal people of India], every tree is like a house. That is what the forest is for us. We are not backward, it’s just another way of life.’
Sophie Grig added, ‘For tribal peoples’ rights to their lands and ways of life to be respected we need to change the way that people think, talk and write about them.’
Note to editors:
- Proud Not Primitive is urging all Indian media to amend their editorial guidelines and ensure that language such as ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’ is not used to describe tribal peoples. Please email [email protected] to sign up.
- Proud Not Primitive is part of Survival International’s worldwide ‘Stamp It Out’ campaign which challenges negative stereotypes of tribal peoples. Stamp It Out has been endorsed by UK newspapers The Guardian, The Observer, the Independent, and renowned journalists such as John Simpson, John Pilger, George Monbiot and many others.
- The BBC guidelines on Reporting and Portrayal of Tribal Peoples state: ‘We should take care over the use of terms that have the potential to be misleading or discriminatory, such as ‘primitive’, ‘backward’, ‘savage’ or ‘stone-age’. Care is also needed to avoid confusing a people that are not industrialised with one that is not part of the modern world or 21st century.’Dramatic scenes at Comic-Con on Sunday saw a woman saved from the 14th floor of an apartment building by stuntmen in town to promote Kick-Ass 2.
According to ABC News, the suicidal woman was on the edge of a balcony and threatened to jump when the three men heard the commotion and rushed into the building to rescue her.
Amos Carver, Gregg Sergeant and Scot Schecter were on the other side of the road setting up for a Kick-Ass 2 private party in the San Diego district hosting Comic-Con. Sprinting across three lanes of traffic and scaling a fence, the men ran into the room before managing to pull her back over the balcony.
Carver told ABC: "We went through the apartment trying to be as quiet as possible. We didn't want to alert her that we were there."
They found the woman, who they believe to have been heavily intoxicated, hanging on with one hand, and with one foot off the ledge.
"She just kept saying 'I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry' over and over again. She was very distraught."
The suicide attempt was first mistaken for a promotional stunt by onlookers accustomed to movie studios going all out at the annual event.
The identity of the woman has yet to be released, but it is thought that she was upset over a breakup.
"We're trained to deal with these situations should they arise," said Carver, who compared the rescue with working on a film set. "But usually if we do, it's not an innocent civilian."There's a stretch of the Los Angeles River in the Elysian Valley, roughly midway along its 51-mile route to the sea, where native willows rise from the east bank and arundo—an invasive grass—closes in from the west. If you're lucky enough to be out there in a kayak, and there's no train rushing past on the tracks above, you will hear something very strange in this city of millions: quiet.
On a recent evening, Omar Brownson, the head of the L.A. River Revitalization Corporation, leaned back in his red plastic kayak, closed his eyes, and listened to the soothing sounds of birds singing and water slipping over rocks.
Wait—Los Angeles has a river?
Well, sort of. Once upon a time, gathering waters from an underground aquifer in the San Fernando Valley and from the surrounding mountains, the river nourished a lush coastal plain, creating rich soils that covered the region. Today, it's largely encased in concrete and barely recognizable as a river.
But thanks to an agreement this spring between the city and the federal government, the overlooked waterway is slated for a $1 billion restoration effort. That plan covers an 11-mile (17.7-kilometer) section of the river that runs roughly from Glendale to downtown. The ultimate goal: transform a neglected wasteland into an urban oasis—a 51-mile greenway, complete with bike path, bridges, parks, public art, waterfront businesses, and, at the center, a thriving river. Imagine New York City's High Line, but aquatic and at three dozen times the scale.
"The L.A. River," says Brownson, who grew up in Los Angeles, "is one of the few chances we have to hit the reset button."
View Images Participants in Paddle the L.A. River, a program run by the L.A. Conservation Corps, kayak through the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area in June 2014. Photograph by Bill ALkofer/The Orange County Register/ZUMA Press, Inc /Alamy
Taming the Torrent
When the Tongva Indians first came to the area, as early as 5000 B.C., they settled on the river's lush banks. Cottonwoods and willows towered above the water, and bears foraged in thick tangles of berry bushes.
Much later, as Los Angeles boomed in the mid-1800s, European settlers built in the river's floodplain. For much of the year, it was a meandering creek. But winter rains turned it into a cascade, overflowing its banks and washing away whatever was in its path. That path shifted dramatically: At some periods the river emptied into San Pedro Bay near Long Beach (as it does today), at others into Santa Monica Bay to the northwest.
Over the next century, a series of catastrophic floods leveled buildings and swept away residents. In 1934, after a devastating flood on New Year's Day, Congress stepped in, authorizing the Army Corps of Engineers to tame the river. They deepened its channel and encased three-quarters of the river in a concrete ditch, fixing it once and for all in its current—artificial—path.
Since then, it has looked more like an irrigation canal or a "water freeway," a narrow ribbon of water running at the base of gray concrete slabs. John Travolta's iconic car race in the movie Grease? It took place on the bed of the L.A. River, just south of City Hall.
In 1985, environmentalists began campaigning to restore parts of the river to its natural state—a vision that took shape over the intervening decades, with help from a few key champions of the river. Today, that vision is officially under way. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who took office a year ago, has made the river a focal point of his administration—even traveling to Washington to lobby President Obama in person.
In late May, the Army Corps of Engineers approved the far more ambitious of two competing proposals to revitalize the river. The plan, known as Alternative 20, involves tearing down roughly six miles (9.6 kilometers) of concrete walls and replacing them with a series of green terraces and wetlands, many of which will merge into parks. It will be several years before the concrete removal begins; the Army Corps plan still needs congressional authorization.
Beginnings of a Greenway
In the meantime, though, the city has been buying up chunks of land—most of them barren lots of crumbling asphalt—on the river's eastern flanks, in a bid to build a chain of parks where, says Brownson, "it'll be seamless in terms of how the city and the river come together."
Brownson's organization is raising money on a project-by-project basis, bringing together funds from city, state, and county coffers as well as from private and philanthropic sources. Their first major construction project is a $9 million pedestrian and bicycle bridge that will connect the east side of the river to a bike path and the 4,200-acre Griffith Park on the west side. Visible from the I-5 freeway, it's intended as a symbol of the river rising again.
Metaphorically rising, at least. Whatever happens, the Los Angeles River still has to function as a flood control channel. "Anything we do cannot lessen that," says Brownson. The river can't be allowed to shift its course over a large floodplain, as it once did, because there's now a major city in the way.
Brownson sees that constraint as similar to the one imposed on a poet by the sonnet form. "How can you be creative," he says, "within a set number of syllables and stanzas? Instead of it being a limiter of what's possible, it's just a structure for how do you create within that frame." The finished project, he says, will have to blend together wetlands and picnic spots, flood control terraces and bird habitat.
"This has the opportunity to become a regional natural resource," says Barbara Romero, the city's public works commissioner. "It's basically redefining people's opportunity to experience nature in their neighborhoods."
Much of the river is still inaccessible even to locals. In one neighborhood, 27 streets dead-end at the river but only four have proper access; the rest end at chain-link fences. One of the revitalization corporation's projects, called Street Ends, will help communities design and build their own gateways to the river.
View Images A man fishes along the Los Angeles River in June 2014. A plan to return the river to a more natural state will cost an estimated $1 billion. Photograph by Patrick T. Fallon, Bloomberg via Getty Images
Kayaking Through Elysium
Last summer, four kayaking companies set up shop, offering tours of two distinct stretches: a float through a calm, flat section called Sepulveda Basin, or a wilder journey down the Elysian Valley that involves four small rapids and considerable navigation among rocks. In both sections, the river—due to engineering challenges that the Army Corps faced during the channelization—retains some of its soft bottom rather than running over a concrete base.
When I kayaked the Elysian Valley with Brownson, as part of a group led by two local artists who run L.A. River Kayak Safari, the wildlife on display included a heron, an egret, several cormorants, and a smattering of ducks. Still, for much of the two-mile journey downriver, it was hard to forget that we were in the center of a major city. Trucks rumbled on freeways; double-decker commuter trains thundered past. And those concrete walls remained in place.
The L.A. River will never be wild. Even the water running through it is domesticated: 80 percent of the flow now comes from a wastewater treatment plant in the San Fernando Valley, next to Sepulveda Basin. Steven Appleton, who runs the kayak company and has visited the plant, advises his clients not to drink the water but not to worry about accidental ingestion.
The river project is primarily a sweeping exercise in urban renewal rather than nature restoration. Ed Reyes, a former city council member who was instrumental in pushing the river agenda, says he saw an opportunity to make smart decisions at a crucial time—expanding bike paths, reinstalling wetlands, turning abandoned industrial areas into parks.
"If we don't begin to identify spaces along the freeway, along our corridors, think about how we get water to our trees—if we don't build in these policies as new developments come online, we're going to miss an important phase in our city's growth," Reyes recalls thinking. The river, he believed, could be the catalyst for a whole new framework of city planning. "We have to formalize it through the river corridor," Reyes says, "and branch out from there, like a nervous system."The Teachers' Union in Helsinki (HOAY) has assured that no schools will be shut down due to the demonstration.
Schools: The Trade Union of Education in Finland (OAJ) has estimated that all schools will remain open on Friday despite the massive demonstration mounted by labour market organisations in protest of the changes to the terms and conditions of employment outlined by the Government.
Matriculation examinations will similarly be held regardless of the demonstration. Examinees who are late due to disruptions to transport services will be granted additional time to take the examination.
Daycare centres: Some daycare centres, on the other hand, may close their doors on Friday. OAJ, which represents the majority of daycare teachers, has stated all daycare centres should not be closed under any circumstances. However, some daycare teachers and assistants are members of different unions.
More on the topic: - Friday's strike to halt all rail traffic (14 September 2015) - Watch a live broadcast of the demonstration at hs.fi (in Finnish)
Vantaa has announced its intention to keep all of its 126 daycare centres open, while Espoo and Helsinki are expected to comment on the matter on Thursday.
Buses: A number of bus operators will halt their services between 3am on Friday and 3am on Saturday. The work stoppage will affect not only local and commuter services but also long-distance and express services.
Charter buses and coaches, however, will be in service across Finland on Friday.
Onnibus has stated that it will operate one hundred services on Friday. Pohjolan Liikenne has similarly announced that its managerial staff will ensure at least some of the Finnair City Buses to Helsinki Airport are in service.
Trains: All trains will come to a halt at 6am and not re-commence service until 6pm on Friday. Trains departing before 6am, however, will be driven to their destination.
No commuter trains depart before six in the morning.
The first three Allegro trains departing from both Helsinki and St. Petersburg will be cancelled, while the trains departing from Helsinki at 8pm and from St. Petersburg at 7.25pm will be operated as usual. The work stoppage will cause no disruptions to the overnight express service between Helsinki and Moscow, Tolstoi.
Trams and metros: Tram and metro services will be suspended throughout Friday, from the first morning service to the last night service, after the joint organisation of railway professionals (JHL) decided on Wednesday in favour of participating in the stoppage. The majority of tram and metro drivers are members of the joint organisation.
Any possible exceptions will be announced in the course of Thursday.
Taxis: No disruptions to taxi services are expected on Friday. The services may nonetheless be affected by the expected spike in demand, despite the fact that the entire taxi fleet of Helsinki will be in service on Friday.
Air traffic: Air traffic is likely to suffer from disruptions or, at least, widespread delays on Friday. Finavia, the operator of airports in Finland, has announced that it will utilise its managerial staff and other temporary arrangements in order to guarantee air traffic control, security and other airport services for the duration of the demonstration.
Delays in air traffic are nevertheless expected especially in the afternoon and evening.
Air traffic controllers, airport ground personnel and cabin crew members will organise a work stoppage between 11am and 1pm on Friday. Airport personnel represented by the Transport Workers' Union (AKT), in turn, will not report for work at all.
Passengers are advised to check with their airlines or travel agencies for announcements on possible delays and cancellations. Finnair has declared that it will allow its passengers scheduled to fly on Friday to change the date of their flight at no additional cost.
Health care centres: The Union of Health and Social Care Professionals in Finland (Tehy) and the Finnish Union of Practical Nurses (Super) have encouraged their members to participate in the demonstration but to do so on their free time. The demonstration therefore should not affect the operations of health care centres.
Shops: The Service Union United (PAM) has similarly encouraged its members to take part in the demonstration or to stage a work stoppage between 11am and 1pm on Friday. Shops, restaurants and cafés may therefore be closed or short-staffed at lunchtime on Friday.
Spokespersons for Kesko and SOK have stated that the majority of grocery shops will remain open regardless of the demonstration. Nearly all Alko shops, however, will close their doors between 11am and 1pm, according to PAM.
Banks: Trade Union Pro, the representative of the employees of Osuuspankki, Danske Bank and some smaller banks, has encouraged its members to participate in the demonstration. Branch managers will decide whether or not their branch will remain open on Friday based on the human resources at their disposal.
Post offices: Posti will suspend all of its operations between 6am and 6pm on Friday with the exception of early-morning newspaper deliveries. No letters or parcels will therefore be delivered tomorrow, and the majority of post offices – with the exception of eight – will remain closed.
A list of the eight post offices that remain open on Friday is available on the website of Posti.
HS-HT
© HELSINGIN SANOMAT
Photo: Rio Gandara / HSSanford Stadium, home of the University of Georgia Bulldogs football team, and now, perhaps, home to the newest and possibly most sinister curse in all of organized sports.
Chicago has their billy goat. The Red Sox suffered under the voodoo of the Babe for decades. The latest sports team to fall victim to other worldly influences of bad luck could be the Georgia Bulldogs. Its shunned name is currently being circulated in hushed whispers amongst the Georgia faithful. It has become known as “The Curse of the Track People”.
In its early days, the east end zone of Sanford Stadium remained open and devoid of seating. This gaping hole created free seats atop the railroad tracks that ran directly across the street from the venue. In the 1970’s, hordes of drunken Dawg fans too rowdy and cheap to gain admission enjoyed splendid vistas of Georgia football completely free of charge. The tracks eventually became so popular that fans would often show up early and camp out until game day in order to save a spot.
There were no “visitors seats” on the tracks. Opposing fans brave enough to venture near the area were met with raging hatred and alcohol-fueled violence. The Track People were sloshed warriors of the Bulldog Nation, sworn by blood and steel to protect and defend her at all costs.
As a 5-year-old in 1980, I saw firsthand what the tracks were all about when two Track People fought like rabid pit bulls over the affections of a young lady on a hot afternoon. The incident ended up costing my parents hefty fees for my therapy sessions later in life, yet I still look back on that moment with beaming pride.
“It was kind of like the Manson Family,” states William “Skeeter” Carmichael, a former Track Person, “except with football!”
“We’d see some beady-eyed bunch of Tennessee fans walking down near the street level, and then everybody would just start chucking our empties at them from up high on the tracks” says Roger Yearwood, who hung out on the tracks from 1974-80, “I split some Tech fan's head wide open one year from darn near 150 feet! He said he’d never wear red. Well, I changed the color of his shirt for him.”
A camaraderie developed among the frequent revelers, and a tradition had been born.
This letter—written prior to the 1980 season by legendary Georgia Icon Erk Russell to his defensive linemen—specifically mentions the “Track People.”
Gentlemen: (linemen) The football season of '80 will be my seventeenth as a Georgia Bulldog. During this time there have been many thrilling Saturdays of competition, each with its individual memories, because each game has its own personality.
There are two Saturday traditions and experiences which have remained basically the same throughout the years for me and I would like to share them with you.
The first one concerns the RAILROAD TRACK CROWD. These are my people because they love the Dogs almost as much as I do. Oh, I know they do some crazy things- like turn over our opponent’s buses sometimes and now and then they throw one another down the bank and into the street below. But they stamp out Kudzu and they pull for us to win and that ain't bad. If you can get off the bus to cheers of THE RAILROAD TRACK CROWD and walk down those steps to the dressing room and not be inspired to play football as best you possibly can, something important is missing beneath the Georgia jersey you wear. It is impossible not to be inspired. They choke me up!
The season of 1980 will be the last for THE RAILROAD TRACK CROWD. A great Georgia tradition will have passed with the new addition to our stadium. The view from the tracks will be no more.
Your team will be the last Georgia Team to be greeted and cheered by the RAILROAD TRACK CROWD. Wouldn't it be fitting if their last team was also the best Georgia Team ever? Think about it!
Another Saturday tradition which has meant so much to me over the years can be stated very simply. "THERE AIN'T NOTHING LIKE BEING A BULLDOG ON SATURDAY NIGHT-----AFTER WINNING A FOOTBALL GAME." I mean like whipping Tennessee's ass to start with, then ten more and then another one.
This is the game plan. We have no alternate plan.
Sincerely, Erk Russell
Old Erk may have been a huge fan of the folks on the tracks, but every Track Person I have spoken to agreed that the UGA fan who most embodied the spirit of the group was a man by the name of Rusty McKay. Rusty had been watching Georgia games from the tracks longer than anyone could remember, and he almost never missed a Saturday in Athens on the tracks with “his folk.”
He claimed to have attended the university briefly in his youth, but had spent the majority of his days serving in the Merchant Marine, until he was finally forced to retire after he suffered a knee injury in Haiti stumbling out of a cathouse. Rarely was he ever spotted wearing any color other than Bulldog red, and he has been credited with having printing the first foam trucker hat that read "Herschel for Heisman" in September of 1980.
He was a true Georgia fan and a decent man by all accounts, although it is widely acknowledged by those close to him that he had an ongoing problem with alcohol. More than one Track Person I interviewed for this piece described him as “The type of guy you would want on your side in a bar brawl.” Many also stated his fondness for taking stray cats into his Tibbets Drive residence.
After the miracle season of 1980, when Herschel Walker and the Bulldogs rocked the world of college football by claiming the national championship with a perfect season, friends recall Rusty’s demeanor as strangely melancholy. When asked why his mood was so somber, given the fact the his beloved Dawgs were now champions, Rusty would ramble on wildly about how the University had “finally done him in” by deciding to close off the east end zone and install more seating, effectively blocking his free view of the Georgia games forever.
He complained even more that all the friendships he had spent so many Saturdays forging over cold beers and Dawg talk would now be lost. A few folks became concerned about his mental state, so they took up a collection to purchase him 1981 season tickets, taking great care to reserve seats high atop the new east end bleachers in order to try and replicate the view he had witnessed from the tracks for so many years. But it was no use, Rusty refused to accept them, and his pitiful condition only grew worse as the months passed.
The last time he was seen alive was a hot summer night in 1981. Witnesses state that Rusty staggered out of TK Hardy’s Saloon at sometime around 11 p.m. on Thursday, July 17. He was found dead late the next day on the tracks, right in his old spot where he had enjoyed so many free games, an empty bottle of Night Train by his side.
Rumors circulated that his eyes were wide open—still gazing at the back side of the newly erected bleachers that had blocked his view and driven him to this horrible fate. It is said that one of his hands, in the first stages of rigor mortis, defiantly extended its middle finger upward toward the stadium. The other hand reportedly clutched in its grasp a crumpled piece of paper, across which was scrawled the words—The Track People will have their revenge! The Curse of The Track People is upon you! No more national championships for you guys!
Sincerely,
Rusty McKay
Rusty was in the ground before the start of the 1981 season. The Track People all drifted back to places like the carnival and the various correctional facilities from which they came. And though the Bulldogs have had many a great season since Rusty’s passing, they have never achieved what they did the last magical year the Track People cheered them to supreme victory.
Is the “Curse of the Track People” for real? Is a human sacrifice in order to appease Rusty’s restless spirit? Is a supernatural entity reaching out from beyond the grave to prevent another national championship for UGA? Who can say for sure?
My enduring hope, as a Georgia fan, is that one day the university will pay some sort of penance to old Rusty, perhaps by foregoing the extra money these cursed seats generate by ripping them out permanently, opening a view for all the Track People of this great state, thereby allowing the Dawgs to once again claim a national title. Until that act of cleansing takes place, I fear many dark days are ahead for the University of Georgia football program.
Long live the Track People…I will take your questions from 6-7pm (Eastern), Monday 4/29. Please use the Twitter hashtag #AskSamAnything to participate.
Possible topics include: the mind/brain, science v. religion, free will, moral truth, meditation, terrorism, consciousness, gurus and cults, publishing, lying, etc.
Note: If you are following the conversation live, you will need to keep refreshing your browser to watch it develop.
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Joe Goodrich @josephgoodrich Thoughts on Islam and the Boston Bombing—and the press’ reaction to (avoidance of) the Islam connection?
This is probably worthy of a separate blog post. But, briefly, I have noticed a persistent failure to differentiate four general types of bad actor: (1) psychotics or people who suffer some obvious form of mental illness (e.g. Jared Loughner, James Holmes, Adam Lanza), (2) psychopaths or those whom we would generally describe as classically “evil” (e.g. most serial killers, Kim Jong Il), (3) psychologically normal people who do bad things because they are a part of a bad system or have poorly aligned incentives (e.g. many gang members, most soldiers fighting in unjust wars, certain business people), and (4) otherwise normal people who are captivated by some transcendent, divisive ideas. Some of these belief systems are merely political, or otherwise secular, in that their goals are exclusively a matter of bringing about specific changes in this world. But the worst are religious—whether or not they are attached to mainstream religion—in that they are energized by beliefs about otherworldly rewards and punishments, prophecies, magic, etc.
Obviously, a person can belong to all four types at once and have his antisocial behavior overdetermined. Someone can be both a psychotic and a psychopath, part of a corrupt system, and devoted to a dangerous, transcendent cause. But there are many examples of each type in its pure form. At the moment, I see no reason to think that the Boston Marathon bombers were anything but type (4)—which puts all the onus on their religious beliefs. And anyone who puts them in the same category as Jared Loughner and Adam Lanza, as many commentators have, is guilty of obscurantism. “Why are angry, disaffected men so prone to violence?” Wrong question.
Mark B @emexbe What’s your opinion of panpsychism? A technically valid theory or scientifically impossible?
Possibly true, but probably unfalsifiable—and, therefore, probably vacuous in scientific terms. Is the sun conscious? There’s no reason to think so, but would I expect the sun to behave differently if its processes of nuclear fusion were associated with subjectivity? No. So, even if panpsychism were true, I would expect it to be undetectable.
Adam Dorr @adam_dorr You seem to avoid political morality. Care to engage? Is conservativism inherently less moral than liberalism?
I touch on this briefly in The Moral Landscape and Free Will. These views have different strengths and weaknesses. Depending on the context, one can be less in touch with reality than the other and conducive to greater harm. One of the virtues of liberalism is self-doubt and a willingness to consider the other person’s point of view. In the presence of antagonists who don’t have a point of view worth considering (e.g. psychopaths, religious maniacs), liberalism can be a recipe for masochism and moral cowardice. Conservatives tend not have this problem. But when conservatives are wrong, they often lack the corrective mechanisms of liberals. It’s hard to generalize, but it is worth noting that there is a structural asymmetry here: liberalism can be exploited in a way that conservatism cannot.
Mark B @emexbe Have you and @danieldennett ever considered having a public debate about free will?
Yes, we are planning on it. But I can’t yet say when it will happen.
Tiny Klout Flag14joseph morris @josephlmorris Do you think that truth has value in and of itself or is its value derived from its affect on well-being
This is actually a very subtle question—and my answer is pretty easy to misconstrue. But I think that (ultimately, when we get very clear about what we mean by these terms) truth is a slave to well-being. Which is to say that anything you can say about the value of knowing the truth (e.g. it’s so interesting, so useful, so beautiful, etc.) translates into a claim about the well-being of conscious creatures.
Oliver Rees Brown @degodier How best to publish 1st book 4students my age on Humanism based on 4horsemen’s combined work+Pinker+much more
Please see my article, How to Get Your Book Published in 6 (Painful) Steps.
TimSkinner @_timskinner Is there a good strategy to help counter blasphemy laws endangering our international secular counterparts?
We need to blaspheme wherever necessary, publicly and without apology, criticize anyone who takes offense—and ridicule those who pretend to take offense.
Glenn the Technomage @bluedream Are you planning on writing a book exploring spirituality without superstition?
Yes, that’s my next book. The manuscript is due in a month (as you can see, I’m procrastinating). It will be out next year.
Anton Vikström @Anton_Vikstrom How square the “illusion of the self” with, in meditation, simply *observing* the stream of thoughts?
If you observe the stream of thoughts closely enough, you will see that there is no self doing the observing.
Alan Litchfield @MalcontentsGamb How can you establish that there are moral facts to be known? Can you give us an example (or two) of a moral fact.
It is a fact that this universe admits of an extraordinary range of pleasant an unpleasant experiences for conscious creatures. It is also a fact that movement in this space is constrained by the laws of nature (whatever they turn out to be). Forget, for a moment, that you ever heard the word “morality.” Just admit that we have a navigation problem on our hands: If we go too far in one direction, things reliably get very unpleasant (and not the kind of unpleasant that has a silver lining); go in another, and everyone gets really happy, creative, fulfilled, etc. These differences exist and movement is possible. Now let’s recall this word “morality”: if you don’t think that it would be immoral to move everyone downward into hell, or moral to move them upward in collective flourishing, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Bryan Goodrich @bryangoodrich Morality is about brain states, how does this apply to ethics of future people (e.g. genetic manip, unborn) or the environ?
I wouldn’t say that morality is about “brain states”—I would say that it relates to the actual and possible states of conscious minds. So if computers of the future become conscious, they will be part of the moral landscape.
The question of our ethical connection to the unborn and to the never-to-be born is an interesting one. We clearly must place some value on possible states of suffering and well-being. For instance, why would it be bad to painlessly kill every person currently alive in his or her sleep? We can’t say it would be bad because of all the suffering it would cause—because everyone would die painlessly and there would be no one left to grieve. The immorality must relate to the potential states of future happiness that would be cut off by such an act. If you believe, as I do, that human life is, on balance, extraordinarily beautiful and well worth living, you must think that ending all human life would be bad, even if it could be done painlessly.
In my view, the value of the environment is reducible to the value it has for all the conscious creatures in it (both actual and potential). For a rock or a stream to be valuable, I think it must be valuable to some actual or possible creature. This doesn’t require that the creature be aware of this value—you and I surely have compounds in our bodies that are absolutely integral to our physical and mental well-being that science has not yet discovered. But value must matter to someone, somewhere, somehow—at least potentially.
Robert Bauer @RobertBauer18 Do you think that people like Chomsky and Greenwald actually believe their own myopic views?
I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.
peter walsh @speciesisminart Moral Landscape says value the well being of conscious creatures – only to solely focus on humans. Why?
My argument applies to all conscious creatures, to the extent that they are conscious. I focus on humans because we are most concerned about ourselves, and I believe we are right to be, given that we seem to experience the widest range of conscious states. But I do think we should be very concerned about the suffering we impose on other animals—and brain-to-body ratio seems a reasonable basis upon which to organize our intuitions on this front (e.g. we should be more concerned about chimps than about chickens).
Adam Simoneau @AyJaySimon To what extent do you agree w/ S. Levitt’s assertion that no proposed gun control measures will do much good?
I basically agree with Levitt about this. You can listen to his discussion of gun policy here.
Jakub Kuźmiński @AeternitasManet What did you learn from Christopher Hitchens?
One thing he taught me is that there are times when outrage is the only appropriate emotion—and not to express it at such moments is a moral failing.
Jefferson Grizzard @JeffGrizza Does your stance regarding free will affect your actions from day to day, or are its implications strictly societal?
My view about the illusoriness of free will makes it easy to let go of anger/hatred. I occasionally get angry, of course. There are people who behave in ways that I find despicable. But I can (ultimately) see their behavior as impersonal—even when it is directed at me personally. That doesn’t mean that I suddenly become trusting of everyone. I know that certain people can be counted upon to misbehave. But so can grizzly bears. We can fear grizzly bears and take steps to protect ourselves from them, but it makes no sense to hate them.
Jefferson Grizzard @JeffGrizza If the self is an illusion, who or what is witnessing that illusion?
Consciousness.
Anjo Bacarisas PA @JoBacarisas How do you define the secular spirituality?
Self-transcendence without divisive bullshit.
John Snow @JohnSno40182901 What are your thoughts on Sufism?
It’s a myth that there have been no intolerant Sufis. But Sufism, being the mystical tradition within Islam, has tended to be more benign and far more interesting than the religion itself. I have always loved the poetry of Rumi and the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I have practiced with Sufis, and I have no doubt that people have interesting insights and experiences chanting the Zikr, for instance. But insofar as these insights are interesting, they will be unintelligible in light of the Koran.
Andy French @andyfrenchie If we live in a multiverse and causality unfolds in all directions, how can we morally justify one action versus another?
Well, if you share the hope that you live in one of the universes where you don’t suffer unnecessarily, you might want to act accordingly.
Anti Life EFIList Ⓥ @AntiLifeEFIL Is is not objectively better never to have been? What flaw is there in the nonexistent state?
It is impossible to eat pancakes there.
Tiny Klout Flag12Usman Mian @UsmanMianMD Have u had many former Muslims credit you for
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, terrorists or agents from hostile governments.
"We have long needed to rely on wiretaps to protect society," Webster Hubbell, Associate Attorney General, said today at a news conference. "We are not talking about any change in the protection of privacy of telecommunications."
"We are at a crossroads," said James K. Kallstrom, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s New York office. "Are we going to have the tool of electronic surveillance, or are we going to let criminals use the national information infrastructure unfettered?"
But critics, including some Democratic members of Congress, charged that the Administration plan would not work and would harm industry.
"It is a tragically flawed idea," said Douglas Miller, government affairs representative for the Software Publishers Association. "Do you think any intelligent criminal is going to use encryption to which the Government holds the keys?"
"The only good aspect of the Clipper Chip program is that it is not mandatory, yet that is exactly why the program is doomed to fail," said Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. "Criminals and terrorists can opt to buy any of the already commercially available encryption methods."
Representative Don Edwards, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on civil rights, agreed, saying, "I was hoping for a more realistic policy from the Administration."One of America’s most famous craft beers made its China debut in October: Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout. This international award-winner is a decadent Imperial stout, as dark and dense as a black hole with thick foam the color of a bourbon barrel. The nose is an intense mix of charred oak, chocolate, vanilla, caramel and smoke. One sip has more flavor than your average case of beer.
What makes it taste so good? It’s actually aged in bourbon barrels.
Bourbon County Stout By the Numbers
1000
On a fateful evening in 1992, a thoughtful Greg Hall, brewmaster of Goose Island Brewery, found himself seated next to Booker Noe, Jim Beam Kentucky Bourbon’s master distiller. Hall had been searching for the perfect way to make Goose Island’s 1,000th batch of beer something special. A spark flickered: What happened to all those whiskey barrels after Jim Beam was done with them?And what would happen if you aged a beer in them? That spark of an idea led to the creation of a brew unique and innovative enough to set the beer world on fire: Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout.
1800
Looking for the historic spot that birthed the very first batch of Bourbon County Brand Stout? Grab a ticket to Chicago and head over to Lincoln Park’s Clybourn Avenue. Arrive at number 1800 and you’ll find the Clybourn Pub, where Goose Island first started brewing its world-famous craft beers nearly 30 years ago – and where dedicated drinkers celebrate the release of the annual Bourbon County Brand Stout batch.
8
In order to age a delicious whiskey, distillers like Jim Beam, Buffalo Trace and Heaven Hill age the bourbon in barrels made from American White Oak trees that have been thoroughly charred within. This charring allows the whiskey in the barrel to seep into the wood where it absorbs the flavors of the tree – toffee, caramel, and spicy vanilla. To achieve the perfect flavor profile, the whiskey ages for a minimum of 8 years in the barrel.
-5 to 38
Bourbon County Brand Stout is aged in these same whiskey barrels after the distillers are done with them. But instead of Kentucky, Bourbon County Brand Stout is aged in the vastly different climate of Chicago, the heart of America’s Midwest. The weather in Chicago soars to 38 degrees Celsius during the summer (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit). The wood in the whiskey barrels expands during the intense heat, allowing the beer to penetrate even deeper into the pores of the wood. During Chicago’s famously chilly winters, the temperature plummets to a frosty -5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit). The wood of the barrels then contracts, squeezing the beer out of the wood’s pores and back into the content of the barrel, bringing with it all the goodness it had spent the summer soaking up deep inside the wood.
8 to 16
Goose Island’s brewers give the Bourbon County Brand Stout plenty of time to interact with the charred wood of the whiskey barrel and ride the ups and downs of Chicago’s wild weather. This craft beer is aged in the bourbon barrels for. Perfection takes time!
11 to 15%
Bourbon County Brand Stout is not a beer for the faint of heart. While your average witbier weighs in at about 4 to 4.5% alcohol by volume (ABV), a typical pale ale comes at 5 to 6% ABV, and an IPA or saison has anywhere from 6 to 9% ABV, the Bourbon county Brand Stout blows them all out of the park, varying every year between a whopping
2006
When Bourbon County Brand Stout made its debut back in 1992, the world had never seen a beer like this before. Beer enthusiasts, cicerones, and craft brew judges resorted to using brand new words to taste the incredible flavors they were experiencing: smoky, coconut, roasted coffee. Bourbon County Brand Stout began growing an international name for itself – becoming so famous that by 2006, it wasWhen in doubt, blame the Illuminati: That’s the motto followed by many netizens. When Spain, the defending World Cup champions, were eliminated on Wednesday, many Twitterati accused the satanic cult.
The Illuminati are alleged to be a secretive group associated with the Freemasons, or, according to some descriptions, satanists. Illuminati rumors are one of the hottest topics on the Web, so it wasn’t very shocking that the I-word was thrown around after Spain didn’t advance.
The illuminati is the cause of Spain's failure this World Cup — Cristian Hernandez (@HnaitsirC) June 18, 2014
I think the Illuminati are behind this World Cup — Alejandro Bahamonde (@AyyeAle) June 18, 2014
Spain is the reason why I know illuminati was involved in the World Cup of 2010 — 6.29.14 (@Cleanboimauri) June 18, 2014
But the Illuminati rumors didn’t just start when Spain lost; they've been there since the World Cup kicked off. UFO-Blogger.com noted all the different types of apparent Illuminati symbolism in the FIFA World Cup 2014 Official Song "We Are One (Ole Ola).” Nearly 20 different “examples” were pointed out by the site's creator.
An Illuminati symbol usually has to do with triangles. For this user, whether it was a crack in the wall, the pattern on Jennifer Lopez’s shorts or the way Pitbull moved his hands, these were all alleged representations of the cult.
Buzzfeed joined in on the Illuminati speculation, though in a tongue-in-cheek manner. The news site, which is famous for its lists and quizzes, pointed out all the random geometric figures that could be found in the 2014 World Cup Brazil.
THIS IS WHY THE DEFENDING WORLD CUP CHAMPS SPAIN IS ELIMINATED. #WorldCup2014 pic.twitter.com/W3LDvt0eVD — STOP THE ILLUMINATI (@Illuminati_Stop) June 18, 2014
It has gotten to the point where some people like to poke fun at the alleged cult, since nearly anything -- with a little help from Photoshop -- can be turned into a triangle and therefore turned into an Illuminati symbol.
Whether you believe in the Illuminati or not, there are thousands of conspiracy theorists who probably relishing the various ways that symbols of the cult can be found throughout the 2014 World Cup.
DID PORTUGAL'S PEPE HEADBUTT THOMAS MÜLLER OR FORCE HIM TO JOIN THE ILLUMINATI? #WorldCup2014 pic.twitter.com/3Lnh2Io5Lz — STOP THE ILLUMINATI (@Illuminati_Stop) June 16, 2014
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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s undercover look at the right-wing militia movement.
When Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer signed up to train with a militia group in California last spring, he came equipped with woodland camo, combat boots, and a semi-automatic rifle. On a mountainside outside the San Francisco Bay Area, he joined other similarly armed recruits. Over the course of several trainings, they learned about marksmanship, land navigation, patrolling, rappelling, radio communication, and code language. They also learned how to hold defensive positions and set up bases.
The group Bauer joined was the California State Militia (CSM), which describes itself as a collection of “concerned citizen soldiers” seeking to defend America from all enemies, foreign and domestic. CSM doesn’t conceal its activities; it shares photos of its trainings on Facebook. In March, CSM’s Bravo Company posted snapshots of camo-clad militia members gathered in the woods, setting up camp and aiming their rifles among the towering pines. “We had fun, built stronger relationships and ate great,” one member wrote on the Facebook page.
These military-style trainings have no connection to the US military or a government-sponsored militia. Yet they are legal so long as they don’t cross the line into inciting violence or civil unrest. Under California law, it is illegal for a “paramilitary organization” to train with weapons if it engages in “instruction or training in guerrilla warfare or sabotage.” Violators are subject to one year of imprisonment and/or a fine of up to $1,000. When I asked the California attorney general’s office if there was any reason to believe that CSM’s activities might violate state law, a spokeswoman said the office was unable to provide any legal analysis and declined to comment further.
Nationwide, 41 states have laws that place restrictions on private paramilitary activity. The laws fall into two categories: those that limit or regulate private military groups and those that limit or regulate private military training. The penalties vary. In Idaho, training people in ways to maim or kill with the intent to further “civil disorder” is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and/or up to a $50,000 fine. In Pennsylvania, training people to use guns or bombs with intent to further civil disorder is a first-degree misdemeanor. Arizona law forbids anyone besides the government from maintaining “troops under arms”; doing so is a class 5 felony—a minor crime comparable to improperly storing used tires.
Anti-Paramilitary Laws
In addition to joining a California militia, Bauer participated in a “border op” partly organized by the Arizona and Colorado chapters of the Three Percent United Patriots (3UP), which operates under a military-style command structure. Among the operation’s participants were members of the Borderkeepers of Alabama. I contacted five district attorneys and four attorneys general in California, Arizona, Colorado, and Alabama to ask about the legality of militia activity in their jurisdictions. All the DA and AG offices I reached out to either declined to comment or said there wasn’t enough information to determine whether the militia groups in their area were operating legally. The only exception was the district attorney’s office in Larimer County, Colorado, which said there was “no reason to believe that 3UP is in violation” of the state’s anti-paramilitary training law.
Some anti-paramilitary laws have been around since the Reconstruction Era, when they were intended to prevent the reemergence of Confederate armies. Many have their roots in the 1980s, when hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan began running training camps. The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors extremist activity, was so alarmed by these reports that it drew up model anti-paramilitary legislation, and over the next decade, 24 states passed restrictions on paramilitary activity. The new ordinances were enforced against white supremacists in a few scattered cases.
“If these militias are just running around the woods with guns, most states don’t really care.”
In the 1990s, self-styled citizen militia groups proliferated across the country, marking the beginning of the modern right-wing militia movement. Officials hesitated to use the laws to crack down on militia activity. Even in Michigan—then a hotbed of militia activity—the attorney general’s office declined to take a position on whether the Michigan Militia was in violation of state law. To date, there are no known cases of these laws being used against “patriot” militias, according to Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “They’ve become sort of forgotten little laws,” he says.
When militia members are accused of breaking the law, prosecutors ignore anti-paramilitary laws and pursue more serious charges. In 2014, hundreds of armed militiamen gathered at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada to protest the confiscation of his cattle as a result of his failure to pay more than $1 million in unpaid federal grazing fees. Some aimed their guns at federal authorities and ultimately forced the Bureau of Land Management to release the cattle. Afterward, the federal government slapped the showdown’s leaders, including Bundy, with a slew of federal charges, including conspiracy, extortion, obstruction of justice, and assault on a federal officer. Earlier this month, after a lengthy undercover FBI investigation, three militiamen in Kansas were arrested for plotting to bomb a Somali apartment complex. They were charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.
State anti-paramilitary laws are often ignored because they have few teeth, says Pitcavage. “You can take a case federal with conspiracy laws and get much more time and potentially much harsher penalties than with most of the state laws,” he says. “In some of these cases, the feds don’t even give the state the option. They come in and they just charge these guys with conspiracy and there’s no need for the state to try and apply a paramilitary training statute.”
Even as militia members talk of the day when they might put their training to the test to resist the government, the decision not to scrutinize militia activity more closely may be a strategic one: Prosecutors and law enforcement agencies don’t want to risk angering militia supporters and generating more support for the militia movement. “For the most part,” says Pitcavage, “if these militias are just running around the woods with guns, most states don’t really care.”A UConn student died after she was hit by a university fire department vehicle early Sunday morning and police said officials from the fire department found her an hour and a half after she was hit.
Jeffny Pally, 19, of West Hartford, was sitting on the ground with her back against a garage bay door at the UConn Public Safety Complex at 126 North Eagleville Road in Storrs when the fire department received a call for service around 1:15 a.m. Sunday, according to police.
When the bay door Pally was leaning against opened, she fell back onto the ground and a fire department Chevy Tahoe leaving the bay drove over Pally, according to police.
Crews from the fire department found Pally around an hour and a half later, when they returned from that call and state police said they were called at 2:48 a.m.
UConn Student Struck By Fire Department Vehicle Dies
Friends of a UCONN student are grieving after their friend died in an accident at the UCONN Public Safety Complex. (Published Monday, Oct. 17, 2016)
The shift commander who was driving the vehicle has been placed on administrative duty and will not respond to calls while the incident is investigated.
UConn is assisting state police in their investigation, according to university spokesperson Stephanie Reitz.
"Every student is precious to us, and this is a heartbreaking and tragic loss," Conn President Susan Herbst said in a statement released Sunday. "Our deepest sympathies go out to her family, friends, and all those whose lives she's touched. We know that words cannot begin to express their grief."
The school is encouraging students to use the campus counseling and mental health services if they need support.
"This is such a terrible thing," Calvin Saxton said. "It's so hard to comprehend, actually."
Jeffny was a sophomore majoring in allied health and aspired to be a nurse, according to the university.
UConn Student Killed by Fire Vehicle
(Published Sunday, Oct. 16, 2016)
The cause of her death was determined to be blunt injuries to the torso and head and it was ruled an accident.
"I'm still in shock. Like, I feel like I'm still going to see her walking to class," said Jenny Patel, a UConn sophomore.
Jeffny worked as a resident assistant and was joining a sorority.
A vigil will be held on Fairfield Way on campus at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Pally grew up in West Hartford and attended Hall High School. The school is also offering grief counselors today.
Anyone who witnessed the accident or has knowledge of Pally’s activities prior to the accident is asked to call Trooper Mark Dicocco at 203-630-8079.Single-seaters have Formula E, touring cars will soon have Electric GT and bikes have MotoE. But so far rallying has had nothing to bring to the electric table.
A few independent electric entries into events such as the Dakar Rally have shown the potential of electron-fuelled rallying, but no electric-only series exists. That could soon change, however, because a small British company wants to lead the way by establishing the world’s first electric rallying championship.
Hot two-seat Renault Zoe e-sport gets 460bhp
Fife-based eRally already has support from UK motorsport’s governing body, the MSA, and it hopes to offer electric rally cars to compete in junior rallying in the next year or two. The key to securing this future comes in the form of a Renault Zoe, which has been transformed into a prototype electric rally car by the eRally team. Company founder and ex-British Rally Championship driver Ellya Gold headed up the project, with input from Formula 1000 junior rally series chairman Tristan Dodd and Stavtec Rally Prep, based near Aberdeen.
On a damp morning at Glan-y-Gors kart track in north Wales, we meet Gold to find out why the eRally Zoe could be the catalyst electric rallying needs to get off the ground.
TORQUE ADVANTAGE
Because of the high torque levels of electric motors, EV powertrains are very well suited to rallying, even before any modifications are made.
“The Zoe is very much still under development, so the powertrain is completely standard,” says Gold. “Renault has produced it with a big safety margin, though, so there’s a lot more to come from it.”Summary
Ethereum is a blockchain-based platform on which programming code can be run and computed. It utilizes a Turing-complete virtual machine, known as the Ethereum Virtual Machine, to compute scripts through a decentralized network of nodes. The software is open-source and the blockchain is public. The platform has many uses, with smart contracts being the most popular and common. Smart contracts are scripts that are stored on the Ethereum blockchain whose primary function is to exchange any unit of value. The smart contract can perform other tasks such as creating new tokens and eliminating fraud in real-life contracts. Ether is the primary token of Ethereum and serves as a unit of value to pay for transaction fees and other services performed on the platform.
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.Israeli Intactivist Group Produces Hebrew Materials
Israeli anti-circumcision activists are busy and their efforts constant...
(TEL AVIV) - One subject we cover frequently at Salem-News.com is the stark reality of circumcision of boys and girls. Our articles examine the physical and emotional implications, the modifications of laws regulating this practice, and the cultural changes and developments that are raising awareness in leaps and bounds.
It is a hard subject with sharp consequences. Jews and Muslims believe they are supposed to cut off their children's genitalia. However, as our Paris-based anti-circ writer Sigismond (Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux) has revealed, Moses actually was told by God not to do this.
Circumcision, or genital mutilation, which is a proper and descriptive term, is the mark of a Jewish slave and those males who are circumcised lose 30% of the tissue that makes sex enjoyable. Our California anti-circ writer, Dr. Richard Matteoli, highlights the mental health issues that circumcision brings, and sometimes in frightening ways that would make any parent consider the act.
Our Oregon physician writer, Dr. Phillip Leveque, has revealed the pain babies suffer through the use of the common tool, the 'Gomco Clamp', from a first-hand perspective. Dr. Leveque, who fought the Nazi's in WWII, says a child's cry from being circumcised is worse than that of a mortally wounded combat soldier screaming for his mother in his final moments of life. Babies are hypersensitive to pain, not that it requires a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Babies are incapable of any coherent type of protest beyond screaming bloody murder.
My article about how more than 100 babies in the US die each year from circumcision served as an eye-opening introduction to the darkest part of this practice, it is unimaginable that we let this become a standard in the United States. It makes us look fairly prehistoric and certainly barbaric. Our writer Diane Walsh in Canada has revealed the gut wrenching facts about Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)
Our musician/writer, Agron Belica, has one of the most well known anti-circ songs in the world, titled 'Leave those babies alone' which will be featured next month at the famous San Francisco gay pride parade. He has a second song and music video about anti-circumcision as well, Circumcision is child abuse
But perhaps most interesting, is the fact that Salem-News.com has a network of anti-circumcision groups and individuals who constantly supply new information and background. We have friends all over Israel fighting from within the Jewish community to force change, and we are one of the few groups in the world with a Muslim anti-circ writer.
The following information just arrived in our newsroom today, it reviews the new emerging material being circulated in Hebrew throughout Israel.
- Tim King, Salem-News.com
Gonnen and Ben Shalem (The Israeli Association for the Abolition of Circumcision), two Israeli Intactivist groups, have produced stickers and postcards in Hebrew:
1. (card, front)
A WORD ON BRIT
[a double entendre in Hebrew]
CIRCUMCISION SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCES THE SENSITIVITY OF THE PENIS.
On normal skin the size of the foreskin there are 50 nerve endings. In the foreskin, there are 1,000 nerve endings.
THE FORESKIN IS IMPORTANT AND HAS MANY FUNCTIONS.
There are risks and complications in the cutting of the foreskin. Some of the problems are only revealed in adolescence. Some people are not aware that they were damaged and think it's normal. SOMEONE BORN TO A JEWISH MOTHER IS JEWISH WITH OR WITHOUT A FORESKIN Removal of the foreskin is no guarantee for social acceptance.
1. (card, back)
"In the natural state, the corona within the foreskin is protected as an internal organ, moist like the eye. In infancy, the foreskin is connected to the organ and protects it. An organ without the foreskin is exposed to infection. Many of the circumcised require corrective surgery to widen the urethral opening under full anesthetic. THE MOHEL PARES AND REMOVES AROUND 1/3 OF THE SKIN OF THE PENIS! RECOVERY FROM THE CIRCUMCISION WOUND IS SIMILAR IN SEVERITY AND RISKS TO RECOVERY FROM A THIRD DEGREE BURN.
(ORGAN WITHOUT SKIN) Following the removal of the foreskin, the psychology of sexual relations is changed.
Sexual intercourse with a foreskin is gentler, more sensitive, and more satisfying. For additional details, visit 'Gonen on the child'
www.gonnen.org
and in the forum 'Passing on Brit Milah' on Tapuz.
2. (sticker)
Circumcision = Abuse
3. (sticker)
I am against circumcision
and any unnecessary word
[a double entendre in Hebrew]
4. (sticker)
PENIS IS GOOD FOR THE JEWS!
The association for the abolition of circumcision.
5. (sticker)
JEWS DON'T CUT JEWS!
The association for the abolition of circumcision
With thanks to Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon for the English translation.
_________________________________________“I’m fascinated by the multiplicity of identity” said Tom Hiddleston tonight about taking on the role for AMC’s multi-Emmy nominated The Night Manager. Up for an Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for his role in the limited series, Hiddleston was talking with Deadline’s Dominic Patten on Friday in a Facebook Live interview – which you can see below. “I’m not just looking for roles,” he said, “I’m interested in what the entire piece says.”
Best known for his Marvel role as the mischievous and villainous Loki in the Thor and Avengers pics, Hiddleston was joined in the Susanne Bier-directed show based on John le Carré 1993 novel of the same name by Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman and Elizabeth Debicki. Oscar winner Bier is also nominated for an Emmy for TNM as is the former House star and Colman among the 12 noms in total the series snagged.
“I feel le Carré’s anger is even sharper than ever,” said Hiddleston about the issue of arms dealing. “When the novel came out it spoke very much to the world in which it was written… those memories have receded, and yet arms dealing has not.” As for whether he’ll return for a hypothetical second season of the critically acclaimed series, it’s in “the lap of le Carré and his sons.” But, says Hiddleston, “I feel so connected to Pine and his predicament that I would be very interested to see where he would go next.”
Back as Loki, as his recently launched Instagram account teased, in the currently filming Thor: Ragnarok, Hiddleston has had quite the last year and likely quite the 2017. Besides the UK cultural phenomenon of the BBC co-produced The Night Manager and the accolades it has received on both sides of the pond, the actor had the big screen High-Rise, based on J.G. Ballard’s 1975 book, and the Hank Williams biopic I Saw The Light.
Next year will see not just the third Thor film for Hiddleston but also the big budget Godzilla spinoff of sorts Kong: Skull Island from Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures – which was a big deal at Comic-Con last month. Out on March 10, 2017, the 1970s set Jordan Vogt-Roberts helmed latter sees Hiddleston’s ex-SAS officer Capt. James Conrad sharing the screen with Oscar winner Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman.
That’s to come, just like the 68th Primetime Emmy Awards – which air live on ABC September 18.White House Petition Demands TPP Process Be Open & Transparent
from the yeah,-like-that-will-happen dept
The USTR needs to be more transparent and inclusive in the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty. The public should be informed by regular drafts of language released and open for comment. Members of Technological and on line civil rights groups should be invited to the negotiations.
It seems that, with every issue that comes up around here, people are quickly putting together White House petitions on the White House's "We The People" site. The latest, in response to all of these stories about secrecy concerning the negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), is a petition demanding that the process be more open and transparent It doesn't have many signatures yet, but perhaps we can help change that...Of course, as I was finishing up this post, I discovered that there's actually another, similar petition that probably should be signed as well. This one asks the White House to stop participating in the TPP negotiations, which is a much stronger request, and unlikely to actually get agreement from the White House (it also has some silly stuff about "the 1%" which is kinda off topic). I think the more straightforward request that any negotiation actually bemakes a lot more sense. But, either way, it's good to see more people recognizing that the TPP is the next big problem when it comes to Hollywood expanding copyright laws against the will of the public that it will impact. Help make sure the White House knows this is a concern by signing one or both of these petitions.
Filed Under: open, tpp, transparent, ustrFormer Celtic and Barcelona striker Henrik Larsson has been appointed coach of promoted Falkenberg on a one-year rolling contract, the Swedish first division club announced yesterday.
“We can now present Henrik Larsson as our new coach. We have met several times and carefully gone through the conditions at Falkenberg,” said sporting director Hakan Nilsson.
Larsson, 42, will take over as coach in the new year.
“This is going to be a lot of fun and inspiring,” he said, adding that he was well aware that the small club on Sweden’s west coast are among the favourites for relegation.
“I like challenges, and I’m looking forward to doing something that everyone outside Falkenberg believes is impossible.” As a player, Larsson won the Golden Boot at Celtic in 2001 as Europe’s top scorer before moving to Barcelona in 2006, where he won the Champions League. He also had a short loan spell at Manchester United in 2007.
Larsson was part of the Sweden team that finished third at the 1994 World Cup in the United States. He made the last of his 106 appearances for Sweden in a 1-0 loss to Denmark in October 2009 in a World Cup qualifier.
Despite an illustrious playing pedigree, his management career has so far been less successful, failing to lift Landskrona out of the second division during a three-year spell.
Since leaving Landskrona in November 2012, Larsson has helped out at fourth division Hogaborg, where his 16-year-old son is a midfielder.
Falkenberg won the recently completed second-tier Superettan in Sweden by a point from Orebro, who will join them in the top flight next year.
• Sir Alex Ferguson on ‘aristocrat’ LarssonI initially wrote this post around March just after the Vive was announced at MWC/GDC but then obviously got distracted and forgot to click publish. My bad.
So, cast your mind back to December 2014…
I love, love, love prototyping with dev kits. I immediately put money down for the Oculus DK1 and upgraded as soon as DK2 was announced. I’d played with various VR offerings from nearly everyone in the market, had played with countless “mobile VR” headsets and experimented with various input devices for VR. I had a pretty good feel of what was going on and the rumours in the VR space, so I thought…
So during what was otherwise a casually awesome day whilst working at Bossa Studios I was asked if I wanted to work with some new secret tech… uh, duh, who would say no?? As a heads up I was advised to check I had solid business insurance… uh, holy crap this must be something Really. Frickin. Cool. Contract Signed…
Next week the guys from Valve turned up with a HMD and lasers… FRICKIN LASERS MAN!!
After lots of excitedly jumping around and installing countless drivers to set this thing up we finally got it working (Windows Plug & Play & Facepalm) and I put it on for the first time. This funky looking 3d printed handmade V-1 Vive dev kit was immediately the holodeck. I could walk around, I could jump, I could roly-poly… I COULD ROLY-FUCKING-POLY!!!
Valve have, with absolutely zero doubt, nailed room scale VR with the Vive and Lighthouse. It is an *amazing experience*.
I’ll always have super fond memories of the V-1 kit (above). It covered your entire face like a welding mask due to the panels extending down. The foam velcro occasionally came off and scratched or stuck to your face. The thick heavy cabling pulling the HMD up against your face was heavy and uncomfortable and meant you had to drink through a straw whilst wearing it (like 6 hours a day). The controllers constantly disconnected when we slightly stood on the cables even when taped, glued, blu-tacked, re-glued and re-taped. All this aside I absolutely loved it, the super raw homemade-basement-glued-together feeling of it. Legendary hardware.
One of the fun crazy parts of this project was trying to hide the damn thing all the time since it was unannounced and there were literally no rumours of its existance. With journalists frequently in the office and the Ashens Gamejam going on during development I was literally boxed into the corner of what is otherwise a completely open plan office. Oh, and with the blinds pulled down too!! Someone also had the great idea of placing other VR kit and input controller boxes next to me so if it was spotted we could give some spiel about VR headsets they might know and change the conversation very quickly 😉
So what VR fun was I working on at Bossa Studios… Surgeon Simulator : Alien Invasion Super VR 64 of course…!!!!!
If you don’t know Surgeon Simulator you really need to go and watch the trailer over here, oh and go buy it too!! There are a number of ridiculous levels to play but as the title gives away the decision was made to start with the Alien surgery which is of course in Zero-G… ahem, I’ll say that again… ZERO-FUCKING-G. In VR. Seriously, it’s just too much fun. Forget the gameplay element, zero-g is wildly awesome fun. No wonder everyone wants to be a frickin astronaut?!
It’s just so ridiculously good with all the tools and organs floating around and the aliens arms wailing around everywhere… want to headbutt an aliens organ? Done. Want to break things with your face? Sorted. Want to smash an alien around the face with an old radio?? #LifeAchievementUnlocked
This crazy experience against the clock also really shows off the accuracy of the Lighthouse system that Valve has developed. In the Alien Surgery there is a laser that you can pick up and aim at whatever takes your fancy and from the other side of the room you can get the laser to hit and track a tiny (1-2cm!!) little blue medicine pill that’s floating around! Simply amazing hardware.
I can’t wait for this game to be launched and for the world to experience Zero-G with an Alien… if we cross paths I can trade beers for demos 😉
Surgeon Simulator, coming soon to a HMD near you 😉
Photographs © MSFX(CNN) Saudi Arabian rights activist Raif Badawi has been publicly flogged for insulting Islam despite international outcry over the sentence handed down by a court in the conservative kingdom, Amnesty International and his wife said.
The flogging Friday in Jeddah was the first of 20 such sessions imposed by a Saudi court after Badawi's 2014 conviction. He was arrested after creating an online forum in 2008 that his wife says was meant to encourage discussion about faith.
"Raif raised his head towards the sky, closing his eyes and arching his back," Amnesty International quoted what it said was an eyewitness to the flogging as saying. "He was silent, but you could tell from his face and his body that he was in real pain. The officer beat Raif on his back and legs, counting the lashes until they reached 50."
The punishment may also have been captured in cell-phone video uploaded to YouTube.
In the unverified video, a man in uniform can be seen striking a shackled prisoner with a cane as a crowd gathers around. Some in the crowd cried out "Allahu Akbar," or "God is great," as the man was being flogged.
Badawi's wife, Ensaf Haidar, said the video was difficult to watch.
"It's a scene I cannot describe. It was horrible," she said from Canada. "Every lash killed me."
Human rights groups deplored the flogging.
"Publicly lashing a peaceful activist merely for expressing his ideas sends an ugly message of intolerance," Human Rights Watch said over the weekend.
Said Boumedouha, Amnesty International's deputy director for the Middle East, called for Badawi's immediate release.
"Raif Badawi is a prisoner of conscience; his only 'crime' was to exercise his right to freedom of expression by setting up a website for public discussion," Boumedouha said in a statement.
U.S. officials have also called on Saudi officials to withdraw the sentence and review Badawi's case.
The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment to CNN on the case, saying it was a legal issue, not a political one.
The flogging occurred days after Saudi Arabian officials condemned the terrorist attack on the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, which has often lampooned Islam.
Saudi officials said the attack was "incompatible with Islam."“We all agree we’re not going to let the rate go up,” Mr. McConnell said.
The vote was the Senate Republicans’ 21st successful filibuster of a Democratic bill this Congress, which started in January 2011. Republicans have blocked consideration of President Obama ’s full jobs proposal, as well as legislation repealing tax breaks for oil companies, helping local governments pay teachers and first responders, and setting a minimum tax rate for households earning more than $1 million a year. Republicans say the measures were flawed and potentially harmful to the economic recovery.
But the student loan filibuster may be the highest-profile stalemate yet, because unlike those earlier bills, this one is not likely to be abandoned. Mr. Obama has elevated the issue by hammering Republicans on it for weeks. American students took out twice the value of student loans in 2011, about $112 billion, as they did a decade before, after adjusting for inflation. Over all, Americans now owe about $1 trillion in student loans. In 2010, such debt surpassed credit card debt for the first time.
Photo
The bill in limbo addresses only part of that burden. Graduate students with Stafford loans pay a higher rate, as do students with unsubsidized Stafford loans. Most undergraduates take out both unsubsidized and subsidized loans.
Republicans say they want to extend Democratic legislation passed in 2007 that temporarily reduced interest rates for low- and middle-income undergraduates who receive subsidized Stafford loans to 3.4
|
of polite society? No. Do we need to say that their books are now worthless? No. Do we need to say that they have nothing further to contribute? No."
Ambrose concludes his Web site statement by leaving his case to the court of public opinion: "The people will judge. The reading public will decide whether my books are fraudulent and react accordingly." Meanwhile, he plans to deal with his illness--and apparently to write more books, despite earlier comments that his next one would be his last.
"I have a lot left to say and to write about our nation's history, the American spirit and personal leadership," he writes. "I will take heart from the lessons I've learned over the years from these experiences as I deal with my own future."
Sources Echoed In Ambrose's Doctoral Thesis
More From Forbes
Did Ambrose Write Wild Blue, Or Just Edit It? 02.27.02 Goodwin confesses, but Ambrose remains in denial as evidence mounts about The Wild Blue.
The Ambrose Saga 02.27.02 Evidence of copying problems continues to mount against America's favorite historian.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A panel of the National Research Council has called for construction of a ballistic missile-interceptor site in the U.S. Northeast to counter a threat that some experts say Iran could pose within years.
The current U.S. defense plan - based on a Boeing Co -run antimissile shield to be bolstered by early intercept capabilities from Europe - is “very expensive and has limited effectiveness,” the panel said in a congressionally mandated report released Tuesday.
Successive U.S. administrations have spent roughly $10 billion a year to craft a layered shield against the limited number of ballistic missiles that could be fired by a country like Iran or North Korea, or to thwart an accidental launch.
It marks the Pentagon’s costliest research and development effort, fueled by fears of chemical, biological or nuclear warheads.
The research council’s “Committee on an Assessment of Concepts and Systems for U.S. Boost-Phase Missile Defense in Comparison to Other Alternatives” recommended that an East Coast interceptor site be set up, for instance, at Fort Drum, New York, or in northern Maine.
A similar move was called for earlier this year by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives over White House and Pentagon objections that the facility - its cost put at $5 billion by experts - was unnecessary.
An East Coast antimissile site would join a pair already in Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The existing sites field a combined total of 30 three-stage interceptors in silos.
Together with five additional advanced Raytheon Co-built X-band radars to track long-range missiles, an East Coast site “would more effectively protect the eastern United States and Canada, particularly against Iranian (intercontinental ballistic missile) threats, should they emerge,” the 240-page report said.
Unless these and other changes, including a new interceptor missile, are incorporated, the sole shield against long-range missiles “will not be able to work against any but the most primitive attacks,” it added.
LONG-RANGE STRIKES FROM IRAN, NORTH KOREA
The report said Iran and North Korea may be able to mount long-range missile strikes in the next decade or so if they press their development programs.
The United States and some other nations fear that Iran’s stated plan to use enriched uranium to generate electrical power is an effort to cloak steps toward producing nuclear bombs.
The recommended improvements to the ground-based shield could be carried out within the $45 billion budget sought for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency from fiscal 2010 through 2016 if unnecessary missile defense programs are scrapped, the report said.
An expanded long-range U.S. shield could overtake any need, for instance, for early intercept from bases in Europe, it said.
The Obama administration’s current plan, known as the European Phased Adaptive Approach, includes a projected Poland-based Standard Missile 3 interceptor to give U.S. soil an additional layer of defense by about 2021, the plan’s final phase.
The panel also turned thumbs down on efforts by Northrop Grumman Corp to develop a space-based sensor system known as the Precision Tracking Surveillance System.
It would cost four times as much to buy and up to five times as much over its 20-year life cycle as the recommended X-band radar setup “and it offers less value,” said the panel.
Representatives of Northrop Grumman and Boeing had no immediate comment on the report.
The Missile Defense Agency took issue with it.
“The deployed ground-based defense in Alaska and California is effective against the type of long-range missile threat we may face from North Korea and Iran,” Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman, said by email.
There are no plans to augment or replace the system’s existing technology with a new interceptor missile nor build any new domestic missile-defense sites, he added.
The Research Council is the main operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, which are advisors to the U.S. government on scientific and technical matters.
Representative Michael Turner, an Ohio Republican who has led the push for an East Coast antimissile site as head of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces, said the report showed President Barack Obama’s approach to European missile defense was the work of a president “more focused on Russia’s concerns than defense of the United States.”Learning an accent can come in handy for many different occasions. Master the Irish accent, bewilder your coworkers and friends with your emerald flair, and put some of those Hollywood stars to shame. This should sound like a typical Dublin accent if you are doing it right.
Correct! Small restaurants near residential communities are more likely to be frequented by locals. Here, you can listen to people speak in the Irish accent and maybe even test out your pronunciation! Read on for another quiz question.
Not exactly! You don't have to travel to Ireland to take a class -- you can do so through a local college or even over the Internet. Instead, while visiting Ireland, try to observe the accent during your conversations and interactions. Choose another answer!
Not necessarily! To learn the Irish accent, you should seek a native tour guide, rather than a large, organized tour group, which is more likely to be hosted by a non-local. This is because a native tour guide will speak the dialect (and hopefully show you some out-of-the way, interesting sites!). Click on another answer to find the right one...
Gawking is also used instead of staring, for example, ¨She stood there gawking at the new car.¨ But it would be pronounced as gaw-kin the g is mainly silent.
Just as there are American and British English dictionaries, there are Irish dictionaries, too. What's more, resources abound when it comes to sources on colloquialisms and idiosyncrasies of the accent. Invest your time and money into this endeavor if you truly want your accent to shine.
In the same respect you never truly master a foreign language if you don't live in the country, you will never master an accent if you don't live among the people.
Look on YouTube and watch movies and interviews for good examples of what you're trying to emulate. However, beware of impersonators out there -- and there are plenty.
Not exactly! The Irish English after perfect can be used in 2 ways. Both ways place the word "after" between 2 verbs, rather than between a verb and a noun as in this example. Choose another answer!
Absolutely! In this sentence, "after" is used between 2 verbs that are both in the present continuous verb tense. It is also normally used as an exclamation, which is the correct way to use the after perfect in Irish English. Read on for another quiz question.
Nope! This is the English adverb use of "after," which means "following in time or place." It is not the Irish English after perfect. Try another answer...
Not quite! In Irish English, you do not use the word "after" to mean "seeking" or "searching for" as it appears in this sentence. Try again...
The Irish accent is generally thought of as more'musical' than American English. It has a definite lilt to it that isn't seen in other variations of the Lingua Franca. Practice phrases a bit more'sing-songy' than you would in your native dialect.
The Irish accent is full of words and phrases unfamiliar to other dialects of English. No one else may know what you're talking about, but sacrifices must be made to be authentic. Soon you'll be cod acting like a bucklepper!
The after perfect (AFP), which is one of the most characteristic features of Irish English, has given rise to a certain amount of debate and a great deal of confusion. It is used to denote recency in two situations:
Often yes/no questions are straightforward and to the point -- as a result, we answer "yes" or "no." Seems pretty logical, right? Nope. That's not how it works in the land of Saints and Scholars. When asked, repeat the noun and verb.
An Irishman will not be caught saying, "coulda, woulda, shoulda." Each sound (unless dropped via a phonemic process) should be given attention. Your tongue and lips will be getting a workout.
Not quite! Americans pronounce the "I" in "Ireland" like the "I" in "pie." However, this is not how you pronounce it with an Irish accent. Choose another answer!
Not exactly. The "I" in the word "night" is not pronounced with an "oh" sound like in "opal." Choose another answer!
For most American English speakers, this is not a problem. But if your dialect is non-rhotic (drops word-final or inter-vocalic; "park" sounds like "pack"), be conscious of pronouncing every "r" -- be it beginning, middle, or end.
English is full of words that end in -ing, but you wouldn't hear an Irishman admitting it, at least not in a natural context. Whether you're muttering verbs or gerunds, cut it out.
As a general rule, Americans have gotten lazy in their speech. "Ladder" and "latter" are pronounced the same in the US, but not to an Irishman. Give each consonant its due (with the exception of the next rule!).
Many people, especially Americans, tend to harden their vowels. For example, Americans pronounce the letter A, "ay"; those with an Irish accent would pronounce it "ah" or "aw." Be very conscious of this in every word, but especially those vowels that come in the middle.
Listen to interviews from The Script. The 3 members have different tones and will help you work out which you want to pursue.
Familiarize yourself with the IRA. This will make it much easier to understand books and websites on the matter. Having correlating symbols to the sounds you are not used to will help you remember what they are and when to use them.
Remember, in Ireland they have some words that mean the same thing as words Americans use, but they are different words.
wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 71 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has also been viewed 757,000 times.
If you want to speak with an Irish accent, pronounce your vowels softly in every word. For example, instead of saying "How are you?" you would say "ha-ware-ya?" When you talk, make sure your consonants are more pronounced and harder, but drop the "g" sound at the end of verbs. In conversation, speak quickly and clearly, and throw in everyday Irish slang, like "Cheers," "lad," and "c'mere."New or Used? New Used New & Used
Product Family? Ag Tractors Aggregates Agricultural Products Air Compressors Articulated Trucks Asphalt Pavers Backhoe Loaders Chipper, Discs Chipper, Horizontals Combines Compactors Concrete Equipment Cranes Excavators Forest Products Forestry - Feller Bunchers - Tracks Forestry - Feller Bunchers - Wheels Forestry - Skidders Forklifts Headers Hydraulic Track Drills Knuckleboom Loaders Lift - Booms Lift - Scissors Lifts Light Towers Lightings Material Handlers / Demolitions Mining Equipment Mining Motor Graders Mining Off Highway Trucks Mining Shovel / Excavators Mining Wheel Loaders Miscellaneous / Other Equipment Motor Graders Multi Terrain Loaders Off Highway Trucks Off-highway Trucks / Tractors On-highway Trucks Others Paving Products Pneumatic Tired Compactors Portable Generator Sets Rotary Blasthole Drills Scrapers Screens Skid Steer Loaders Skid Steer Loaders / ASVs Stationary Generator Sets Telehandlers Track Excavators Track Type Tractors Track Type Tractors / Dozers Trailers Vibratory Double Drum Asphalts Water Equipment Water Pumps / Trash Pumps Wheel Loaders / Integrated Toolcarriers Wheel Loaders/integrated Toolcarriers Wheel Tractor Scrapers Work Tools Wt - Buckets Wt - Cold Planers Wt - Material Handling Arms Wt - Winches Wt- Asphalt Screeds Wt- Blades Wt- Snow Removals Wt- Trenchers Wt-miscellaneous
Price Range? Any $50,000 and below $50,000 - $150,000 $150,000 - $250,000 $250,000 - $500,000 $500,000 - $750,000 $750,000 +But Henry Aaron, according to an eyewitness kneeling about 40 feet from the batter's box in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, did indeed call a home run that was even more historic than the Bambino's in the 1932 World Series.
The debate over Babe Ruth's "Called Shot" in Chicago's Wrigley Field -- did he or didn't he? -- never will be definitively resolved.
The debate over Babe Ruth's "Called Shot" in Chicago's Wrigley Field -- did he or didn't he? -- never will be definitively resolved.
But Henry Aaron, according to an eyewitness kneeling about 40 feet from the batter's box in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, did indeed call a home run that was even more historic than the Bambino's in the 1932 World Series.
Today is the 40th anniversary of Aaron's epic 715th career home run, the one that eclipsed Ruth's hallowed record of 714. It was a rainy night in Georgia, bitter cold, and Dusty Baker was right there, watching his mentor reach the mountaintop on April 8, 1974.
Baker, the Braves' 24-year-old center fielder, raised a fist from the on-deck circle as Aaron's drive arced toward left-center field. Clearing the fence, the home run sent a sellout crowd into a collective delirium normally reserved for another sport in football-mad Georgia.
Baker still clearly recalls Aaron's words as he headed toward the plate to face Dodgers veteran Al Downing in the fourth inning.
"Hank told me he was going to do it," Baker said of their brief exchange in the on-deck circle. "Hank was a student of hitting; he always studied pitchers, their tendencies. As he went up to hit, he said, 'I'm going to get this thing over with right now.'
"After he hit it, I didn't want to go to the plate. I was closer to the catcher and pitcher than anybody, but that was Hank's moment -- a great moment. He earned it."
Baker was among a select few close enough to Aaron to grasp what the great slugger had endured emotionally in the days, weeks and months leading up to April 8, 1974. Venomous mail, racist and threatening, found its way into Aaron's hands.
"I was aware of most of it," Baker said by phone from Texas, where he was enjoying his first NCAA basketball Final Four after all the years otherwise occupied as a player, coach or manager. "I lockered right next to him. I could see him stare at a letter. Sometimes he'd drop it on the floor. I'd pick it up and read what these people had written. It was terrible, man.
"The other side was people who'd send him things to let him know they were behind him. When they'd send him some hip records, he'd hand them over to me and say, 'Here, you take this.' That wasn't Hank's style."
One hate letter in particular stands out in Baker's mind all these years later.
"It was a death threat from somebody who said he'd be in the ballpark in Atlanta, in a red coat," Baker said. "Me and Ralph [Garr] said, 'We're down with you, Hank.' We were looking all night for some dude in a red coat. Hank was Hank -- cool as always. He got threats all the time."
Aaron, who turned 40 two months before breaking Ruth's record and had hit No. 714 in Cincinnati in the season-opening series, took Baker and Garr, his young partners in the Atlanta outfield, under his wing. They had dinner at the home of Rev. Jesse Jackson and also met prominent figures in the civil rights movement such as Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young.
"We went to visit Jimmy Carter and his mother when he was the governor," Baker recalled. "All these important people wanted to connect with Hank. One of his heroes was Jackie Robinson, for everything he'd gone through [in integrating baseball]. Hank wanted to carry it on in his quiet way -- and he did. He had a tremendous social impact."
When he was drafted by the Braves in 1967 as a multi-sport star out of Del Campo High School in the Sacramento, Calif., suburb of Carmichael, Baker had to convince his parents that baseball, not college, was the way to go.
"I had signed a letter of intent to Santa Clara [University]," Baker said. "Hank promised my mom he would take good care of me -- and he did. Me and Ralph went over to his house almost every night.
"After they had the ceremony on the field for him that night, I was the next hitter. I heard the clicking of seats, people leaving, when I went up to hit. It was the coldest night I can remember in Atlanta -- and one of the greatest nights of my life."
* * * * *
Downing was 22, not yet known as "Gentleman Al," when he met Aaron for the first time. Downing was embarking on his rookie season as a flame-throwing lefty for the New York Yankees, having appeared in six games the previous two seasons.
"I was first introduced to him by [Yankees catcher] Elston Howard in Spring Training in 1963, in Florida," Downing recalled. "The Braves were in West Palm Beach. I remember Elston introducing us and thinking, 'This is the nicest, most gracious guy for a superstar.' Hank never really changed."
Eleven years later, Downing answered to "Ace" in the Los Angeles clubhouse. At 33, a 20-game winner in 1971, he was entering his fourth season with the Dodgers.
"I walked him first time up, and everybody booed me. It was the second pitch [in a 1-0 count], and I was trying to get the double play. I wanted to get a fastball down in the strike zone, hoping he'd roll over. It was elevated -- and 'The Hammer' put the hammer on it." -- Al Downing
It was his destiny to be known in baseball lore for a fastball launched into history, one No. 44 throwing it to another. Downing was the right guy in the right place.
"It couldn't have worked out any better, really," said Davey Lopes, playing second base behind Downing that night. "Al is such a secure person, he understood the big picture. It was like when Rickey Henderson was Nolan Ryan's 5,000th strikeout victim. Rickey embraced it. Al was never bothered at all by being part of Hank's big moment."
Downing recalls every detail: three rain delays, the game situation, his characteristic nap before his start, what he was trying to do with the pitch. And he also remembers Aaron's poetic swing: so relaxed, so pure and powerful.
An error on Darrell Evans' grounder leading off the inning had Downing -- protecting a 3-1 lead he'd helped create with an RBI single -- thinking about a double play as he prepared to face Aaron.
"I walked him first time up, and everybody booed me," Downing said, Aaron scoring on Baker's double after the free pass. "It was the second pitch [in a 1-0 count], and I was trying to get the double play. I wanted to get a fastball down in the strike zone, hoping he'd roll over. It was elevated -- and 'The Hammer' put the hammer on it."
Downing had been informed that if Aaron went deep, there would be a ceremony.
"I went to the dugout," Downing said. "It rained all night. They wanted to make it official, so they were going to wait out the rain."
When play finally resumed, he walked Baker and Davey Johnson, then was replaced by Mike Marshall.
As the crowd numbering 53,775 gradually dispersed into the cold night, Downing headed to the clubhouse. Holding court with legendary author George Plimpton and a young, wide-eyed Dodgers beat writer during a rain delay, Downing was as cool and analytical as ever. He praised Aaron, talking about the respect Hank commanded, and eventually left the park in a cab with Plimpton, who had a plane to catch.
"This was a very impressive moment, a magnanimous moment for sports," Downing said. "Baseball was not big in Atlanta; football was reigning supreme. The Braves had made it to the playoffs in '69 when the Mets beat them, and that was the only time the city really got into it. This was a crowning moment for baseball in the South."
The following afternoon, Downing was sitting in the dugout with the young beat reporter when Aaron motioned him toward the batting cage. The pitcher came over, writer in tow, and the two men talked.
"He was telling me, 'I'm glad it's over,'" Downing said. "He asked me how I was doing, and I told him I was fine. He said, 'You're still a good pitcher; don't worry about it.' I have a photo of that [scene]. I'm shaking his hand behind the batting cage."
Downing and Aaron sat together at the annual Baseball Writers' Association of America Awards Dinner in January in New York. They shared some memories along with the Willie, Mickey and The Duke Award presented by the New York chapter.
"We had fun at the dinner," Downing said. "We've always had a good relationship."
* * * * *
Lopes was on the money. It could not have been scripted any better.
When Dodgers left fielder Bill Buckner was unsuccessful in his attempt to climb the left-field fence and claim the prized No. 715 home run ball, it was caught by Braves reliever Tom House, who raced to home plate to present it to Aaron.
As he toured the bases in his inimitable style -- and as a pair of exuberant fans were running from the stands onto the infield -- Aaron shook the hand of Lopes as he approached second base. It was the rarest of baseball scenes, especially in those times when fraternization among opposing players was heavily frowned upon.
"That was a special moment," said Lopes, who impulsively had extended his hand to Aaron. "That wasn't anything I prepared to do. It was spontaneous. I have tremendous respect for Hank, for what he accomplished and the man he is.
"Just like Jackie was the one to handle all the racial overtones of breaking the barrier, Hank was the guy to break the home run record. He's very quiet, very humble. There are a chosen few, and Hank was one of them.
"Hank and Al, their personalities are very similar. I don't think it's been a burden at all on Al. It wasn't like Bobby Thomson's home run off Ralph Branca. It was almost an honor for Al to be associated with Hank [in a historical context]. People who know themselves well see things clearly, for what they are."
That young writer, so fortunate to have been in Atlanta 40 years ago, is still knocking out copy, knowing he'll never experience anything quite like April 8, 1974, on a rainy, magical night in Georgia.
Lyle Spencer is a columnist for MLB.com.The ancient custom of striking the king on the cheek and bringing him to tears on the fourth day of the Babylonian New Year celebrations deserves some attention. It might be interesting to note that a great Babylonian king like Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 BCE), well known in our chronicles as the destroyer of Judea and of the First Jerusalem Temple in 597 BCE, the mighty conqueror of the entire ancient world who considered himself to be the king of kings, would willingly and meekly, once a year, submit himself to such a humiliating procedure, a standard New Year’s proceedings in the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian world.
And yet this is well known from the original tablets found in the temples of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, containing all the details of their extensive rites welcoming and observing the New Year.
They were written in cuneiform by their temples’ priests, are still well preserved and were translated in the London and Paris Oriental Institutes. In Israel, Chaim Tadmor described, translated and interpreted in great detail all the prayers and procedures of the Babylonian New Year. There can also be little doubt that the Judean exiles, brought to Babylon by force after the fall of Jerusalem in 597 BCE, might have been at least partly influenced by the observance of the extensive Babylonian New Year ceremonies, which lasted for several days, with a special program prepared ahead for each particular day.On the fourth day of the celebrations the chief priest himself assisted in the cleaning and purifying of the main Babylonian temple.He prayed for a long time, before he called upon the slaughterer to decapitate a ram, the body of which the priest used to make the “kuppuru” ritual, the sanctification of the temple’s premises. He then came out of the temple’s holy of holies to greet the king, took away his staff, crown and godly scepter and put them on a chair before the idol of Bel. The priest then dragged the king by his ears up to the very image of Bel and made him kneel down. The king had to say that he had not been neglectful of his requirements, including the conquest of foreign lands; had not commanded that Babylon and its temples be destroyed; forgotten the temple’s rites and obligations; struck on the cheeks holders of special rights or humiliated them; and many more, all included in a previously prepared list. The list of the king’s promises and assurances was long and contained all that both clergy and the ordinary people usually demand from their ruler.It was only after the king finished this list of assurances, well prepared ahead of time, that the chief priest struck him hard upon the cheek, with an open hand but as strongly as he could. The blow had to be decisive and hard, for according to tradition tears had to flow from the king’s eyes as an indication that Bel (and his wife Beliya) were friendly, an omen which purported to assure king’s future success and the prosperity of the country. If there were no tears, this signified that Bel was angry, and thus that enemies were expected to rise up and bring about the king’s downfall. It is not known whether the rite could be repeated if tears failed to appear at the first stroke. But if the performance was satisfactory, and there was a steady flow of tears, then the arms, the scepter and the crown were restored to the king, who was now expected to be prosperous and could rule safely for another year.The priests of the huge Assyrian or Babylonian temples were rather a sophisticated lot. Their knowledge of writing, astronomy and the basic rules of a prosperous religious establishment, their role as teachers, top officials in a good and efficient government, secured for them the top position on the social scale. They were the real power behind the throne and could postpone a new king’s official coronation and recognition for several years, until he had proved himself successful in battle, in the taxation of his own people and the well-organized armed plunder of foreign lands. The priests and their temples were the first to receive a share (the largest) of the tribute and plunder: innumerable slaves, gold, silver, wood, concubines and singers brought to them by the king’s conquests and robberies of the foreign lands. The priests taught the king and his chosen ancestors how to discipline the people and the army, all for their own benefit.However, the humiliation of the king during the New Year ritual served a double purpose: It demonstrated to the king that without his crown, sword and scepter he was just another ordinary mortal, whose fate depended on the mighty gods and their humble servants.He might have been all-powerful, ruling over the entire world, but the pain of being hit in the face in this manner was meant to make him humble, more aware of his duties and obligations, inspiring him to take care of his promises, or face consequences.How many times have we felt, during the past year, like striking and humbling all those bureaucrats who so often wield extraordinary power, forget their humble roots, forget the people who got them elected and to whom they owe their careers, and continue to annoy us by their forgotten promises? How many of our top people became proud, inaccessible strangers, as if they lived on another planet? How many times have we wanted to punish our leaders for their mistakes, committed after they lost their contact with the real world and served only themselves, while we suffered the consequences? It seems, after all, quite likely that all those Babylonian priests weren’t such fools after all. They, too, firmly believed that on the eve of the New Year we should, without exception, all wake up, as if hit by our conscience, and reexamine ourselves.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Monday’s Senate vote will be our last opportunity before Congress adjourns for the November election—and corporate interests flood the airwaves—to put our senators on the record of where they stand on this crucial issue.
Fifty senators (all Democrats & independents) have pledged to support Senate Joint Resolution 19, so we are targeting Republicans and the five undecided Democrats (Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Joe Donnelly, Tim Kaine & Mark Warner).
On Tuesday, over 30,000 Daily Kos members who live in a state with one or more undecided senators sent a quick e-mail urging their support—but now we’re asking for more.
As we learned in our net neutrality campaign, personalized messages are far more persuasive and effective than form letters.
In a meeting with net neutrality advocates that my colleague Rachel Colyer attended, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler made it clear that personal comments from real people, telling real stories about how the end of net neutrality would impact them personally, are the comments he reads and gives the most credence to.
Our Daily Kos community has been very effective in pushing for net neutrality, as an excellent analysis by the Sunlight Foundation of public comments to the Federal Communications Commission recently proved. Not only did Daily Kos form letters account for 10 percent of all public comment—but a staggering forty percent of all comments to the FCC on net neutrality were personalized (as opposed to form letters), which is four times the normal rate.
It’s difficult to know why, exactly, more members of the public apparently wrote letters themselves in this rulemaking than is typical for large dockets. It could be an indicator of a genuinely higher level of personal investment and interest in this issue, or perhaps this docket drew organizers who employed different "get out the comment" techniques than we have seen in the past.
Guilty as charged. Daily Kos mobilized our members, who sent high-quality personalized messages to the FCC on net neutrality. A public body receiving 10,000 personalized e-mails about an issue is far more effective than receiving 100,000 standard form letters.
And we will do that again to push for the U.S. Senate to reverse Citizens United.
We are not asking you to click a couple buttons or sign your name, like we usually do.
We need you to take five minutes from your day to write a personal email to one or both of your senators, telling them why you believe we need a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and otherwise get money out of our elections.
Will you give us a few minutes of your time and use the space below to write a personal email—in your own words—to your senator about why this issue matters?
In case you are not familiar with what is at stake, here is some background …
Graphic by DonkeyHotey
In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Buckley that money is “speech”—which has allowed the rich and powerful to drown out the voices of everyday people in our political system.
Citizens United in 2010 made it even worse, by declaring that corporations are “people” which allowed the Koch Brothers to freely spend their corporate treasuries in political campaigns.
The Supreme Court’s McCutcheon case last year took it a step further by saying that donors had a right to give to an unlimited number of campaigns—from U.S. president to dog catcher.
Please click here and use the form to write and send your personal story and thoughts about why money is not “speech” and corporations are not “people”—and why we must change our constitution. Original emails to your senator are the most effective.Final Fantasy TCG – The undefeated deck at Manaleak.com Birmingham’s third OP tournament, by Michael Cheung
Ice/Water – By Michael Cheung Deck Tech
Not as catchy as the first one, but another undefeated win nonetheless! Manaleak.com hosted their third Organised Play tournament on the 18th February, with 16 players attending.
The following is the deck I used to win the tournament:
Ice/Water – By Michael Cheung
Forwards (25)
2 x 1-033C Argath
3 x 1-042R Squall
3 x 1-043H Snow
3 x 1-046H Terra
3 x 1-058L Laguna
3 x 1-059R Laguna
3 x 1-152L Ultimecia
1 x 1-158H Cloud of Darkness
2 x 1-160H Gordon
2 x 1-195S Serah
Backups (16)
3 x 1-053C Summoner
3 x 1-157C Scholar
2 x 1-171H Minwu
3 x 1-176H Yuna
3 x 1-193S Jihl Nabaat
2 x 1-196S Mog (XII-2)
Summons (9)
3 x 1-038R Shiva
3 x 1-170C Fairy
3 x 1-178R Leviathan
Reasoning behind card choices
I built this deck with the intention to remove my opponent’s cards away from their hand as soon as possible. They can’t play cards if they’re discarded, right? Especially when they are not expecting it.
The style of play really depends on the player, it can be played very aggressively as a tempo deck. Or, you can set up your backups, play a few big forwards and keep controlling the board as a slow control deck. Generally I played it as a combination of both, starting aggressive with cards such as H Snow, dealing damage whilst playing backups to gain momentum, and finishing off slowly with L Laguna and L Ultimecia.
1-033C Argath
Argath fits well with the tempo style of play in that he is very cheap for what he does, his highlight isn’t his power, but his ability to make your opponent discard a card. Being able to play H Snow and Argath by discarding just 2 cards in the first turn can generate a huge advantage early game. Not only do they discard a card, but they must play a minimum of 2
forwards to counter H Snow, or use more CP (again, by discarding) to remove him. If not, your opponent is looking at getting hit 2 points of damage in turn 3, and if they are even more unlucky, 4 points by turn 5.
1-042R Squall
R Squall was a very important player in keeping the advantage on my side of the table.
By having both R Squall and R Laguna in your hand you are given the option of playing in 2 ways, you can keep the tempo going by playing R Squall first and then R Laguna to dull and freeze an opponent, allowing you to get a few hits in the turn. Or, playing R Laguna first and then R Squall to keep your opponent from playing cards, both ways give you an incredible advantage and both cards coming to your hand is more common than you think.
Note: in this deck, there is an incredible combination that can be triggered if you have R Squall and R Laguna in your first hand. Playing first or second, you discard your entire hand to play R Laguna first, and then playing R Squall to make your opponent discard 2 cards. This immediately sets your opponent on the back foot with only 5 cards instead of 7 (if playing first), and they must figure out how to deal with 2 9000 power forwards in the space of a few turns.
R Squall’s combo with R Laguna is amazing
1-043H Snow
H Snow on turn 1 almost guarantees a couple points of damage at the beginning of the game. Your opponent will either normally have to spend an inefficient amount to remove a 1 cost forward, or play 2 forwards (which for the first turn, that’s many discarded cards already gone), keep in mind this forwards costs 1. But that’s not all! Whilst you’re generating momentum, your opponent is stuck in a very awkward position of having 2 forwards and no backups or cards in hand, play a R Shiva to dull and freeze 1 of them, and then use H Snow’s auto-ability to dull AND freeze the other! Another couple of free hits as your opponent whines about their forwards not activating. Marvelous!
H Snow is such a big problem for so little cost
1-046H Terra
H Terra was a very tricky card for my opponents to play around. In this tournament, a majority of my opponents were also playing water themed decks, with many strong summons such as Leviathan/Fairy (also in here!).
Your opponent must make the decision of generating more CP to play summons. Worse off, even if the extra fee is paid, H Terra can’t be targeted by them! Keep her on the field, your opponent is already at a disadvantage in paying more than they should. Her S effect also keeps your opponent guessing on a 3k
|
was 11,702,735. Of the total number of visitors, only 2,311,184 were from China. The largest group of visitors came from Japan (2,382,890).
Now we will briefly have a look at the HKMDS of January 2015. The estimated population for this year is 7,234,800, an increase of about a million people compared to 1997. But if we examine the number of visitor arrivals, we see that there has been a boom: in 2013, 54,298,804 visitors arrived in Hong Kong, and the majority of them (40,745,277) came from what is now listed as the "inland of China".
Suddenly I understood the meaning of what one of my Hong Kong friends had once told me: "I remember that before 1997 there were not so many people in Hong Kong."
No wonder. From just over 2 million, the number of mainland Chinese has increased to over 40 million. Although the resident population has increased in a relative moderate way, the influx of mainland tourists has changed the face of Hong Kong.
I cannot tell how Hong Kong was before 1997, although I wish I had a time machine and could see it. However, it is evident that an increase of 40 million tourists in a city that is already overcrowded and that is one of the most densely populated in the world must have a huge impact.
Some people may argue that mainland tourists are vital for the Hong Kong economy because they bring cash and create jobs. But Hong Kong was already one of the wealthiest cities in the world before 1997, and it did very well without mainland tourists' money. And I think it is fair to assume that its quality of life was much better, too.
The question is not whether Hong Kong needs these tourists, but why the mainland cannot offer to its population products of the same quality and price in order to put an end to the ongoing Hong Kong shopping frenzy.
Angry Hongkongers protest outside a D&G store in Tsim Sha Tsui. A security guard had allegedly prevented Hongkongers from taking pictures, saying that only mainlanders and foreigners were allowed to. The story went viral and caused local citizens' furious reaction.President Barack Obama stressed the importance of scientific research in his State of the Union address Wednesday, and plans for a decade-long project to explore the inner-workings of the human brain will soon be underway, but automatic spending cuts set to take effect March 1st could put a damper on these scientific endeavors.
The $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts over a period of ten years were part of a plan to end the 2011 debt ceiling standoff. Congress has since tried to avert the so-called sequester, but with March fast-approaching, spending cuts may be unavoidable.
It's unclear which agencies would suffer most from the loss of federal funding, but according to Research!America’s Sequestration Report, an estimated $3.6 billion will be cut from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Science Foundation.
Drastic spending cuts may also curtail the ambitious brain-mapping project Obama described in his speech. According to the New York Times, the project is estimated to cost billions of dollars and will include a collaboration among “federal agencies, private foundations, and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists." The president is expected to include the project in his budget proposal next month.
If it is given appropriate funding, the brain-mapping project could reveal new insights to rival the Human Genome Project, which began in 1990. The new initiative, called the Brain Activity Map, will enable scientists to understand the brain on a level never before achieved and to “develop the technology essential to understanding diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” according to the New York Times.
Federal Funding, Science, and the Economy
Scientific research is the key to understanding disease, developing new technologies, and fueling economic growth. In his State of the Union address, President Obama said, “Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation. Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race."
Many agencies stand behind him. In a statement issued by the American Physical Society, the nation's largest organization of physicists, researchers said that while they understand “the importance of America reaching its debt reduction goal…predictable and sustained federal investments in scientific research and education are needed to grow the economy and promote deficit reduction through increased federal revenues. They are also essential for keeping the U.S. competitive in the face of increased global competition.”
Research!America, the nation's largest not-for-profit public education and advocacy alliance, released a similar statement in their Sequestration Report.
“Sequestration would slash federal investments in critical health, scientific, medical and biological research aimed at discovering treatments, moving safe and effective new medicines to market, and creating the innovations to grow our economy,” wrote Research!America leaders.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) stand to suffer one of the largest budgetary blows, with an estimated $2.39 billion in spending cuts on the table. According to Research!America, “that amount of money is equal to nearly half of the entire budget of the National Cancer Institute, which itself is the largest of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers.” In addition, the $538 million in spending cuts for the National Science Foundation (NSF) is equivalent to “nearly 75 percent of NSF’s entire budget for all biological sciences research in 2011.”
Government Projects and Proposals
Along with plans to map the human brain, according to whitehouse.gov, “the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the Department of Agriculture are funding $70 million of research for next-generation robotics,” as part of President Obama’s National Robotics Initiative in an “effort to promote a renaissance of American manufacturing through the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership.”
According to the National Science Foundation, this initiative is meant to “accelerate the development and use of robots in the United States that work beside, or cooperatively with, people.” Proposals for the project are due as early as Nov. 14.
As for plans to avert spending cuts in science and education, areas in which federal funding is critical, according to a Huffington Post article published today, “the Democrats propose to generate revenue by plugging some tax loopholes. Those include tax breaks for the oil and natural gas industry and businesses that have sent jobs overseas, and by taxing millionaires at a rate of at least 30 percent.”
However, the sequestration date remains the same, and “it's unclear whether another delay would have any impact on the prospects for a broader budget agreement.”
Take Action!
If you would like to take a stand, several organizations have created petitions urging lawmakers to find an alternative to sequestration, including the National Head Start Association and the Community Action Works! Campaign.
Learn More:BERLIN (Reuters) - The German government is considering adding Turkey to a list of countries that pose high security risks for intelligence agents, police officers and military officials, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and two broadcasters reported late on Tuesday.
The reports come amid heightened tensions between the two NATO partners and vows by German officials to restrict arms sales to Turkey, in a move that Ankara said would hurt their joint fight against Islamic State.
The newspaper and WDR and NDR broadcasters quoted a spokesman for the Interior Ministry as saying that the list was currently being reviewed.
“As part of this process, the Interior Ministry is examining whether to add Turkey to the list,” the spokesman was quoted as saying. The list now includes China, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea and 26 other countries.
Germany’s Interior Ministry, contacted by Reuters, was not immediately available to comment.
Some German intelligence agencies argued for viewing Turkey less as a partner than an enemy and called for expanding intelligence surveillance of Turkey’s activities in the fight against Islamist groups, the media outlets said.
Some agencies had also warned employees in recent months about the risks of traveling to Turkey and cautioned others not to travel there on vacation, they said.
German officials have been enraged by Turkey’s arrest of around a dozen German citizens, including the German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel, who has been held for over 200 days.Conan O’Brien may have been a writer on The Simpsons, but he’s getting animated on a different Sunday-night Fox comedy: The late-night talk show host will lend his voice to an upcoming episode of Family Guy.
In the episode, which airs next season, Peter and Quagmire are frightened by a bee and accidentally scream in perfect harmony. In fact, they sound so good together, they form a singing duo called Griffin and Quagmire, play a music festival and wind up performing on Conan, which does not go as planned.
Michelle Dockery, Bill Maher, Jeff Daniels are among the other celebs contributing guest vocals to the show next season.
Read more:
Conan O’Brien: How ‘Breaking Bad’ should end
‘Downton Abbey’ star Michelle Dockery to guest on ‘Family Guy’ — EXCLUSIVE
‘Family Guy’ meets ‘American Dad’ meets… ‘King of the Hill’? — VIDEOWe've got a new reality show pitch: Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant teams up with World Cup hero and New Jersey native Carli Lloyd to come up with funny, insulting comebacks for Twitter trolls.
ALSO: Juice List 2015: The most influential person in Rutgers sports might surprise you - Nos. 2-5
Here's why: Lloyd had to fend off some obnoxious Twitter users who questioned how Lloyd could balance her suddenly busy off-the-pitch schedule with training.
Mentally powering through!! All in the mind. [?] https://t.co/kBxEP81RJ6 -- Carli Lloyd (@CarliLloyd) July 28, 2015
You are actually 100% wrong. https://t.co/UKk8A0QpDF -- Carli Lloyd (@CarliLloyd) July 28, 2015
PLUS: WATCH: Carli Lloyd dunks James Corden with great shot
And here comes Bryant for the final word:
(Hat tip to For The Win)
Follow Charles Curtis on Twitter @charlescurtis82. Find NJ.com on FacebookYouTube celebrities have gained the affections of millions of viewers. In fact, some have made YouTube their main source of income. Most successful YouTubers create their own skits or commentary for video game streams. Other creators are more popular because of their risqué content. And then there are the final malicious few that are content thieves.
Calling out the faults of these powerful idols takes moxie.
The channel H3H3Productions is popular for mocking these distasteful individuals.
Ethan and Hila Klein are a married couple that previously lived in Israel. Since then, they have moved to Philadelphia.
Their channel name derives from the couple’s first name initials. Comedy and utter ridicule is their forte. Most of their videos are comprised of Ethan reacting to far-fetched videos and revelling in the absurdity.
They may be a channel dedicated to comedy, but their efforts also include whistleblowing. Ethan and Hila are avid hecklers of disdainful channels such as SoFloAntonio and PrankInvasion.
They point out that these channels consistently break the rules set by YouTube yet do not suffer the repercussions. SoFloAntonio is a blatant plagiarizer. PrankInvasion is known for his frequent off-color “pranks” that are scripted and depicted with racy women.
Recently, the couple has been churning out satirical skits on “how to produce modern art” and “documenting Homogeneous Khalidius (DJ Khaled)”.
With each video they produce, there is an improvement in the production quality that is refreshing.
No longer are they heavily bogged down by awkward lighting or camera restrictions.
As a viewer, the connection one feels with a YouTuber goes beyond just watching the videos. To see a creator’s comedic style evolve is increasingly gratifying.
H3H3Productions’ audience is always in anticipation. Ethan and Hila are open to frequent Q&A streams as well as frequent raffles in which they give away their merchandise.
They are enjoyed for the way they poke fun at others. But they are admired for the way they can also laugh at themselves.The Toronto Blue Jays have promoted right-handed pitcher Sam Dyson to the big leagues.
The Blue Jays announced Thursday that the club selected Dyson's contract from the AA New Hampshire Fisher Cats. The Jays also optioned Canadian right-hander Scott Richmond to AAA Las Vegas to make room for Dyson.
Dyson, 24, started the 2012 season with class-A Dunedin, where he was 2-0 in six starts with a 4.08 earned-run average. Since joining New Hampshire the six-foot-two, 205-pounder has posted a 0.75 ERA in 15 relief appearances with three saves.
The Tampa, Fla., native has a combined record of 2-0 with three saves and a 2.56 ERA with 13 walks and 24 strikeouts in 52 2/3 innings.
Dyson was selected by the Blue Jays in the fourth round of the 2010 first-year player draft out of the University of Carolina. He then missed the 2011 season recovering from Tommy John surgery on his right elbow.Margaret Atwood is the latest literary luminary to receive the 25,000-euro Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, it was announced Tuesday in Berlin.
The author of more than 40 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays, Atwood has already won numerous international prizes, including the Man Booker Prize in 2000 and this year's Franz Kafka Prize. Her diverse body of work has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Atwood is best known for novels including the dystopian feminist classic "The Handmaid's Tale," now a major TV series, and "The Blind Assassian," for which she won the Booker.
She was awarded the Peace Prize for her "political intuition and clairvoyance when it comes to dangerous underlying trends and currents," said the head of the German Book Trade, Heinrich Riethmueller.
Read more: 9 must-read books to face the Trump era
'Supposed normality can turn into inhumanity'
The 77-year-old, Toronto-based author is renowned as one of the most important narrators of our time - and of the repercussions for the future.
"By closely observing human contradictions, she shows how easily supposed normality can turn into inhumanity," the German Book Trade board of trustees, which adjudicated on the award, said in a statement. "Humanity, justice and tolerance shape Margaret Atwood's approach to the world."
Scene from the film adaptation of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale"
Since 1950, the German Publishers and Booksellers Association has gifted the peace prize - which is comprised entirely of donations from booksellers and publishers - to those who "reflect the German book trade's commitment to the promotion of international understanding."
In 2016, the recipient of the prestigious prize was German journalist and author Carolin Emcke, who has written and reported widely from war zones and crisis regions.
The 2017 award ceremony will take place on October 15 at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main - the site where the Frankfurt National Assembly was formed in 1848 at the height of the democratic revolutions. October 15 also marks the final day of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
sb/kbm (dpa, KNA)The top 10 popular breakfast cereals most likely to contain Monsanto's GM corn
Which cereals contain no GMOs? Nature's Path
(NaturalNews) By now, nearly everyone interested in healthy living is aware of the recent research linking Monsanto's GMO corn to cancer tumors and an increase risk of premature death in both men and women. News of the research is spreading like wildfire across the 'net, and support for Proposition 37 -- which seeks to label GMOs in foods -- is growing by the day.But the media has not yet reported on the everyday foods being sold in grocery stores right now and made with Monsanto's genetically modified corn (GM corn). Which foods are most likely to contain Monsanto GM corn? To answer this question, I visited a local grocery store in Austin, Texas and purchasedmade with high levels of non-organic corn.According to the Center for Food Safety, up to 85% of the corn grown in the United States is genetically modified. This means corn-based cereals that use non-organic corn have a very high likelihood of containing GM corn.The following list presents the top 10 popular breakfast cereals most likely to contain Monsanto's genetically modified corn. For the record, none of these cereals claim to be GMO-free, nor made with organic corn. The exact GMO content of these cereals remains a mystery precisely because manufacturers of these cereals refuse to label them with their GMO content. This lack of full disclosure by the food industry underscores the urgent need for a labeling law so that consumers can make an informed decision.Legal note: In no way are we claiming these cereals will cause cancer tumors to grow in your body or that they pose an immediate risk to your health. Those studies have not yet been done on humans. GM corn is ancrop with unknown long-term effects of humans. Breakfast cereals made with GM corn may turn out to pose a significant long-term risk to human health, but that has not yet been determined. This article is presented in the public interest, reflecting reasonable caution over a common food ingredient which French scientists have now convincingly linked to cancer and premature death in studies conducted on rats.Cocoa Puffs and Corn ChexFrosted Flakes and Honey Graham Oh'sHoney Nut Chex and Kashi Heart to HeartKellogg's Corn Flakes and Kellogg's Corn PopsKix and Barbara's Bakery Puffins Peanut ButterThere is only one brand of breakfast cereal I know of that's 100% non-GMO and 100% organic across their entire product line. That company isIf you buy breakfast cereal, and you don't want to eat Monsanto's GM corn, always choose cereals from Nature's Path. This is my No. 1 most highly trusted cereal company.Many "natural" brands that appear to be healthful and natural are actuallyorganic or GMO-free. For example, "Barbara's Bakery" cereals are not organic. Although they are positioned in store shelves alongside other organic cereals, they are actually made with conventional crops grown with pesticides which may include Monsanto's Roundup.You may also notice that most of the cereals most likely to contain GM corn are. It is the children in America who are being fed the most GMOs. This represents a highly unethical food experiment being conducted on an entire generation, and the long-term effects of human consumption of GMOs are simply not known.What we do know is that rats fed this very same Monsanto GM corn developed shockingly large cancer tumors.The photo released by the French research team, showing large cancer tumors growing at a strongly heightened risk in rats fed a "lifetime" of Monsanto's GM corn, is shown below. According to that study,and showed significant damage to their liver, kidneys and other organs.Pretty crazy, huh?Russian site Insecam, and others, were scoured for shots of women in private security camera feeds
Commenters on the discussion site Reddit pored over compromised security camera feeds linked from the Russian website Insecam, screenshotting and sharing pictures of naked or half-dressed women.
The website, which has been live since September, is just the latest of a string of sites which exploit knowledge of default passwords to access supposedly private security camera feeds.
When a link to Insecam was first posted on the social news site, alongside links to similar sites, Redditors initially responded that the concept was “just creepy”. One asked whether the site was even legal (it is not, according to the information commissioner’s office), and another said that on browsing through, they saw a lot of sleeping children, and “got creeped out”.
But soon enough, other Redditors started posting screenshots and links to security cameras which were pointing at women unaware they were broadcasting themselves on the internet.
“I found very nice apartment in Italy”, says one user, linking to a woman vacuuming in a revealing outfit. A few minutes later, another comments “she’s making the bed right now”.
Other users post links to screenshots and feeds of women masturbating and getting undressed, as well as footage of trans sex workers in Thailand.
“Is it more or less creepy that I prefer the old lady who just knits,” a user asks.
The information commissioner, Christopher Graham, has condemned Insecam, and said that he wants “the Russians to take this down straight away … We now want to take very prompt action working with the Federal Trade Commission in the States to get this thing closed down.”
But the FTC might have more pressing matters domestically, before it goes after Insecam: At least one similar website, discovered by the Guardian, is hosted in Phoenix, Arizona.
Graham emphasised that, in the short term, it’s the camera operators who can help most. “The more important thing is to get the message out to consumers to take those security measures. If you don’t need remote access to a webcam then switch off that function altogether,” he said.SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER
A moderator of Reddit’s default political discussion board, /r/Politics, has been removed as a mod after voicing his support for Donald J. Trump’s presidential bid.
Jeffrey Minter, known on Reddit under the username /u/Kwiztas, has previo usly been interviewed by Breitbart in relation to censorship on Reddit and has expressed his support of both Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos and Donald Trump. He has also previously provided technical support work for Yiannopoulos.
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This apparently made him quite unpopular amongst the /r/Politics moderators, who voted to have him removed as a mod yesterday.
The official reasons given for voting to remove Minter as a mod were that he hadn’t been actively moderating the subreddit enough to warrant his mod title. It was also claimed that he had “misrepresented the mod team” simply by saying “I try my hardest to make /r/Politics MAGA” and discussing other moderators feelings about his support of Trump, saying “They don’t seem to mind that I support Trump… Now I might be in the minority so my say isn’t always listened to when rules are made.”
Moderators also cited Minter’s brief interview with Breitbart as a reason to have him removed as a moderator. It’s long been suspected that /r/Politics looks upon Breitbart in an unfavourable way but this is the first time a connection with Breitbart has been used as a direct reason for demodding a user. When asked for comment on his sudden removal as a moderator, Minter had this to say, “I feel I was blindsided. This came out of nowhere. No one cared what I said when I supported Bernie. No one had issues with my activity then.”
Minter’s girlfriend, Sarah Williams, contacted Breitbart with research she had compiled on the key players who orchestrated his ban. The leading users that sought his removal were users ScrictScrunity, Lotrouble, Meghanam, and Qu1nlan. All of these users – apart from Meghanam – are strong Clinton supporters.
Considering that Minter was demodded for “misrepresenting the mod team” after simply stating his own political views, Williams decided to investigate the comment history of the users calling for Minter’s demodding to see if there were any patterns in their political views. There was.
Here is an example of StrictScrunity telling conservative users in /r/News to “shut the fuck up” and that they “needed therapy”. He also holds to an elaborate theory of GOP corruption. His posts are far more critical of conservatives and Republicans than anything that Minter has posted about liberals or their candidates.
Qu1nlan is a self described “socialist, SJW cuck” who has regularly “misrepresented” the /r/Politics mod team, as Minter is accused of doing. In a post on the feminist subforum TwoXChromosomes, Qu1nlan said “all the Clinton support here is a nice break from r/politics”.
He is aggressively anti-Trump and has even made long posts in /r/Politics disparaging Trump, such as this one. He has compared the Republican candidate to an “edgy twelve year old”. He posted to the anti-Trump subforum /r/EnoughTrumpSpam specifically speaking “as an /r/Politics mod” – a phrase that Minter was reprimanded for – while discussing “shills” i.e, people paid to post in favour of a particular presidential candidate.
Meghanam is seen here saying that moderators don’t often publicly say which presidential candidate they support, despite then going on to reveal exactly what candidate she supports. Many users have taken issue with both Meghanam and StrictScrunitys moderation, although Meghanam has defended the latter’s record. Complaints against Meghanam can be seen here.
The only difference between Minter’s actions and the other moderators is that he is a quiet supporter of Trump, while the rest support Clinton or third party candidates such as Jill Stein. There have been many claims of politically-motivated censorship in Reddit’s subforums which Breitbart has reported on previously. This is just the latest.
In a comment to Breitbart Tech, /r/politics moderator Qu1nlan denied allegations of political censorship. “All decisions we make, including adding and removing moderators, have nothing to do with any moderator’s political beliefs.”
Lucas Nolan is a conservative who regularly contributes articles on censorship and free speech to Breitbart. Follow him on Twitter@LucasNolan_ or email him at [email protected] whistleblowers come forward as gas-price scandal widens amid claims that electricity market has also been distorted
Update: On 7 November 2013 Ofgem and FCA concluded their investigation and found that there had been no market manipulation on 28 September 2012: http://www.fca.org.uk/news/statements/statement-gas-market-manipulation
The energy secretary, Ed Davey, has warned that energy firms could face swingeing fines and be forced to pay customers back through lower energy prices as the gas-trading scandal escalated with more whistleblowers coming forward and claims that the electricity market could have been rigged too.
Davey pledged the government would "support the regulators taking whatever steps necessary to ensure the full force of the law is applied" if it is found that prices have been deliberately distorted.
The row could spread to Europe on Wednesday as the whistleblower and gas price reporter at the centre of the row, Seth Freedman, meets senior EU officials to explain his concerns.
The Guardian revealed on Monday that Freedman had taken a dossier of data and documents allegedly showing price manipulation in the wholesale gas market to the Financial Services Authority.
Both the FSA and the energy regulator, Ofgem, which was separately approached by Freedman's employer ICIS Heren, at his request, have now launched investigations.
On Tuesday more industry insiders came forward to express their concerns. Tim Fettis, who had acted as an electricity market price setter at ICIS Heren, said he had left the company after a couple of months because he felt uncomfortable about taking on such a responsible job with little training.
"The current energy system is open for manipulation, there's no doubt – not just in gas, but in electricity, also because the market is so illiquid [low trading volumes]," he added.
Meanwhile, a former energy trader has made similar allegations about the electricity and gas markets to ITV News. Omar Rahim said: "Most traders know that this is going on. A simple example would be electricity is trading at £50 all day and at five to five before the market closes it suddenly trades at £52. Now it immediately looks odd. It's not traded at £52 all day and right before the market's closed you see a spike up in the market."
Nick Grealy, an energy consultant who publishes the No Hot Air website but formerly worked for EDF Energy, said unexplained gas price movements were a "continual source of amusement and cynicism" among those working in the wholesale markets. "They [traders from non-EDF companies] would also openly manipulate the market via the price reporting agencies," added Grealy, who also used to buy power for the National Health Service.
Jason Torquato, who also worked at ICIS Heren as a gas-price setter, said he was certain any manipulation of indices created by the price-reporting agencies could "influence retail gas prices".
He said he had noted "half a dozen or a dozen" occasions that price differentials over the course of a year looked unusual, with one particularly marked case on 9 September 2011.
Davey, who was broadly aware of the allegations since Friday, has been determined to be seen to act, and given the scale of voter anger at energy prices, to avoid any whiff of complacency.
During his statement there were widespread calls from all parties for action to protect energy consumers, as well as concern that other areas, including food prices, might also be open to abuse. Tory MPs called for the book to be thrown at whoever was responsible.
Davey insisted he did not want to prejudge the inquiries launched in the wake of the allegations, adding that the investigations were at an early stage, but he said they could involve either civil or criminal offences. If certain offences, including cartel offences, are proved to be committed there are very serious potential penalties. Fines can be up to 10% of a company's worldwide turnover.
He called on other whistleblowers to come forward, saying the government had powers to protect their anonymity.
Davey said he was willing to hand the regulators further powers, adding that the UK had taken the lead in developing the EU's regulation wholesale energy market integrity, legislation that will come into force in the UK shortly. The directive strengthens regulators' powers to tackle market abuse.
The minister said it was not clear if the Guardian's allegations related to physical or financial markets, with the energy regulator Ofgem responsible for the former and the FSA the lead body for the latter. He added that the Office of Fair Trading also stood ready to intervene if necessary.
The shadow energy secretary, Caroline Flint, responded by claiming there were deep structural problems in the energy market and its regulation. She said: "Energy companies have been able to run their businesses in such a complicated way it is not possible to know the true cost of energy. Most energy is bought and sold through secret back-room deals and energy companies are allowed to generate power, buy it for themselves and sell it on to the public."
She said it was time to force companies to sell the electricity they generated into an open pool so that anyone could purchase to retail to the public, so increasing transparency and competition.
She also again called for a new regulator to replace Ofgem, but Davey rejected the proposal, saying a massive reorganisation would not speed up the investigation. An open pool would not tackle the problem of liquidity, he added.
Pat McFadden, a former business minister, said it would reflect badly if it was possible to tackle the Libor scandal but not possible to do the same for other markets, including food, due to a lack of international powers.
Frank Dobson, a former energy minister, said the electricity market had become a speculators' racket designed to manipulate the market.
The concern about market manipulation was equally strongly expressed on both sides of the Commons, as MPs said voters were increasingly angry at the way in which they were being ripped off by the energy companies.
Patrick Heren, who established the price-reporting agency now known as ICIS Heren and ran the business for 15 years before selling it, said it was inevitable that traders tried to "game" the system.
Rather than criticise price reporters, he said, they should be defended for getting close to a near approximation of the real price. "The market price [as given by ICIS and others] reflects the market fundamentals, although you can get little tweaks," he explained.
It was the job of a good price reporter to take all gyrations into account. "Obviously the thing about reporting the market is that you regard the whole lot as a pack of liars, well not liars, but everyone is defending a position. Most tell the truth, but not the whole truth."
Last night the parent company of British Gas, Centrica, said: "Traders are prohibited from providing price information to price reporting agencies.
It's important to stress that the wholesale gas market has more than 50 participants, not just energy supply companies, handling hundreds of trades every day. It is in everyone's interests that there is a well-functioning and orderly wholesale energy market."Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can. Spins a box office any size, catches moviegoers just like flies. Look Out! Here comes the Spider-Man.
"Spider-Man: Homecoming," the latest reboot starring the friendly neighborhood web-slinger, brought in an estimated $117 million for its North American opening this weekend.
The film, which stars Tom Holland as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, was co-produced by Sony and Marvel Studios. That allows the hero to be a part of Disney's (DIS) Marvel Cinematic Universe that includes Iron Man, Captain America and the rest of the Avengers.
The domestic debut is Sony's second-highest opening ever and the second-biggest opening for a Spider-Man film behind 2007's "Spider-Man 3."
Overall, the film nabbed $257 million around the world this weekend.
The big box office numbers are a win for Sony, Marvel and Spidey himself. Spider-Man is Sony's biggest franchise, and Marvel Studios is looking toward a future where Spider-Man is its potential star.
Related: 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' and the attack of the acclaimed superhero movie
As for the character, "Homecoming" shows that even though Holland is the third Spider-Man in 15 years, audiences will still line up for the hero's adventures.
The film, which had a budget of $175 million, also earned rave reviews.
"Homecoming" received an "A" CinemaScore from audiences and a 93% score from critics on the review site Rotten Tomatoes. That makes the film one of the best-reviewed superhero movies of all time.
If "Homecoming" follows in the footsteps of other well-reviewed superhero films this year like Warner Bros.' "Wonder Woman," it could weave a web that catches audiences for weeks to come.On Tuesday, UK-based Malloy Aeronautics launched its Kickstarter campaign for the scaled model of its flying motorcycle, the Hoverbike.
Combining the “simplicity of a motorbike and the freedom of a helicopter,” the Hoverbike is essentially a quadcopter that looks sort of like one of the lightcycles from Tron or the speederbikes from Star Wars.
The team, lead by Chris Malloy, first introduced the concept back in 2011.
According to the Kickstarter page, the company is in the final stages of developing a full-sized prototype and will begin test flights in just a few months.
To raise funds to further the development of the full-sized, driveable Hoverbike, the team has taken to Kickstarter to sell the 1/3 scale Hoverbike drone… a drone they originally built as a proof of concept.
In actuality, the drone is a fully functional UAS capable of carrying payloads weighing up to 10 pounds. So the company has decided to share it.
And it’s not like they are hocking a useless toy; the Hoverbike’s Kickstarter video shows the drone serving a glass of juice (without spilling), dousing and putting out a fire with water and a parachuting teddy bear.
Ok, one of those functions might not have any practical use but still, a lot can be accomplished with what is essentially a model. There is no doubt someone will get their hands on this drone and use it for something amazing the creators never imagined
The scaled model, which carries a starting price of around $1,200, can be programmed to conduct autonomous flights and is capable of up to 20 minutes of flight time.
The team projects they can begin shipping the drone before the end of the year.
Check out the Hoverbike in action below. You can back the project and find out more, including specifications and the various donation packages, on the Kickstarter page.
Alan is serial entrepreneur, active angel investor, and a drone enthusiast. He co-founded DRONELIFE.com to address the emerging commercial market for drones and drone technology. Prior to DRONELIFE.com, Alan co-founded Where.com, ThinkingScreen Media, and Nurse.com. Recently, Alan has co-founded Crowditz.com, a leader in Equity Crowdfunding Data, Analytics, and Insights. Alan can be reached at alan(at)dronelife.comThe rabbinical school of Yeshiva University, previously said to be withholding ordination from a student who held a partnership minyan in his home, now says it will grant the student ordination.
“An agreement has been reached and the student will be receiving Semikha,” Y.U. spiritual leader Rabbi Yosef Blau told the Forward in an email, referring to ordination.
Matthew Yaniv, the yeshiva’s director of media relations, confirmed by phone Thursday that the ordination will take place.
The agreement comes on the heels of a letter sent to the student by Rabbi Menachem Penner, acting dean of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), and published on The Jewish Channel website. The letter explained that a rabbi who receives ordination from RIETS “would be expected to not participate in such activities nor create a public impression that he supports such activities in normative practice” and would be “expected to defer, in matters of normative practice, to the opinions of recognized poskim” or arbiters of Jewish law.
The January 13 letter indicated that the student — whom it identified as “Shalom” — would not receive ordination unless he subscribed to these rules. It asked him to reply, “in writing, affirming or denying your ability to agree to these principles.”
The student had held a partnership minyan, in which women lead certain parts of the prayer service, at the request of his wife. She had been ill and wanted to be able to recite a blessing at the service.
Since the student’s story was publicized by a February 26 report in The New York Jewish Week, many have expressed their displeasure with Y.U.’s initial stance, including several rabbis ordained by Y.U.
Rabbi Josh Yuter, who received ordination from Y.U. in 2003 and now serves as the rabbi of Manhattan’s Stanton Street Synagogue, took issue with the assumptions underlying Penner’s letter, particularly that Y.U.-ordained rabbis do not have the authority to make Jewish legal decisions and are instead expected to defer to more recognized arbiters.
“That’s not what semikha is,” Yuter told the Forward by phone. “That actually contradicts what
|
ibi came to Chapman in April 1974, freshly graduated from Tehran University. He flew 7,600 miles at a friend’s urging to attend a tiny college he knew next to nothing about.
Adibi arrived at Los Angeles International Airport with a single suitcase, barely managed to avoid boarding the Disneyland bus, and took a taxi to Chapman.
“And then,” Adibi recalled in a 2010 interview, “I realized they didn’t have a graduate degree in economics.”
No matter. He earned an MBA from Chapman while studying for his master’s in economics at Cal State Fullerton and later a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University.
He worked his way through school at the Knowlwood restaurant in Fullerton, starting by peeling onions and ending as a manager.
Adibi had come to California with a plan: He was going to get a doctorate, then return to Iran and become a researcher in the central bank, one of a handful of Ph.D.s helping set economic policy. But then came the Iranian revolution, the fall of the shah, the rise of theocracy and the hostage crisis.
Adibi joined the Chapman faculty in 1978 and became the director of the A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Research in 1985.
Although one of the state’s greatest minds on the economy, Adibi never forgot his roots in the hamburger world and was his family’s grill master.
His son, Keeya, said Esmael Adibi was enamored with anything classy, such as Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack genre. His favorite song was Dean Martin’s “Sway.” He danced to the tune with daughter Roxanne at her wedding.
Besides his sense of funny, Esmael Adibi left his family with a sense of value that went beyond numbers and money, they said.
His favorite saying, Keeya Adibi said, was “Never compromise your principles. There’s no shortcuts in life.”
In addition to Keeya, Adibi is survived by his wife Jila, daughter Roxanne, son-in-law William, future daughter-in-law Irene, and grandchildren Nicholas and Alexander.
A memorial service will held on 11 a.m. April 16 in the Wallace All Faiths Chapel in the university’s Fish Interfaith Center.
Staff writer Jonathan Lansner contributed to this report.The Little Printf: why do we code?
This text is a transcript of a presentation I have given on October 9, 2015, at the CityCode conference in Chicago. This content is also available in video, and as a PDF Document better suited for printing.
—
Chapter 1
I've been lucky enough to have been born before computers and video games were ubiquitous. I had the luck to play outdoors with friends and my brother, and of inventing our own games.
We could be our own heroes, use a twig that would instantly become a bow, a gun, a sword, or a telescope. It could be anything, except maybe a boomerang because once you throw the stick away, you have to go fetch it back.
At some point I grew up, and it became embarrassing to play that way. You can't treat a pinecone as a grenade and pretend to have magical powers when other kids think being an adult is cool. You just don't fit in anymore. You eventually get pressured into growing up. Still, that's a very lucky childhood.
At some point I got the chance to play video games, and to use computers. There could be the imaginary world you had wanted all this time, materialized in front of you. It's consuming you, and for a moment you live a different life.
But there's something particular about most video games: you don't create, you react, you consume. I eventually did improvisational theatre as a teenager. Then, again, it was okay to be with people and create and pretend out of nothing.
Of course, improvisational theatre in Quebec is different; there's an ice rink in there — everything's hockey.
When I got to a vocational college to study multimedia from 2005 to 2008, I eventually tripped into programming work. I found it amazing! Creativity was there again, and it could get me money! I then designed the mechanism of my first game, and it blew my mind.
That's not a real video game, I was told. That's just an HTML form. You should have used an array for the text and options it would have been better. The code needs cleaning up.
I was a bit disheartened; the game was really about the 11 pages of text I had written for the "choose your adventure" aspect of it. But I realized that if I wanted to make stuff more people thought was good, I'd have to learn a lot.
I'd have to learn "real programming". Move from JScript in a GUI toolkit to something better, like PHP. So I learned that, along with Javascript. Then eventually I was told to learn how to do real programming again; PHP is terrible. I was told to maybe try Python, which I then learned.
But real programmers knew fancier stuff, and python's lambdas didn't cut it, object-oriented programming was not where you wanted to be. Reading SICP would be the next good step, I was told, because it was like the bible of computer science.
That got me to Scheme. And I got the K&R book because real programmers in the real world did C, and I registered for part time classes at my local university while juggling them with work, because real programmers knew data structures and math, which I learned to some extent. I started reading papers and books, because real programmers stayed up to date and knew fancy algorithms.
Somewhere through that I picked up Erlang and started making a career out of it. I wrote a book on it. Curiously enough, nobody ever questioned if I were a real author, or a real writer, or a real illustrator. Hell, I got a job teaching Erlang without ever having used it in a production system.
Chapter 2
So I lived my life flying around the world, telling people how to do things I had sometimes never done myself, while everyone suddenly seemed to believe I was a real programmer because of things I did that were mostly not related to programming in the first place.
One day, I was stuck in an airport coming back from a conference, furiously typing at a terminal, when an odd, gentle voice asked me:
If you please, design me a system!
What?!
Design me a system!
I looked up from my screen, surprised by the request. I looked around and saw this kid who aspired to be a developer and wanted me to call him "printf", which I felt was very stupid and gimmicky. He looked a bit like this:
I don't know computers much yet, but it seems you do. I want to write programs and blog about them and have people use and read them. Please, design me a system!
Now that was a surprising request, and I had been awake for 20 hours by then, not too sure I fully understood or felt like it. I told him systems were hard. I didn't know what he wanted to do, how he wanted it to fail, how many readers it should support, where he'd want to host it, and I could therefore not design a proper system with so little information.
That doesn't matter. Design me a system.
So I made the following architecture diagram:
He looked at it and said No, this system is not good enough. Make me another.
So I did:
and I gave him a rundown of how it would work.
My new friend smiled politely. That is not what I want, it's way too complex and does a lot of stuff I don't need
I felt a bit insulted, having considered redundancy, monitoring, backups, caches and other mechanisms to reduce load, external payment processor for legal protection, failovers, easy deployment, and so on. I could have charged decent money as a consulting fee for that! Out of patience, I just drew this:
And I added: this is your design. The system you want is inside the black box, hoping this shitty answer would have him leave me alone. But I was surprised to hear back:
That is exactly the way I wanted it!
And that is how I made the acquaintance of the little printf.
Chapter 3
I soon learned of this little guy's portfolio. In his repositories were only small programs, simple web pages with forms, trivial command line utils. They would be unspectacular, would come into being, and no sooner disappear.
Then at some point, he started working on a bigger program, that used multiple modules. It needed sockets, accessed the disk, talked to an actual database. When it first built and ran properly, little printf was amazed. But the program was not enough yet.
It needed refactorings, better tests, documentation, linting and analysis. The program would run for a while, and one morning, it crashed.
And it crashed again, and again.
The configurations were wrong, the logs would not rotate, the disk had unpredictable speed, the network would get the hiccups, bugs would show up, the encodings would be confused, the database needed vacuuming, transactions would hang, certificates would expire, CVEs would keep coming, and the metrics would remain silent.
It kept turning to Spaghetti.
He told me: the fact is I didn't know anything! I ought to have judged by my needs. I got the hubris of writing a fancy system, and I spent so much time fixing it, it felt like it cancelled the time it saved me. Still, I should have known what a wonderful thing it was.
One morning, he decided to leave his office. Goodbye, he said to a blinkenlight that seemed to have burnt out. He left to see what the world of software had to offer aside from his messy little server.
The logs would keep accumulating, until the hard drive would fill no more.
Chapter 4
He went to a workspace, looking for experienced developers from whom to get tips and help.
The first one he met was a very proud senior engineer who seemed to feel rather superior.
Ah, here comes a learner! Welcome to my domain, of which I am the expert he said.
An expert? Little printf asked. Does this mean you can program anything and everything?
Yes! the expert answered. He added Well almost; I only program programs that are worth programming. I don't lose my time on trivialities. Many programs I have never written but could write with all the ease in the world.
Ah, so could you help me with my system? As soon as the little printf started explaining his business, the domain expert interrupted him:
I'm sorry, but I don't really see the point of doing that.
Why not?
Experience. I am good at programming the things I program, and I program things I am good at. By getting better at this fairly restricted set of things I'm already good at, I make sure I'm more valuable than ever at it. Call it job security, call it survival of the fittest, but that's how I roll.
And why can't you help me?
Well you see, taking my time away to help you means I divert important self-investment into furthering the progress of others — that's a losing strategy for me. The best way to learn for you is the way I took myself: struggle very hard and figure it out yourself. It helps forge character.
That doesn't seem very efficient...
Well you can go to school and learn, or you can learn on your own. Really what it does is weed out the lazy people who just want it easy, and forces everyone who stays here to be those who really deserve it. The moment we let moochers in, the very value of the work I produce goes down with it.
Do you not think cooperation or colleagues could help you?
Not really. I work best when left alone and not being distracted. Every time I end up forced working with others, it's nigh impossible to get our stuff working together. Out of exasperation, I grab their work and rewrite most of it in a sane way; then it works right.
Little printf was surprised to meet an expert who seemed so disinterested in helping others, yet so annoyed by their perceived lack of skill. It was a bit sad that this man narrowed his vision of himself to just the one area he knew, to the point where he didn't do anything else than create problems for himself to fix!
I see... well I guess I'm happy you won't give me your help, said my little friend
What do you mean? asked the meritocratic man, whose value seemed suddenly downgraded. Don't you think the work I do is interesting?
Oh that I do. It just seems like you would see me as a hindrance and annoyance more than anything else, and what I am looking for is help, not affliction.
And little printf left swiftly, leaving the expert to realize he had made himself untouchable in more ways than just his job security.
Chapter 5
On his way, little printf went in front of the door to an office occupied by a man surrounded by thick hardcover books, with fancy images on them like wizards and dragons and fractals and mathematical patterns.
Nice books, sir, said printf
Thanks. I think they're essential material for programmers. If you don't have them, you're not really a pro
I guess I'm not a pro then, said little printf. Which one is your favorite?
Oh, well I haven't read most of them.
Are you not a good programmer then?
No, I am not. The developer proudly added: In fact, I'm a terrible programmer.
That's a shame, said little printf, who continued: I'm getting better myself.
Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?, asked the man.
No, what is it?
It's a cognitive bias thing. It basically says that people who are less competent tend to overestimate their qualifications, and people who are competent tend to systemically underestimate theirs.
So if I think I'm getting better, I'm probably not great
Yeah, exactly. You're probably bad. On the other hand, I openly say I'm a terrible programmer. But according to Dunning-Kruger, I'm probably underestimating myself, and that makes me a good developer, don't you see?
I guess?
That's because self-deprecation is a vital tool of the developer. The moment you feel you're good, you relax and stop improving.
Doesn't this mean that the moment you feel good about yourself, you're on your way to failure and then you should feel bad?
yes. But the way to go about this is to say that everything is terrible, even if you have no solutions to offer. That way you look smart, but don't have much to contribute.
What do you mean?
Say I go online and see a project I dislike. The trick is to point out everything that is wrong, give no more information than that. You can probably subtly point ways in which the person who did the thing is an idiot and get away with it.
And how is anyone better for this?
Well I like to think they are better for knowing they're on the wrong track, and I'm better off for showing them that. It's a bit of smoke and mirrors. Nobody knows what they're doing but that way it looks like I do.
And what happens when you are asked for help and can't do anything about it?
That's when you go back to saying everything is terrible; you have too much yak shaving to do, improving other things, and being overly pessimistic. They're on their own.
So this is all posturing? You're gaming your way through? You're the person who pretends to be incompetent at things they know, which makes people who actually know nothing there feel even worse, and you're the person who pretends to be competent at things you don't know, so that people trying to improve there also feel bad.
In any case, competence has very little to do with it. Reputation is pretty important though. People hire friends, and people who aren't liked and non-essential get fired first; try to change the system and you become disliked. It's all a very social game. It's how it works in the industry, and probably in academia too, though I wouldn't know, now would I? It's all about who you know, selling yourself, your own personal brand you know? That's how you get jobs in the business.
If this is how things are and that you must feel bad and make others feel bad to do well, maybe I don't want a job in the business, said little printf, before walking out.
Chapter 6
During the time that would have been lunch break, Printf interrupted a person who had seemingly forgotten to eat their lunch, a sandwich growing cold by the minute, while sitting at their desk and looking at their screen.
That seemed like quite a busy person who might have known what they were doing. Printf asked:
If a primary database can fail, can the follower fail too?
Everything you run, the person said, can and will sooner or later fail.
Even the things telling you things have failed?
Yes, even these ones. All large systems are in some state of partial failure at any given time.
Then, trying to make reliable systems, what use is it?
The person did not know, for at that moment, they were trying to answer a page for the sky falling out onto their head due to a broken cloud, wondering the same thing.
Then making reliable systems, what use is it? pressed little Printf again
Upset as the person was dealing with a production issue, with this kid not letting go and a sandwich going to waste, the person impatiently shot back:
It's of no use at all. Programming is all shit anyway.
oh!, he gasped.
Then there was a moment of complete silence.
The little guy responded, with a hint of resent:
I don't believe you. Programs are fragile, but programmers can make good efforts and make things better and useful.
No answer came back. At that point the person had opened the document explaining how to boot a new copy of the whole cluster from scratch, and things seemed to go from bad to worse.
And you actually believe good reliable prog-
Oh no! the person said. No no no! I don't believe in good or reliable programs! Not anymore! They're all terrible! I just told you the first thing that came to my head because I'm dealing with one of these shitty systems right now. Don't you see I'm trying to keep this stuff running? This shit is actually of consequence.
Printf stared back, with a shocked expression.
Actually of consequence? You talk just like a'real programmer'.
He added:
You mix everything up, confuse everything. There's been millions of programs, and for years they've been running and failing just the same. And people have used them and needed them. And I know of some programs that run nowhere but on a single laptop, and in a single mistake could destroy entire communities, without even noticing. And you think that this is not important?
The person remained silent.
Chapter 7
The fourth workspace my friend visited had a man whose computer was covered in so many stickers nobody could tell what brand it was.
motor-mvc, quadrangular JS, GoQuery, cometeor, some japanese soundy thing,...
Hi, interrupted printf. What are you doing?
alchemist, bongodb, mochascript, walktime.js, portasql,..., the man kept going
What are you doing?, he asked again, louder this time.
Oh, I'm trying out new frameworks, tools, databases, languages.
Whoa, you seem to be going fast, maybe as fast as 10 programmers put together!
yes! well, the industry moves so very fast!, he looked at his phone for a second, and added there! the cardboard.io framework came up with version 3.5 which broke compatibility with 3.4 and this yielded 4 forks in the community! I have to try them all to know which to choose!
and what do you do learning all of these?
I'm an early adopter. If you don't stay up to date you get stuck writing COBOL or MUMPS for a living. You want to find the next big thing, and ride the wave to the top!
Has it ever worked?
Oh yes! I found out about Rails before it got big, and I figured out node.js before it was popular, and I was on the first beta copies of redis and mongodb and riak! I was the first one to use vagrant and then I got us to switch to docker but of course now it's all about unikernels..
Cool, and all these things you were at the forefront of, how did it pay off?
oh it didn't; by the time rails became huge I had moved on to the next big thing so I didn't get left behind. Similarly for the other ones. Here's hoping for unikernels though
I see, added little printf, pensively. What problems do you solve with all of these frameworks?
Oh, I make sure we don't use something that is not going to be big, so that this company doesn't get to bet on technologies that have no future. It's very important work, because if you don't do that, you can't find anyone to hire except old grey beards behind the times, and you want self-motivated go-getters, who are also early adopters., said the man.
That is funny, chimed our friend.
It is very hard! in the startup world, if you want a-players, you need good technology to bring them in! Otherwise you're stuck with inflexible laggards. Nobody wants to be an inflexible laggard.
The little printf interjected: No, that's not what I mean, and he then added I mean it's funny that tools are meant to solve problems for us, but for you, the tools themselves have become a problem.
And while the man stood there in silence (on his new cool treadmill desk), little printf hopped out of the room.
Chapter 8
In the next office over sat a tired employee, with dozens of empty coffee cups, slouched over, typing angrily.
Hi, said little printf.
The woman didn't stop what she was doing. She kept typing furiously.
Hello? he asked again.
The woman stopped at once, got a flask out of a drawer in her desk, and took a swig.
I have a terrible job, she said. I do devops. It started okay, where I'd mostly develop and then sometimes debug stuff, but as time moved on, it got worse and worse. I started fighting fires in our stack, and then more fires kept happening. I got rid of most of them, pulling small miracles here and there to then meet the deadlines on dev stuff I also had to do
And did they hire anyone to help?
No, that's the thing. Small fires kept happening here and there, and because of the time I took to fight them, I couldn't be as careful as before with the dev stuff, so I created more fires all the time. Now I'm fighting fires all day and all night and I hate my job
Why doesn't your employer do anything?
I'm good at my job, and I managed to keep things under control long enough that everyone got used to it. When you make a habit of small miracles, people get used to it. Then you're stuck doing miracles all the time or they will think you won't do your job at all.
That sounds very sad
It is; and because you're the most familiar person with these fires, you get to only work on them more and more, until your employer hires someone else to cover your old job, the one you loved. If you care hard enough about your work to be the one doing the stuff everyone else hates, you're thanked by doing more and more of that work you don't like, until that's all you do. And then there's nothing left for you to enjoy.
Then you're unlucky, said little printf.
And her pager went off again.
That woman, said little printf to himself, as he continued farther on his journey, that woman would be scorned by all the others: by the senior expert, by the rockstar developer, by the serial early adopter. Nevertheless she is the only one of them all who seems helpful. Perhaps that is because she is thinking of something else besides herself.
Chapter 9
At the corner of the building, printf found a large office with big windows giving a stunning view of the area. In it sat an old gentleman with reams of documentation on his desk.
Ah, here comes a developer exclaimed the man, as printf stood in the doorway. Come in!
Looking through the windows, little printf noticed that they were full of writing. With the help of a dry-erase pen, the view to the outside world was masked by tons of circles, arrows, cylinders, and clouds. While it was curious the man needed clouds drawn where real ones could be seen outdoors, the whole ensemble was more intriguing.
What is this?, asked our friend, pointing at the windows.
Oh this? This is our production system! Said the man, not once thinking the question was about the outside world. I am a software architect.
What's a software architect?
Mostly, it's someone who knows how to best structure and coordinates the components of a large system so they all fit together well. It's someone who has to know about databases, languages, frameworks, editors, serialization formats, protocols, and concepts like encapsulation and separation of concerns.
That is very interesting! said little printf, here is someone who can answer all my questions! He glanced at the architecture diagrams. Your system is very impressive. Is it running very fast?
I couldn't tell you, said the architect. It should, though
How's the code then, is it good?
I couldn't tell you
Are the users happy about it?
I couldn't tell you either, I'm afraid
But you're a software architect!
Exactly! But I am not a developer. It is not the architect who goes and writes the modules and classes, combines the libraries. The software architect is much too important to go around touching code. But he talks with programmers and developers, asks them questions, provides them guidance. And if the problem is looking interesting enough, the architect takes over the planning.
And why is that?
Because we are more experienced. We know more about systems and what works or not. Developers can then be an extension of our knowledge to produce great systems!
But how do you know if things are going well without getting involved with code?
We trust the developers
So you trust them to implement your ideas correctly, but not enough to come up with their own ideas?
The software architect was visibly shaken by this comment. I guess I might have been a bit disconnected, he finally admitted. The problem is that after a while you are asked to work with ideas so much you don't have a good way to get them tested or verified... he stared down, pensively. Sometimes a software architect does neither software nor architecture, it seems.
Little printf left the room, and being done with his visit, exited the building.
Chapter 10
Little printf, once outside, met a man collecting money for some charity.
Hi, said the man. how would you feel about helping someone today?
It would probably make me feel better, said little printf back. I have been in this office all day, and now I'm more confused than ever.
Ah I see. These people are all developers. They are not really helpful, are they? What they love to say is that they're changing the world, and they pretty much succeed at that, in fact.
Why does it feel so awkward, then? Asked little printf.
Well, the best they do is often help convert some people's jobs into programs, or make everyone's leisure more leisurely. Software is eating the world and that changes its face for sure... but deep down it's the same old world, with a mangled face. The reason it feels awkward is that changing in that way doesn't mean things are getting any better. We have the same flaws and problems we always had, the same holes to fill deep down inside.
So how can I feel better? Little Printf was visibly anxious.
The man thought for a while, and offered printf to come help him help others, as this was this man's way of feeling better. During the afternoon, printf told the man about his problems and his adventure. After a long silence, the man said:
The games people play, the roles and reputations they chase and entertain, the fleeting pleasure they derive from solving intricate problems, is all fun for a while. Ultimately though, if you do not solve anything worthwhile, if you forget about the people involved, it's never gonna be truly fulfilling.
And that may be fine, and it might not be, and you may or may not get that from somewhere else than your workplace when you grow up. Work can be work; it can be for the money, it can be for the fun of it. That's okay. As long as you manage to get that fulfillment somewhere in your life.
In the end though, it is only when you solve problems with a human face that you can feel truly right; What is essential is invisible to the computer.
It is the time you have spent on your system that makes it so important", the man added, "and when you lost sight of why it made sense to spend time on it, when it became a game of pride, it caused more grief than relief.
Developers have often forgotten this truth; If you lose sight of things, working on your system becomes its own problem, and the most effective solution is to get rid of the system, given it's the problem.
It is only when you solve problems with a human face that you can feel truly right, repeated little printf to himself, so he would remember.
Chapter 11
Printf, who's now sitting right in front of me, is on his way home. Talking with him made me realize how much of what I do flies in the face of what I liked, what I started programming for. Each of the people Printf met are roles I see myself taking one day or another over time. I was encouraged by them to become them, and probably encouraged people to do the same.
Where I got dragged in the game of trying to become a real programmer, Printf didn't. He said he was okay with not being a real programmer, that he preferred to be a programmer with a human face.
Today I'm stuck in the situation where I look back, and have to figure out if I can, too, become a programmer with a human face; or if everything I do is just a job. There doesn't seem to be too much that's worthwhile in-between.
In any case, where printf felt he didn't need to be a real programmer, I think I feel the same now.JAMES Arthur's V Festival rider was very un-rock and roll, with the star demanding vegetarian Percy Pigs and steamed broccoli.
The Sun Online got an exclusive look at the former X Factor star's list of demands and there were even more surprises on the list. Rex Features 2
James Arthur's V Festival rider has been revealed
Rex Features 2 He was performing at the Chelmsford site
Getty - Contributor 2 The singer went for non-starry items like "Percy Pigs" and "broccoli"
James also asked for a fruit platter with a side order of Nutella, which he chose to wash down with cases of pale ale.
More starry options included Egyptian cotton towels, which had to be egg shell in colour and a Playstation.
A star's "rider" refers to the little extras an artist receives from the promoter at a gig, usually in their dressing room.
Typical riders include things like food and beverages, but they can go beyond this and include things like the number of dressing rooms a star requires, what kind of furniture they would like in the rooms, and more.
Some of the most extreme riders come from global superstars. 2 Some of the items James required at V Festival
Mariah Carey is the most famous, with her notorious extravagant rider including "20 white kittens and 100 doves".
Then there was heavy metal band Korn, who once required: "Access to a 'Rock Friendly' lawyer, medical doctor, dentist, masseuse and/or chiropractor"
Rock band Van Halen wanted all "brown M&Ms" to be removed from the bowl of sweets.
Getty Images - Getty 2 Mariah Carey's extravagant riders are well know backstage
Cher required an entire "wig room".
Rockers Motley Crue wanted: "Alcoholics Anonymous meeting locations, a jar of creamy peanut butter, a 12-foot-long boa constrictor, and a jar of Grey Poupon mustard."
Instagram 2 Cher once required a "wig room"
While singer Gnarls Barkley once required: "One pack of Magnum condoms."
But this was not the case for James, who opted for low-key stuff like sliced lemon and hot water.
Meanwhile, James revealed the reason behind his recent weight loss. He told The Mirror: “I’ve been vegetarian for a little while. But then I watched the Netflix documentary What The Health and now I’m vegan. Getty - Contributor 2 James credits his recent weight loss down to being a vegetarian “I’m a singer and dairy stuff isn’t good for you. I’ve also got a Fitbit health tracker. I was carrying loads of weight and it was terrible being fat.” "He also said he is feeling more confident now, following his time out of the limelight:“I don’t take myself seriously any more and I feel great."
James Arthur's V Festival Rider Three bottles of Ribena
Order of Dominos Pizza worth £157.64 - including four cheese pizzas
Two crates of pale ale beer
Nutella and fruit platter
Vegetarian Percy pigs
Dyson fan
Four Egyptian cotton towels in egg shell colour
Steamed broccoli
Sliced lemon wedges
Hot water at all times
UFC PlayStation game
TV and gaming chairs
Got a story? email [email protected] or call us direct on 02077824220.
We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Dr Angie Bone of Public Health England offers some tips and dispels some myths on staying cool
In the week the sunshine never ends, the UK is close to matching a sizzling June run not seen in two decades.
If Wednesday's temperature tops 30C - and forecasters confidently predict it will - that will be five days in a row.
The last June that we sweltered for so long was 1995, when the heat affected us so much Robson and Jerome stayed at number one for the entire month.
And if Wednesday reaches 33.9C, it will be the warmest day in any June since 1976 - the classic long hot summer.
BBC Weather says it is "very likely" that these temperatures will be reached this week.
The Met Office has issued an amber Level 3 heat warning until Thursday.
It has advised people to stay out of the sun and to show awareness for people who may be vulnerable people, such as the elderly.
Weather Watchers' picture gallery
Tuesday is the fourth consecutive day where the temperatures have exceeded 30C somewhere in the UK.
Monday was the UK's hottest day of the year so far, with 32.5C being reached at Hampton Water Works in Greater London.
Image copyright PA Image caption It's not just humans who need to keep cool - animals do too
Of course, not all of the UK has seen particularly high temperatures - Edinburgh hovered around 18C on Tuesday, while Belfast was about 19C.
However, by early afternoon on Tuesday it was 27C in Bristol, 30C in Chivenor and 30C in Hampton Water Works.
And excessive heat should be seen in its proper context. While these temperatures are high for the temperate climate of the UK, they are lower than many parts of the world usually experience.
For countries like Portugal where fires are currently raging and people have died, heat can be particularly deadly, while heat waves in India can also prove fatal.
And even in the UK, the heat can be problematic for older people, leading to bodies like the NHS, the charity Age UK, and the Royal Voluntary Service all issuing advice for the elderly when the temperatures rise.
These include:
Drinking six to eight glasses of water or fruit juices a day
Dressing appropriately, such as in a hat and loose-fitting, light-coloured clothes
Staying out of the sun during hottest parts of the day
Also the RSPCA regularly issues warnings about the dangers of leaving dogs in hot cars.
And for those (human) Britons simply trying to get a good night's rest, there's the #TooHotToSleep hashtag on Twitter.
But the British obsession with its recent temperatures has given rise to the rolling of eyes in other parts of the world, especially places like Australia.
The news.com.au website has written a story about Brits not coping with our temperatures "as high as, hmm, 32C".
Suffice to say, some of the reaction to this story on Facebook has not been sympathetic.
"You sure wouldn't want to be in Australia in the middle of summer. Walk outside and you'll look like a shrimp on the Barbie," writes Julie Rae, while Mark Whiting scoffs that Britons "need to get out more".
He also mentions how the town of Birdsville "nudges the 50C mark".
However, a few people commenting on that same story have offered a more understanding point of view.
Lawton Rose points out that "the UK is just not built for this sort of weather", while Australian Daniel Richardson also posted that hot weather feels like "a different kind of heat when you live in an old city designed to mostly just handle cold".
Perhaps those Aussies with scathing views of Brits sweltering in the heat are grumpy because it's their winter right now. Just take a look at Bondi Beach.
Image copyright Getty Images
Meanwhile, in much of the UK...&amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://johncarpentermusic.bandcamp.com/album/lost-themes-remixed"&amp;amp;amp;gt;Lost Themes Remixed by John Carpenter&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;
John Carpenter has inspired countless musicians since his earliest minimal, synth-based film scores. The themes to his features like Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and Escape from New York have remained instantly recognizable since he penned them nearly four decades ago. In February 2015, Sacred Bones released his first solo record of non-soundtrack music, Lost Themes, to overwhelming critical success. The Horror Master proved that not only could he perfectly score his own films — he could also score the movies in your mind. Eight pivotal contemporary electronic artists were moved to reshape the original songs on Lost Themes in tribute to one the genre’s great pioneers. Several of the remixes were released as part of the digital deluxe edition of the album, but Lost Themes Remixed marks the first time any of the tracks
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Michael Schumacher is still in a medically induced coma, his manager has said.
Sabine Kehm told the BBC the seven-time world champion remained in a "stable" condition at a clinic in Grenoble.
She has rejected as "speculation" a French media report saying Schumacher was being woken from his coma.
The German suffered a severe head injury on 29 December when he fell and hit a rock in the French Alps.
Surgeons have performed two operations to remove blood clots around Schumacher's brain. He is being kept asleep to reduce swelling.
'Better than expected'
Doctors in Grenoble have ruled out giving a prognosis for his condition in the coming days and months.
But it is medically possible for someone to spend several weeks in an induced coma and make a full recovery.
Image copyright Getty Images Schumacher: The unanswered questions
However Professor Gary Hartstein, a former F1 doctor who worked with Schumacher, said it "was extremely unlikely" that the 45-year-old would regain his previous level of health.
Prof Hartstein nevertheless described the champion's current state as encouraging.
"The fact that he is still sedated and not in an unsedated coma is better news than I expected," he told the BBC.
British neurosurgeon Peter Kirkpatrick suggested French medical staff may keep Schumacher in a coma to avoid chest infections and breathing problems.
"I think it's true to say that our French colleagues tend to ventilate patients for much longer than we do here, but I certainly wouldn't discount the possibility of Mr Schumacher still having a reasonable recovery."
Meanwhile, Ferrari - the racing team with which Schumacher had 72 of his 91 F1 wins - said in an online statement it was "waiting" for his return:
"Dear Michael, having spent so many years at Ferrari, you became one of us. You thrilled us so often, bringing us great joy, but the greatest one is yet to come: namely seeing you here in Maranello again, to meet your second family, the Ferrari one."
Off-piste accident
Schumacher's family have been by his bedside since the accident. They have received hundreds of letters and gifts from around the world, as a show of support for the popular sports star.
Michael Schumacher Image copyright Getty Images Born: 3 January 1969
First GP win: Belgium 1992
Last GP win: China 2006
Races started: 303
Wins: 91 (155 podium finishes)
Championships: 7 (1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004)
On Sunday, fans marched around the Spa-Francrochamps race track in Belgium to pay tribute to Schumacher.
He made his grand prix debut at the track in 1991 and won six of his seven world titles there.
Earlier this month, investigators probing the accident said Schumacher had been going at the speed of "a very good skier" at the time of the accident in the resort of Meribel.
He had been skiing eight metres off-piste when he fell, they added.
Experts reconstructed events leading up to the crash after examining Schumacher's skiing equipment and viewing footage filmed on a camera attached to his helmet.
The German retired from racing in 2012 after a 19-year career.
He won two titles with Benetton, in 1994 and 1995, before switching to Ferrari in 1996 and going on to win five straight titles from 2000.OAKLAND — On Dec. 4, Jimmy Martinez survived a shooting when his dog came to his aid and scared off the gunman.
He did not survive another shooting Friday night.
The 54-year-old auto mechanic was fatally shot in the 600 block of 85th Avenue in East Oakland, where he and his dog Chata had relocated in his RV after the earlier shooting, police said.
Like our Facebook page for more conversation and news coverage from the East Bay and beyond.
Martinez and Chata were both still recovering from wounds inflicted in a Dec. 4 incident that was prompted by a dispute over a parking space. Martinez had been shot in the hand and Chata in the face.
About 9:30 p.m. Friday, Martinez stepped outside the RV to fill up some water jugs, leaving Chata inside, police said.
Moments later, he was shot by someone he got into a confrontation with, police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The killer fled before police arrived, and so far homicide investigators have no information on the motive or the suspect. Police are reviewing the Dec. 4 case to see if there might be a connection but said it was too early to tell. No arrests have been made in that shooting.
Since moving to the 85th Avenue site, which is in an industrial area where other occupied RVs are parked, Martinez had no reported problems, authorities said.
After Friday’s shooting, Chata was given to relatives of Martinez to be cared for. They told police she seemed calm.
Among the RVs camped along 85th Avenue, a man known to neighbors as ‘The Mayor’ remembered Martinez as a quiet man who had helped out others with a tow or tools like many in the community.
“I know a lot of people out here and Jimmy Martinez — he was a good guy,” he said.
Chata had saved Martinez’s life twice, once from being stabbed by an assailant who had confronted Martinez, “The Mayor” said.
The Dec. 4 shooting happened in the 4700 block of East 12th Street. Martinez said afterward that his 4-year-old Labrador and pit bull mix, “saved my life.” The dog, he said, came to his defense and prevented further shooting by an attacker.
A man apparently upset about the parking place being taken up asked Martinez to move his RV and became angry and abusive when Martinez said he would, but needed a few minutes to charge the vehicle battery.
The men started arguing and the suspect left briefly, then returned with a gun. He pistol-whipped Martinez on the head before shooting him and the dog.
A GoFundMe campaign set up by PALS East Bay, a nonprofit pet assistance group, had previously raised over $8,500 for Martinez and Chata’s medical bills after the shooting earlier this month.
“It’s devastating news,” said Nicole Perelman, spokesperson for PALS East Bay. “We’re devastated for his family. It’s very sad and tragic.”
Like our Facebook page for more conversation and news coverage from the East Bay and beyond.
PALS is hoping that someone will step forward and adopt Chata, who is a “sweet dog, but shy right now that she is recovering from trauma.”
Anyone interested in adopting Chata can contact PALS East Bay at [email protected]
The killing is the 74th homicide investigated by Oakland police this year. Last year at this time police had investigated 82 homicides in the city.
Police and Crime Stoppers of Oakland are offering up to $10,000 in reward money for information leading to the arrest of the killer. Anyone with information may call police at 510-238-3821 or Crime Stoppers at 510-777-8572.
Check back for updates.How To Make An Atlatl – A JustSurvival Guide
What Is An Atlatl?
One of the best primitive weapons of all time is the atlatl, whose use dates back to prehistoric times. Before we go into how to make an atlatl, we’ll first cover some basics.
The atlatl is a throwing spear�that has a hook on one end and a handle on the other. By essentially lengthening the arm, it provides additional leverage to propel�a dart much farther and faster than a one-handed throw.
Quick Suggest:�these are the best atlatls we could find on Amazon:
The typical atlatl�launches a feathered dart that is longer and heavier than an arrow but weighs less than a spear.�The unique throwing motion of the atlatl propels the dart�much faster than what could be typically achieved.
In the Stone Age, they were used by humans hunting everything from fish and deer to bear and woolly mammoth.
A well-made atlatl can throw a dart over 100 yards at speeds of over 100 miles per hour, and can be made easily with materials made in nature.
With a little practice, the atlatl is a�primitive weapon that everyone�should know how to make in a survival situation.
History of the Atlatl�Spear-Thrower
The Aztec word atlatl means “spear-thrower”. It�is a primitive weapon used in North America over 10,000 years ago, but reports indicate that native Australians have used this ancient weapon as recently as 50 years ago. Evidence from cave paintings show that atlatls were used on every continent except Antarctica.
Before the bow and arrow,�the atlatl was�the primary hunting weapon. It’s lightweight, simple to make, and�powerful enough to penetrate a mammoth’s hide.�Instead of carrying around large bulky spears, the world’ first reloadable weapon was created.
Over time, the designs have been tweaked�depending on what was being hunted, who was hunting with it, and what materials were available to create them from.
Regardless of the variations, all atlatls have the same three components: the hook, the shaft, and the grip. If you can picture the Chuckit! tennis ball launcher for dogs, it works in the same way. It allows you to throw twice as hard with half the�effort.
How To Make An Atlatl
A simple atlatl can be made using a tree branch.
To make this simple tool, you will need:
Survival Cord, or paracord grenade
Branch (2-2.5 inches in diameter)
Knife
Locate a branch approximately 2.5 inches in diameter. Poplar is a great choice because it is lightweight and dry; not sticky like pine. Chop the branch down from the base of the tree.�Choose a branch that has a smaller branch protruding at a 40-45 degree angle from end, and chop off a 24-inch length. Length is more of a personal preference, but most people prefer to use one at least the length of their arm.
The small branch, or “peg”, will become�the section that holds the dart in place when you throw.
The goal is to find a branch that strikes the perfect balance of comfortableness and weight. Too light of a branch will be unstable when you release, and too heavy will be hard to aim.
Use your knife to sharpen the small side branch to a point.
This is optional, but you can add a wrist loop from your paracord to keep the atlatl from coming out of your hand during release.
How to Make an Atlatl Dart
The dart is the projectile that the atlatl propels.�Think of it as a large arrow, with a large point on the front and fletching (also optional) on the back.
Darts can be made out any sticks or branches, but I’ve found the best survival darts are made out of river cane. Bamboo also works well.
Select a straight piece of river cane about a half inch in diameter and 4-5�feet long. Choosing a straight piece ensures it flies in a straight line. If you have chosen a slightly bent river cane, you can apply heat and bend it into place.
Next, you’ll need to make the foreshaft. The foreshaft is a smaller, secondary shaft that you insert into the tip of the mainshaft.�This will provide additional strength when it hits the target. Push the foreshaft into the river cane until it hits a joint, and leave about a foot of foreshaft sticking out of the cane. Tie it into place with any plant fibers you can find.
Use your knife to sharpen the foreshaft into a point. Your dart is now useable, although with a few simple modifications, you can greatly increase the usability of the dart.
Alternative Dart Improvements
Much like making a fire without smoke, small modifications to your dart can make all the difference.
Tips: You don’t�necessarily have to fashion the foreshaft into a point. Use whatever you have at your disposal – a tent spike, an arrowhead, or a piece of glass.
Fishing: If you attach several points to the end, the atlatl dart makes an excellent fishing spear.�Instead of trying to pin a fish with a single pointed end, you have several. This provides a larger surface area,�increasing the chances of a successful throw.
Strength: If an atlatl dart is going to break, it is either going to break at the tip, or at the mainshaft joint (where the the foreshaft was inserted).�To increase the strength of the joint, wrap sinew or other plant fibers tightly around the joint.
Accuracy: To increase the accuracy of the dart, you can add feathers the end.�On an arrow, this is the called the fletching. It works the same way for the atlatl dart.
How to Hold�and Throw the Atlatl
Because the river cane is hollow, the end without the pointed tip is the end that will be placed into the atlatl peg. Wrap your palm,�middle, ring, and pinky finger around the atlatl, and place your index�finger and thumb on the sides of�the dart. Hold it tightly and securely against the notched peg.
Stand�straight with one foot slightly in front of the other, facing your target. If you’re right-handed, your leading foot will be your left foot. Hold the handle of the atlatl (with the dart loaded) horizontally, slightly above and behind your ear. Cock your arm by bringing it back as far back as you can. Step forward and shift your weight to your leading foot. Slide your arm forward and keep the dart pointed at your target. Snap or flick your wrist and follow through with the throw, just like your baseball coaches taught you. The dart should release on it’s own.
Note: Steps 4, 5, and 6 should occur in one fluid motion.
Here’s the best “how to throw an atlatl” video I’ve found:
Practicing the Throw
Choose a practice area that can double as a backstop. While atlatls can travel up to 100 yards away, 15 yards is a pretty good distance to begin with.
Always test using the same test�darts. Once you become more comfortable throwing it, you can adjust a few variables – distance, different targets, variations of the atlatl, etc.
Start by throwing the dart at your target without the atlatl.�Get yourself a high-quality foam target such as this one. This will help you determine the difference in thrusting strength between with and without the atlatl.
Measure how deep the arrow penetrates with a one-armed throw, and then measure again�with the atlatl.�You’ll be amazed at how much deeper it penetrates with half the amount of effort required.
Here’s a video showing the comparison:
Professional Atlatls
Making an�atlatl is a survival skill everyone�should learn. However, some people are interested in competing in atlatl throwing competitions, practicing in their backyard. If you decide to go this route, Thunderbird Atlatl crafts some of the highest-quality atlatls in the world, and I recommend you check out their selection.
Simple Nanacoke Atlatl
Catatonk Atlatl
Wedge Handle Kanakadea
Six 5-foot Fletched Darts
Good luck! If you get stuck, I recommend you watch some of the videos I’ve posted above. It’ll show you everything you need to know.WARNING: Your browser seems to either have disabled or does not support JavaScript - this page will have limited functionality on your current browser
WHAT I SEE WHEN MY EYES ARE CLOSED sort by: participant's name, location, color, or shuffle randomly
WHAT COLOR I SEE WHEN MY EYES ARE CLOSED
Contribute to the project
“What I See When My Eyes Are Closed” is an online data visualization project that documents the approximate colors seen by users when their eyes are closed. The data was gathered using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a site for crowd-sourced labor. Participants closed their eyes while facing a white screen, they then recorded the color they saw. Their name and location, when provided, are associated to the color.
Research into “soft data” is of particular interest: data sets culled from cultural or personal sources suggest a lack of utility that aligns this kind of information with poetics and removes the often-arbitrary relationship of data-point to image. Specifically, “What I See When My Eyes Are Closed” gives a very human interaction with anonymous Mechanical Turk workers, who are located across the globe. Clicking on a color fills the screen for an immersive view that simulates a temporal shift into that person’s body.
A longer text outlining the project and its relationship to data visualization was published in March 2012 in the Parsons Journal of Information Mapping.
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Current number of participants shown: 462A BRISBANE mum has suffered hearing loss after she was speared in the ear by a rogue garfish.
Julie Fison, 46, was swimming chest-deep at Port Douglas in September when the garfish leapt up and plunged a 2.5cm barb into her eardrum.
Mrs Fison, a children's adventure book writer, is still recovering from surgery.
"It was excruciating - it hit me hard enough in the head to make me collapse and bleed out of my ear," the mother of two said.
She was left with facial palsy - unable to smile or blink on one side of her face - for more than a month after the barb perforated the eardrum and penetrated a facial nerve near her brain.
It took three hours of surgery at Cairns Base Hospital to remove the barb and she has since made numerous trips to ear specialists, physio sessions, an ophthamologist and now a speech therapist - and yet she still suffers hearing loss in her left ear.
Mrs Fison was unable to drive a car, take the kids to school, use a computer or work for weeks after the injury.
It is believed she is the first person in Australian medical history to be speared in the ear by a tiny garfish.
"My hearing and ear has still not recovered. I'm told it could take up to six months," she said.
But she feels lucky to be alive, with at least one recorded death of a Torres Strait fisherman fatally speared by a much larger specimen.
North Queensland is renowned as frontier territory with a wide array of deadly and dangerous creatures such as crocodiles, tiger sharks and box jellyfish.
Mrs Fison, the author of Hazard River, who has survived on rat soup on a barge on the Mekong River, said not even her wildest imagination could conjure such a "bizarre random attack".
The fish had to leap out of the water to reach her ear.
"There are lots of lethal things in the wilds of the deep north that are known to be dangerous - but a tiny garfish was not on my list," she said. "It is a bit of a war story, some people laugh.
"It is such a random thing, and it shows how in the blink of an eye, your life can change... even if it is from being attacked by a tiny fish."
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[email protected](UPDATE January 29: The president of the Phoenix-based chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People defends his credibility after sexist remarks.)
Don Harris, head of the Maricopa County chapter of the NAACP, is concerned about the lack of sensitivity to black people.
He was one of 40 or 50 community leaders and educators invited by the Tempe Union High School District to attend a private meeting on Tuesday about a widely shared photo of six high school girls spelling the n-word with letters on their T-shirts. The group agreed to push a movement to eradicate use of the n-word.
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Then, after the meeting, Harris exclaimed about a Channel 12 News (KPNX-TV) reporter: "Nice tits!"
Respect for women apparently isn't on Harris' radar. The 77-year-old lawyer is certainly no stranger to controversy.
From his five-month appointment as Maricopa County Attorney in 1976 to his failed bid for the same post against Andrew Thomas in 2004 to his current post as a white, Jewish leader of the state's largest NAACP chapter, Harris — a former U.S. Marine officer who served in Vietnam — is known for brash, politically incorrect comments.
Still, Harris' off-handed remarks on Tuesday, following a high-powered meeting about the need to rid society of an offensive word, were a new twist.
"How did this meeting fix anything?" asked a Channel 12 cameraman of Harris near the entrance of the TUHSD headquarters at 500 West Guadalupe. This followed several other questions by New Times and Channel 12 reporter Monique Griego, an Arizona native who worked as a reporter in out-of-state TV markets until moving back to the Phoenix area in 2014.
"It doesn't fix anything," Harris replied on camera. "We're on a pathway now to making things better."
"Thank you so much, I appreciate it," Griego told him, then immediately introduced herself to another meeting participant.
Monique Griego, Channel 12 News reporter 12news.com
Harris turned to New Times as a reporter asked, "Can you just talk about the..." and made his enthusiastic comment about Griego. Then, a few seconds later, he said it again: "Nice tits."
Griego said she wasn't authorized by her station to comment about the incident.
New Times called Harris today at the NAACP office to ask a few questions about his ribald observation.
"The meeting was over," he says. "I apologize if anyone was offended. I could have said nothing... I'm really fucking sorry."
Harris reiterated that the meeting concerning the n-word had concluded — a meeting in which he had pledged $5,000 for the anti-N-word effort.
Asked if any kind of effort should be waged to eradicate sexist comments, as well as racist, Harris went off on a tear.
"I'm going to slash my wrists," he spews. "Better yet, I'm going to throw myself out of a fucking window, except I'm on the first floor... I'm one of the best goddamned people in the state."
People criticized him when he first took over the NAACP chief post from the Reverend Oscar Tillman, who retired in 2014 after 22 years in the position, he says, because "I was the wrong flavor.
"They've seen me now, they've seen what I've done. I've given up my law practice. I'm down here six, seven days a week. That's what my commitment is. I support NOW, the women's organization — goddamn! — are you shitting me? Are you going to write this up?"
After getting a response he didn't like, Harris hung up.
No doubt he's back working to eradicate an offensive word.
Click on the player below to hear the soundbite:The robot delivering printed paper [Click to enlarge image]
Fuji Xerox Co Ltd tested a printer that not only prints documents on paper but autonomously moves around a room like the Roomba robot cleaner for delivering it.
Fuji Xerox used a prototype of the robot in a building located in Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo, in July and August 2014 in cooperation with Tokyu Land Corp for operation tests. Visitors to the lounge of the building used it for free.
The printing of documents is carried out via an Internet browser. Each desk in the lounge has a smart card on which a URL for printing is written. When the URL is accessed with a browser and a file is dragged and dropped in the browser window, an instruction to print out the file (print job) is sent to the robot.
When the robot receives a print job, it automatically begins to move toward the desk being used by the person who sent the order. Because it knows where in the lounge it is running, it stops near the desk.
The print job starts only after the user holds the card up to the robot. Therefore, the printed paper does not come out when the robot is moving in the lounge. As a result, business papers, etc will not be seen by others even in a public space like a lounge.
The robot houses a color laser printer of Fuji Xerox. It can handle sheets of up to A4 size. And it is the company's smallest printer. On the top of the robot, a tablet computer is mounted. When the user presses the "start moving" button displayed on it after the printing job is done, it automatically goes back to the "home position" in a corner of the lounge.
Because the battery of the robot lasts for a day, it does not need to be charged in the home position.
For the autonomous movement function, the robot uses the "Lidar" sensors, which use laser to measure the three dimensional shapes of surrounding objects. While conventional radar devices use radio waves, the Lidar uses light (laser) instead so that more detailed information can be obtained in the range of several tens of meters.
The robot can automatically make a three-dimensional map of the lounge. If it is manually moved around a room at the time of introduction, a map for autonomous operation is made in the robot. It is not necessary to set up "markers" to be detected by sensors. When the robot detects an object that does not exist in the map, it sees the object as a human and selects a route so that it can avoid the person.The Challenger Deep, the deepest point on the entire seafloor, lies in the Mariana Trench off the coast of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Islands. It is nearly 36,000 feet—7.8 miles—below the ocean’s surface. If you were to stand at this remarkable depth, the column of water above your head would exert 1000 times the amount of pressure you normally experience at the surface, crushing you instantly.
Even in this extreme environment, though, organisms can survive. One type, it turns out, can even prosper: bacteria. A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, finds that unexpectedly abundant bacteria communities grow in the depths of the Mariana Trench, with organisms living at densities ten times greater than in the much shallower ocean floor at the trench’s rim.
To probe the ultra-deep ecosystem, the international research team, led by Ronnie Glud of the University of Southern Denmark, sent a specially-designed, 1300-pound robot down to the bottom of the trench in 2010. The robot was equipped with thin sensors that can slice into the seafloor sediments to help measure the organic consumption of oxygen. Because living things consume oxygen as they respire, tallies on how much ambient oxygen is missing from the sediments can be used as a proxy for the amount of microorganisms living in that area.
When the team used the device to sample the sediments at a pair of sites with depths of 35,476 and 35,488 feet, they found surprisingly high amounts of oxygen consumption—levels that indicated there were ten times more bacteria present at the ultra-deep site than at another, shallower site they sampled for reference about 37 miles away, at a depth of just 19,626 feet.
The robot also collected a total of 21 sediment cores from the two sites, and these cores were hauled up and analyzed in the lab. Although many of the microorganisms died when they were brought up to the surface—after all, the creatures are adapted for the high pressure and low temperature of the ocean floor—the finding was confirmed: Cores from the Mariana Trench had much higher densities of bacterial cells than those from the reference site.
The team also remotely recorded video of the ocean floor, using lights to illuminate the pitch-black environment, and found a few life forms much larger than bacteria scurrying around on top of the sediment. When they used baited traps to recover a few of the specimens and bring them to the surface, they determined they were Hirondellea gigas, a species of amphipods—small crustaceans typically less than an inch in length.
The discovery of such abundant bacterial life is particularly surprising because conventional wisdom would suggest that not enough nutrients are present at such depths to support much growth. Photosynthetic plankton serve as the nutrient base for nearly any ocean food chain, but they’re unable to survive on the lightless seafloor. The waste products (such as dead animals and microorganisms) of ecosystems higher up in the shallow light-filled waters do filter down and feed deeper food webs, but typically, less and less organic matter makes it down as depths increase.
In this case, though, the scientists seem to have found an exception to the rule, since the ultra-deep trench was home to so much more bacterial activity than the nearby shallower reference site. Their explanation is that the trench acts as a natural sediment trap, gradually collecting nutrients that filter down and land at shallower locations on the ocean floor nearby, then are dislodged by earthquakes or other perturbations.
In the years since the 2010 exploration, the research team has sent the same robot down to sample the Japan Trench (roughly 29,500 feet deep) and plans to sample the Kermadec-Tonga Trench (35,430 feet deep) later this year. “The deep sea trenches are some of the last remaining ‘white spots’ on the world map,” Glud, the lead author, said in a press statement. “We know very little about what is going on down there.”Flames coursing around my arms, I look at the Seattle police officer standing before me. He puts his gun on the sidewalk and raises both hands in the air, shaking his head. I can accept his surrender or not.
But I can't stop thinking about the murder of a Native American woodcarver by an on-duty SPD officer and a string of other SPD civil rights violations that escalated until an aghast Justice Department had to intervene.
Stepping forward, I unravel the chain wrapped around my wrist and beat the Seattle cop to death in the street.
Just another day playing Infamous: Second Son, a video game that takes place in Seattle, the city I live in.
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The game's Seattle setting may be real, but the tribe the Native American protagonist belongs to is a developer fabrication. If the region's actual original inhabitants have been overlooked, it's a remorseful irony: the tribe who once occupied the land where Seattle now stands has long fought for recognition because the federal government keeps telling them that they officially do not exist. But while the game's developers appear to have cautiously attempted to mute certain hot-button elements associated with their choice of setting, you can't separate a real place from its history.
You know the sequence in Second Son where you go up the Space Needle and run around the circumference of the observation deck? There are a bunch of wires that encircle the deck preventing you, Delsin Rowe, from jumping off. Those wires are real and they were put there after two jumpers committed suicide in 1974. Now the suicide wires are a functional part of a popular video game.
The nearby Pacific Science Center where you fight Department of Unified Protection troops? That was designed by Seattle-born Minoru Yamasaki. After the 1941 date that would live in infamy, Yamasaki had to shelter his parents in a New York apartment because the authorities in Seattle had begun rounding up Japanese-Americans and incarcerating them in internment camps without trial or charge. Later he would design the World Trade Center.
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You can't separate a place from its history.
Akomish, Duwamish
It doesn't take Columbo to figure out that the dystopian near-future of Second Son alludes to the institutional outgrowths of post 9/11 Islamophobia. The unsavory Department of Unified Protection, with its surveillance fetish, security checkpoints and ability to suspend civil rights, seems to be a catchall reference to the NSA/TSA/CIA/DHS and the general trespassing into our daily lives since the government of the people and for the people began perusing the people's emails and X-raying the people's groins. Everyone with superpowers is labeled a "Bio-Terrorist" and either killed or held in prison camps under Gitmo-like conditions.
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The superpowered protagonist, Delsin Rowe, is a member of the fictional "Akomish" tribe. He was created, according to developer Sucker Punch's Brian Fleming, "As an offshoot of the decision to do Seattle." The Akomish tribe doesn't exist. The Duwamish tribe, however, is very real.
As Second Son addresses topics like government-sanctioned discrimination, Seattle, and its Native American connections, it's fruitful to keep in mind the living people who still bear the wounds of discrimination, inflicted on the very land which Sucker Punch has digitally recreated so masterfully.
Seattle is built within the 54,000 acres of land that was ceded by the Duwamish tribe. Chief Seattle was the Duwamish leader at the time and it was he who signed the treaty on their behalf. To an observer, it seems as though Sucker Punch had Seattle's Duwamish tribe somewhere in mind when they created the Akomish—beyond the similar sounding tribe names and the stated intent to create a Seattle-centric hero.
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Second Son's prologue prominently features the Akomish Longhouse:
After finishing the game, I drove down to the Duwamish longhouse, which stands near to where the Duwamish River meets Elliott Bay (Elliott Bay is represented in Second Son as the large body of water you see off the Waterfront District).
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While the fictional Akomish longhouse is much gaudier than the Duwamish one, I did note this sign:
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And here is the sign outside Second Son's Akomish longhouse:
I emailed a screenshot of the Second Son sign to the Duwamish longhouse and was told that the original sign is one-of-a-kind, handmade by Jack Kvarnstrom, a direct line descendant of Chief Seattle. Mr. Kvarnstrom passed away last year.
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When I spoke with Second Son director Nate Fox on the phone, he seemed unaware that Sucker Punch had referenced the Duwamish longhouse sign in their game. "I have never visited the Duwamish longhouse, so I couldn't tell you," he said. "We draw from a lot of different sources."
The Treaty and the Betrayal
How is Seattle's real-life tribe doing? Not well. The Duwamish tribe has been declared "extinct" by the federal government. This is despite the fact that there are still almost 600 Duwamish alive.
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In 1855, Chief Seattle signed the Treaty of Point Elliott with Governor Stevens and ceded the Duwamish land in exchange for a reservation and other federal guarantees for his tribe, including healthcare and education. However, the US government reneged on their end of the treaty. Despite not giving the Duwamish their reservation, the settlers of the new city named after their chief banned the Duwamish from Seattle by community ordinance.
Over the next several decades, as Seattle expanded across the ceded land, white settlers meticulously burnt down over 90 Duwamish longhouses in present-day Queen Anne, Belltown, Pioneer Square and other places in which you spend time in Second Son.
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With nowhere to go, some of the Duwamish merged with other tribes to survive. In 1866 a Duwamish reservation just south of Seattle had been proposed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But local settlers, including Seattle's co-founder Arthur Denny of the Denny Party, petitioned the BIA not to give that land to the Duwamish, and the BIA withdrew the proposal. The situation has never been corrected.
The present Duwamish longhouse, constructed only a few years ago on just 2/3 of an acre, is built on land bought through donations organized, in part, by a penitent descendent of the wealthy Dennys as well as some of the families of other white settlers. The Dennys are immortalized in Second Son—they're the namesake of its Denny Park district. In real-life Seattle, I live on Denny Way.
Real City, Fake Tribe
Second Son producer Brian Fleming has spoken about Sucker Punch's decision to use a real city for their game's backdrop, a change from the fictional approximations of the first two Infamous games. "If it was going to be the real Space Needle," Fleming said, "it had to be the real Seattle."
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So why use a fictional tribe? Nate Fox told me on our call, "We wanted to invent our own tribe largely to be respectful of the tribes in the Seattle area. We didn't want to invent or misinterpret anything that we didn't fully understand. It was mainly to be respectful."
Cindy Williams, a member of the Duwamish and operations manager at the longhouse, said, "Well, 'Akomish' sounds pretty stupid. But maybe it is better to fictionalize it if you're just trying to make entertainment, so you don't have to get into all the political crap. My twenty-year-old son checked the game out, though. He thought it was pretty cool."
After most gamers have completed Infamous: Second Son and moved on to other things, Seattle's banished tribe will continue their fight for recognition.
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"If the treaty we signed isn't valid, then I want Seattle back!" Duwamish Tribal Chairwoman Cecile Hansen said to me, pounding on a table theatrically before letting out a laugh. "The whole thing is so completely insane. Sometimes all you can do is laugh." Hansen is the great-great grandniece of Chief Seattle, the man who signed the original treaty all those years ago.
And in the game, brimming with power, I glide over Seattle's rooftops, a Native American everyman fed up with an unjust bureaucracy. I experience the joy of insurgency. I bring down in flames the structures of my oppressors. Screaming people run from me in Denny Park.
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The citizens of Seattle will never forget me.
Jagger Gravning co-hosts the video game podcast Go For Rainbow, speaking with critics, developers and voice actors each week. His writing on games has appeared in The Atlantic and Kill Screen. Find him on Twitter: @GoForRainbow.
AdvertisementThousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews have paralyzed most of Jerusalem as men, women and children took to the streets to protest an army service bill that would require many of them to serve in the military.
Local media called the protest “a million
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, and other weapons. During the maps, players may capture buildings to increase financial resources and repair damaged units. During combat, two units go head to head with the results determined by how the two stack up against each other, terrain conditions, and other factors. Up to four players can play using the Game Link Cable or by swapping a single Game Boy Advance at the end of each player's turn.
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Trivia
1001 Video Games
Awards
Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences 2001 - Handheld Game of the Year Award
GameSpy 2001 – Game Boy Advance Game of the Year
Related Web Sites
Game Boy Advance: Advance Wars (Official game web site by Nintendo of America.)
Advance Wars (Game Boy Advance) on Sep 19, 2001 NeoMoose (1262) added(Game Boy Advance) on Sep 19, 2001
Other platforms contributed by Michael Cassidy (21062)
The Game Boy Advance version ofappears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.Supporters of the two leading candidates in Iran’s presidential election took to the streets as official campaigning came to an end.
But despite festive scenes ahead of Friday’s vote, there has been tension between the moderate and reformist forces and hardline fundamentalists with fiery exchanges.
It has turned into a tight race between incumbent President Hassan Rouhani, described as a pragmatist, and the hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi.
One young woman in Tehran told Euronews: “We’ve gone forward with hope and we think moderation is the best thing.
“We want it to happen. We want our candidate to win. We want to have hope.”
One young man said: “I’m holding both photos (Rouhani and Raisi) to say we’re all Iranians, that unity matters and no matter who we choose the important thing is to vote and choose by logic.”
As the campaigning came to an end there was an intervention by the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday.
He slammed the heated tone of the election campaign, describing it as “unworthy”.
Some observers read that as a thinly veiled attack on President Rouhani and his attacks on Raisi.Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
Folks this truly is an amazing leap forward for the vRA platform. Just look at the list of new features below, which is not a complete list of all there is with this release. Keep checking back for informative step-by-step articles as well as updated versions of our workflow packages to be published by the end of this month.
vRealize Automation 7.0 is a cutting edge release which provides an industry lead cloud automation solution to our customers. With the streamlined installation wizard, simplified SSO configuration, integrated graphical infrastructure and application blueprint authoring and deployment capabilities, and many other new enhancements, customers will be able to maximize their return on investment by extremely shortened time to value for cloud service delivery.
Following are some of the new features:
Streamlined and Automated Wizard-based Installation
Introduces management agent to automate the installation of Windows components and to collect logs
Automates the deployment of all vRealize Automation components
Installation wizards based on deployment needs: Minimal (Express) and Enterprise (Distributed) Installations
Simplified Deployment Architecture and High Availability Configuration
Embedded authentication service by using VMware Identity Manager
Converged Application Services in vRealize Automation Appliance
Reduced minimal number of appliances for HA configuration
Automated embedded PostgreSQL clustering with manual failover
Automated embedded vRealize Orchestrator clustering
Enhanced Authentication Service
Integrated user interface providing a common look and feel
Enabled multiple features by new authentication service
Simplified Blueprint Authoring for Infrastructure and Applications
Single unified model for both machine and application blueprints and unified graphical canvas for designing machine and application blueprint with dependencies and network topology
Software component (formerly software service in Application Services) authoring on vSphere, vCloud Air, vCloud Director, and AWS endpoints)
Extend or define external integrations in the canvas by using XaaS (formerly Advanced Service Design)
Enable team collaboration and role segregation by enhancing and introducing fine-grain roles
Blueprint as code and human-readable which can be created in editor of choice and stored in source control or import and export in the same or multiple vRealize Automation 7.0 instances
Customer-requested machine and application blueprints provided
Additional blueprints available on the VMware Solutions Exchange
Simplified and Enhanced NSX Support for Blueprint Authoring and Deployment
Dynamically configure NSX Network and micro-segmentation unique for each application
Automated connectivity to existing or on-demand networks
Micro-segmentation for application stack isolation
Automated security policy enforcement by using NSX security policies, groups, and tags
On-demand dedicated NSX load balancer
Simplified vRealize Automation REST API
Simplified schema for API requests by switching to normal JSON model
Follow-on request URIs and templates exposed as links in response bodies (HATEOAS)
New APIs to support business group and reservation management
Improved documentation and samples
Enhanced Cloud Support for vCloud Air and AWS
Software component authoring for vCloud Air, vCloud Director, and Amazon AWS
Simplified blueprint authoring for vCloud Air and vCloud Director
Improved vCloud Air endpoint configuration
Optional proxy configuration
Event-Based Extensibility Provided by Event Broker
Use vRealize Orchestrator workflows to subscribe any events triggered by most events happen in the system or custom events
Support blocking and non-blocking subscriptions
Provide administrative user interface for extensibility configurations
Obsolete.NET based lifecycle callouts and provide upgrade proof extensibility and configurations
Enhanced Integration with vRealize Business
Unified location in vRealize Business to define flexible pricing policies for infrastructure resource, machine and application blueprints, and all type of endpoints in vRealize Automation
Support operational cost, one time cost and cost on custom properties
Role-based showback reports and fully leverage new features in vRealize Business 7.0
CloudClient Update
Content management (import and export blueprints between instances or tenants in vRealize Automation 7.0)
Existing functionality updated for vRealize Automation 7.0 APIs
vRealize Orchestrator 7 New Features
Introduce vRealize Orchestrator Control Center for easy monitoring and troubleshooting
Significant Smart Client improvements including Workflow tagging UI, Client reconnect options and enhanced search capabilities
vSphere 6.X vAPI endpoint support
Other Improvements
Enhanced management of tenant, business group, approval, and entitlements
Customizable columns in the table for a given type of custom resource defined in XaaS
Accept a mix of license input, including vRealize Suite, vCloud Suite, and vRealize Automation Standalone
Improved stability, quality, and performance
Download Details:When Beth Doherty found her future home in Indiana, it was by mistake.
Visiting property her sister-in-law purchased in 2002, she discovered Beverly Shores, Ind., where she and her husband moved in 2010 after living in Bucktown for two decades.
"You can see the skyline from the shore, and there's all these really cool houses," she said.
Doherty, a real estate broker, said many clients have no idea that such lakeside gems are available.
That might change soon.
Puzzled by why Indiana isn't drawing more people who work in Chicago, local officials are touting newly revitalized downtowns and pitching a new train track to slim commutes.
"This area is the best-kept secret," said Michael Noland, CEO of the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District.
Debbie Barkowski agrees. For her, the draws in leaving Chicago for Long Beach, Ind., were many — the lakeshore, where she and husband Brian see sunsets, and a leafy neighborhood where quaint houses sit back from winding, quiet streets.
They're grateful, too, for a network of young peers to meet for dune hikes or coffee at Beach Glass Cafe. Within eight months of moving in, they were invited to a wedding.
With a new track planned for the South Shore Line, Northwest Indiana's lakefront communities, already attracting commuting millennials, are poised to grow.
But some Chicago friends and family remain perplexed.
"We do still get that question about, 'What brought you to Indiana?'" she said.
With some millennials attracted to the area's beach access and low-key lifestyle, officials hope a new generation of residents will flow into town.
The linchpin in their plan to draw more people? Adding another track to a segment of the South Shore Line, which officials hope will slash the commute from Michigan City to Chicago to just one hour.
"The double tracking, I think, is going to be a huge game changer," said Leah Konrady, president of One Region, a group that promotes growth and quality of life in Northwest Indiana. She is 30, and says many friends in their 20s and 30s have moved to the area. She's monitoring the way other cities reach out to millennials, like Atlanta's New Voices campaign, with an advisory panel of millennials.
But making Chicago workplaces accessible is key. Right now, just one track runs between Gary and Michigan City. "We've got two-way traffic on a one-way street," Noland said.
Two tracks, Noland said, will allow trains to run more quickly — and with more options. He would love to see more rush-hour trains, for example.
Officials are in the process of finalizing details for the double tracking and received federal approval in May to hire engineers for preliminary planning. They plan to hold public meetings in October, and if all goes well, to see improved service by 2020.
Officials say Indiana is an obvious choice. Locals laud the lower cost of living. Billboards near Gary beckon Illinois residents with the boast, "Balanced State Budget."
Northwest Indiana's serene lakefront is one of its selling points for officials pitching it to young working professionals as a place they should live. Aug. 23, 2016. (Alison Bowen / Chicago Tribune) Northwest Indiana's serene lakefront is one of its selling points for officials pitching it to young working professionals as a place they should live. Aug. 23, 2016. (Alison Bowen / Chicago Tribune) SEE MORE VIDEOS
But they acknowledge challenges — for many, the state brings to mind an industrial landscape, Konrady said, not lakeshore sunsets and a shops-lined downtown. And in a recent One Region survey, residents expressed concern about jobs and education.
Bringing in more young people would help boost population — according to a upcoming One Region report, the area's 4 percent rate of population growth between 2000 and 2014 was slower than both the state's and the nation's.
Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage broker Nick Landers often reminds clients that Illinois suburban sale prices can double or triple Indiana's. According to Zillow, the median home value in Porter County, which includes Chesterton, is $166,200. In Lake County, it's $121,600.
But just 15 percent of the workforce in Northwest Indiana commutes to Chicago, compared with 35 percent in Illinois counties near the city.
When Noland asks Chicago friends what it would take to make them move, "Frankly, it's simple. It's the commute."
Right now, it's a hefty one. The train from Michigan City to Millennium Station is about 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Narrowing that, Noland said, "We unlock the region, and we become the newest suburb of Chicago."
Chicago Tribune Graphics Chicago Tribune Graphics
Of course, Indiana residents have long commuted to Chicago. Valparaiso's express commuter bus, ChicaGo DASH, carries about 130 riders to downtown and back daily. In Michigan City, commuters hop on the 5:52 a.m. train, returning on the 3:57 p.m. from Millennium Station.
Swifter trains, officials are confident, would advance both Michigan City and nearby communities like Portage.
"We think it's the new area to look at," said Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority President Bill Hanna. "This is the ground floor for a lot of these neighborhoods that will be anchored by these transit areas."
Revamped downtowns are elevating the region's appeal.
In Michigan City late Saturday night, a young couple strolled past lit storefronts like restaurant Mucho Mas, serving guacamole and enchiladas, and home decor shop Nest Number 4.
New shops in buildings that previously hosted empty storefronts softened Jenn Moser-Summers, initially reluctant to move here from Chicago to join her husband. Although still considering a move to the West Coast, she's encouraged by all the openings.
"I'm just now starting to appreciate Michigan City," said Moser-Summers, 34, who bar tends at Fire & Water, where people watch the sunset on the rooftop while sipping drinks half as expensive as they would be on Michigan Avenue.
The shore, also, is on locals' list of selling points. They point to places like Whiting Lakefront Park, where millions of dollars were invested in a winding, green area that attracted bikers and dog walkers on a recent weekend morning. The Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk, which opened in 2008, has a 3,500-square-foot public pavilion, used as a backdrop for wedding photos Saturday. Trails thread through dunes that nestle a beach filled with families.
"If you haven't seen our shoreline in the last three or four years, it would look completely different to you," Hanna said.
But first, Noland added, is convincing Chicagoans to come. He understands. Years ago, living in Lincoln Park, he and his wife decided on Glen Ellyn when they had children.
"I've told people around here, Northwest Indiana was not on my radar screen," he said.
Part of the pitch is promising people the area looks different than 20 years ago. After MSNBC political commentator Chris Matthews in 2015 called Michigan City "hollowed-out," local officials invited him to come back and see what's changed.
Recently, Konrady was shopping with her mother in Michigan City. Strolling by shops like Hoity Toity, where lamps and dressers fill the windows, her mom, 65, noted she hadn't ventured onto that stretch since she was 16.Editor’s note: One of my best friends is from Houston, and a family he knows lost everything in Hurricane Harvey. You can click here to donate to them, or donate to Red Cross.
Music journalist Everett True has attacked Dave Grohl in a new Drowned in Sound article. In 1991, True introduced Kurt Cobain to Courtney Love at a Butthole Surfers and L7 gig. The three became close friends, and, in 1992, True wheeled Cobain on stage at the Reading Festival. In 2006, True published Nirvana: The True Story, a book about his personal relationship with the band and the grunge scene.
He wrote:
Dave Grohl is shit.
Do not believe the hype. My life over the last two decades has been swamped with people spouting weak-assed crap like “I don’t want to say Dave Grohl is shit because it ain’t up to me to tell others how to live their lives”. Damn straight. It AIN’T up to you to tell others how to live. You so scared of being thought out-of-touch that you can’t even figure out what you like yourself, though? You so scared of being viewed as opinionated or nasty or close-minded (shudder) a critic that you can’t state your own opinions loud and clear, though? DAVE GROHL IS SHIT.
He later said:
Dave Grohl is shit. Shout it from the tops of buses and shout it from street corners. He is dreary, whiny, derivative, needless, grey. Dave Grohl is shit. He makes Chris Martin sound like Beyoncé. Flaunt the bump/don’t flaunt the bump/FLAUNT THE BUMP! He makes Ed Sheeran shine with an inner fire. He puts Theresa May into perspective.
He is shit. He is crap. He is the shit in the middle of crap. His emotion is not his. It’s empty, big washes of guitar-driven bombastic nothingness. Dave Grohl is shit. The loudest boy in a room of one. Useless shit that pervades the world with the smell of uncritical acceptance. Smiley shit. Bouncy shit. Bearded shit. Dave Grohl is shit. He is one more commodity, just one more commodity. Shit. Less than nothing. Shit. Lifestyle choice for the folk who think someone else is cutting edge. Shit. An approximation of music that does not bother to capture the spark that can make music so special, so magical, so special. Just an approximation of an approximation. The boy next door, with a drum kit and a sound purloined from the past. Half-assed subcultural appropriation.”Schaumburg Boomers Stadium often referred to simply as Boomers Stadium is a stadium in Schaumburg, Illinois, formerly known as Alexian Field. It is now home to the Schaumburg Boomers of the Frontier League which began play in May 2012 and captured the first-ever professional baseball championship for Schaumburg in 2013. It is primarily used for baseball, and was the home field of the Schaumburg Flyers baseball team from 1999 through 2010 before the Boomers resurrected the facility for pro baseball in 2012.
Schaumburg Boomers Stadium opened in 1999 and the park holds 7,365 people for a baseball game or over 10,000 for a concert or other non-baseball event. Its field dimensions mimic those of Chicago's Wrigley Field, and the land the stadium is built on was originally purchased in the mid-1980s as a hopeful site for the New Wrigley Field, had the City of Chicago and the Chicago Cubs not come to terms to bring night baseball to the North Side. Some pro lacrosse as well as professional and amateur softball has also been played at Schaumburg Boomers Stadium due to the late start (mid-May) of the independent baseball season.
The Stadium itself is located west of I-355 off the Elgin-O'Hare Expressway. Now called Schaumburg Boomers Stadium, the Alexian Brothers Medical Center in nearby Elk Grove purchased the naming rights to the ballpark in 2000. The Stadium was host to the Schaumburg Flyers from its opening through the end of the 2010 season. At that point, the village and park district which owned the stadium began eviction proceedings against the Flyers for failure to pay $551,800 in back rent. On February 24, 2011, a Cook County court ruled the Flyers could be evicted, ordered the now defunct team to pay the back rent, and the naming rights contract was terminated when there was no professional baseball played in the park in 2011.
From 2009-10, the Wheaton College Thunder, a Division III baseball program, played its home games at Schaumburg Boomers Stadium, and since 2008 the Dominican University Stars another Division III baseball program has played a majority of it home games at Schaumburg Boomers Stadium. In 2011, the Roosevelt Lakers, an NAIA baseball program, played its home games at the stadium as well.
Later that year, in September 2011, Chicago attorney Patrick A. Salvi was awarded ownership of a Frontier League franchise that began play in May 2012. Salvi is also the owner of the American Association's Gary SouthShore RailCats. The franchise is known as the Schaumburg Boomers named after the "booming dance" of the male Greater Prairie Chicken and the team earned a 54-42 record during its Inaugural Season, falling one win short of a playoff berth.
In just the franchise's second season in 2013, the Schaumburg Boomers captured the first-ever pro baseball championship for the Village of Schaumburg in impressive fashion. After capturing the league's best record in the regular season (59-37), the Boomers became the first team in the Frontier League's 14-year history to sweep through the playoffs with a 6-0 record en route to claiming the 2013 Frontier League Championship. In doing so, the Boomers made good on a promise to win title in the "first 100 years or your money back." The guarantee was featured on a billboard announcing the new team in March 2012 before the club's first season got underway.[5]
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:Broncos coach Wayne Bennett has asked for a rethink on the punishment handed out in representative fixtures, seeking a solution that doesn't unnecessarily punish NRL clubs.
Four players are this week missing from their respective NRL teams as a result of suspensions handed down for indiscretions in representative games, Greg Bird's eight-week suspension for a lifting tackle having dramatic implications for the Gold Coast Titans.
Along with Bird, Sam Thaiday (Broncos), Josh Reynolds (Bulldogs) and Felise Kaufusi (Storm) will each serve a week's suspension this weekend and with the representative season about to hit full stride, Bennett is concerned other clubs will suffer for the sins of their rep stars.
Bird won't be seen in a Titans jersey again until Round 19 and Bennett believes there must be a way to punish foul play in the representative arena without negatively impacting club teams.
"We've lost Sam Thaiday playing for Australia and the club takes all the risk in this business. I sometimes think there's got to be a better way," Bennett said.
"I see Greg Bird leaving the judiciary last night and [Titans coach] Neil Henry is there representing him. Neil Henry had nothing to do with that game, this is his club coach and we're left with all the responsibility again.
"To me lots of times it's unfair, maybe there's no fairer way, I don't know.
"The clubs take all the risk, we pay all the money, we contract the players, we're the ones that look after them 24/7 and they go away in the rep programs and at the end of the day we pay the price.
"The club takes all the risk, the fans buy their season tickets and a guy's out for eight weeks so everyone's a loser except the game.
"The rep stuff, if nothing changes for them they go and pick another player and don't even have to appear at the judiciary."
The loss of Thaiday is one of only two absentees from the Broncos roster this Friday with Mitchell Dodds looking at more than a month on the sidelines with a knee injury that was initially feared to be a season-ending ACL injury.
It's a health assessment that Panthers opposite Ivan Cleary could only dream of ahead of their clash on Friday night with the Broncos also welcoming Darius Boyd back to the fold, with the star fullback recovering from his Achilles tendon injury suffered in the pre-season.
"If Sam hadn't got suspended and with the exception of Mitchell Dodds we're probably at full strength," Bennett said.
"We haven't been all season, we've used five fullbacks at some stages so we've been through our own moments with injuries to players in key positions.
"They're obviously having some injury problems with some key players at the moment but that doesn't diminish what they can do."Cars and homes were burnt as settlers rampaged after the eviction
Outgoing Israeli PM Ehud Olmert has compared the violence used by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in Hebron to bygone anti-Semitism in Europe.
He told Cabinet he was ashamed by recent scenes in the West Bank city, which he said amounted to a pogrom.
The settlers shot and wounded three Palestinians and set fire to property after Israeli security forces evicted a Jewish group from a disputed building.
Correspondents say Mr Olmert's use of "pogrom" has particular resonance.
It is usually associated with the anti-Semitic violence Jewish people experienced in Europe and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term 'pogrom' to describe what I have seen," he told Cabinet members, according to public radio.
"We are the sons of a nation who know what is meant by a pogrom, and I am using the word only after deep reflection."
Video from an Israeli human rights group showed two settlers shooting Palestinian rock-throwers on Thursday.
About 600 Jewish settlers live in the city, with several thousand more in surrounding settlements.
It is not the first time Mr Olmert has used the word to condemn Jewish settlers - in October he described a rampage through a Palestinian village in the West Bank as a pogrom.In four years, India will have the world's largest population of working people, about 87 crore in all. When nations reach a high ratio of such people, they are expected to earn something called a demographic dividend. This simply means that because most citizens are working, economic growth goes up. The expectation and anticipation is that India is approaching such a position soon.
However, there is a second view on this. A few months ago, a report by IndiaSpend, which does data-based journalism, looked at the issue of employment and made six observations. These were as follows:
1) In 2015, India added the fewest organised-sector jobs — in large companies and factories - in seven years across eight important industries.
2) The proportion of jobs in the unorganised sector — without formal monthly payment or social security benefits - is set to rise to 93 percent in 2017.
3) Rural wages are at a decadal low, as agriculture — which accounts for 47 percent of jobs — contracted 0.2 percent in 2014-15, growing 1 percent in 2015-16.
4) As many as 60 per cent of those with jobs do not find employment for the entire year, indicating widespread ‘under-employment’ and temporary jobs.
5) The formation of companies has slowed to 2009 levels, and existing companies are growing at 2 per cent, the lowest in five years.
6) With large corporations and public-sector banks financially stressed, the average size of companies in India is reducing, at a time when well-organised large companies are central to creating jobs."
This indicates that a very large labour force is moving into an environment which does not have the ability to absorb them.
The report pointed out that though India had seen high growth after 1991, less than half the population was fully employed. In comparison, a United Nations Development Programme report said that in China “the number of jobs grew from 628 million to 772 million between 1991 and 2013, an increase of 144 million, but the working-age population increased by 241 million.” It added: “A wider gap in India than China suggests a more limited capacity to generate employment - a serious challenge, given the continued expansion of the workforce in India over the next 35 years.”
Unless there is a change in the economy, and I mean a major change, (not just a continuation of what has been happening over the last 25 years) these jobs will not materialise. The traditional way in which countries have developed is through low-end manufacturing, like garments exports, and then migrating to higher-end work like automobiles and electronics.
India has all these sectors but without any great scale. On garments, for instance, we compete and often lose to countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam and Sri Lanka which are more efficient and cheaper. The slowing down of the global economy in the last seven years has meant there is no external demand of large size that we can capitalise on.
If the traditional route is not clearly open to India, how will we manage to profit from our demographic dividend? This is a question that must be answered quickly because there is not much time.
I think it is totally wrong to expect that the government alone, for the most part, can provide a solution here. One reason we have not received large investments in manufacturing is a lack of infrastructure and connectivity. Here, we can clearly see the role of the central government in terms of its investments and prioritisation.
But another equally big reason is a lack of qualified manpower. This will surprise upper class urban Indians who can get jobs relatively easily because of their access to reasonably good education. But vast majority of Indians don't have access to this education resource and, therefore, are not equipped to work in the modern economy. This is true even at the basic level of skilled blue collar functions like assembly-line work. Meanwhile, countries like the Philippines are eating into our backend service jobs in an environment where automation is reducing the total number of new jobs every year.
The prime minister recognises the problem and has launched an initiative called Skill India to equip millions of people with basic blue collar skills. Even here the results will take time because the quality of primary schooling in India is very poor. The more one thinks about it, the more difficult it is to see how India will be able to reap the benefits of a demographic dividend. A period of mass unemployment and social unrest is looming unless there is a shift, both internal and external, that at the moment is nowhere to be seen.
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.Two months after donors pledged to help Gaza after the war between Israel and Hamas, barely 2 percent of the money has been transferred
By Luke Baker and Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Two months after donors pledged $5.4 billion to help rebuild Gaza after the war between Israel and Hamas, Palestinian, U.N. and other officials say barely 2 percent of the money has been transferred.
The conference in Cairo had been hailed as a success, with Qatar promising $1 billion, Saudi Arabia $500 million and the United States and the European Union a combined $780 million in various forms of assistance.
Half was expected to go to rebuilding houses and infrastructure in Gaza destroyed during seven weeks of fighting, and the rest to support the Palestinian budget.
But of the total, only $100 million or so has been received, according to U.N. and other officials. While the EU and the United States have accelerated some funding that was already in the pipeline, very few new pledges have come to fruition.
"We have received funding and pledges of approximately $100 million for shelter and repair," said Robert Turner, director of operations for the U.N.'s Relief and Works Agency in Gaza.
"That money will be largely finished in January 2015. We have a shortfall (for shelter and homes) of $620 million and we are going to run out right in the hardest part of winter."
Details of donor commitments are often hard to pin down as the headline figure frequently includes money set aside earlier but not yet paid out.
While that is the case with some of the funds for Gaza, particularly from the EU and the United States, the Arab states were in most cases making new commitments of support. Officials said they had been among the worst at following through.
"The Arab countries haven't paid anything until now," Mufeed al-Hasayna, the Palestinian housing minister, said this month. "The Europeans just a few millions, maybe something from the Swedes."
It was not clear what happened to promises of $200 million from each of Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. In part, officials said, the problem is that it always takes time for donors to follow through on their commitments.
It is also difficult to transfer money to Gaza since Hamas, an Islamist group, remains in control. The money was supposed to go to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which planned to resume responsibility in Gaza and administer the money. That has not yet happened. (Writing by Luke Baker; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.The first 45 characters will appear as the preheader on a smartphone. Make sure the body is front-loaded and clearly personalized within the first 45 characters. I noticed you… I enjoyed your post on… I saw that we both… Provide valuable industry research showing understanding of pain points and how to get ahead.
Using your 8 years of HR experience to keep the team abreast of smartphone development.
Hi Karl,
This year the estimated number of smarphone users is 222.9 million. I read that by 2021 this number should jump to 264.3 million. As more people jump on board, and as more devices are created. Jorvo’s solutions should continue to be in high demand and also evolve. How do you keep your employees up to date on the newest technology? Our solution can help with employee development.
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Can we send you some potential courses to take a look at for your engineering team?
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BrentDeveloper: Panzer Gaming Studios
Publisher: Panzer Gaming Studios
Preview Platform: PC (Steam)
Preview Copy Provided By: Panzer Gaming Studios
Release Date: Early Access – 8th July, 2014
I requested to preview A New Reckoning (simply called New Reckoning on its Steam page) while I was drunk. I’m not ashamed to admit that. In a lager induced haze I discovered the existence of Panzer Gaming Studios’ debut title by accident and thought: “Wow this looks ridiculous. I should probably preview that for a lark”. The funny thing about beer is that it can make bad things seem hilarious. Would you thrust your crotch into your friend’s face to the sound of Bon Jovi while he imitates the arms of a clock if you were sober? Probably not. If I ever accidentally impregnate someone whilst inebriated, requesting to preview A New Reckoning will still be the biggest drunken mistake I’ve ever made.
Of course I opted to play and preview the game completely sober (I’m not that unprofessional), which was also a bad call on my part. A New Reckoning is a mess, one that I can only describe in the form of a story. I realise that this is an unorthodox way to preview a game, but A New Reckoning is an unorthodox game, one which forced me to unburden myself of the shackles of contemporary games criticism. Here goes.
The chugging guitar music filled my eyes, ears and mouth like a hot soup brewed by Chad Kroeger. Was I caught in a nightmare, or was I about to experience the hellish, “next-gen” scares of A NEW RECKONING? Instantly I see an image of four slightly creepy looking, grey-skinned little girls. The chugging continues as they stare at me. For some reason, there is a black swirly shape in the middle of the screen. Then, out of nowhere, ENEMIES! A pixel-y mess of a screenshot displays demons and zombies standing next to a poorly spelled command list. DRAMA! A man dangerously closely resembling Gordon Freeman fights off demons by slowly moving their heads into a wall. We are about to taste reckoning in its newest, purest form.
I find myself in a dark, slightly untextured and impossibly glossy looking place. It’s not quite a warehouse, and it’s not quite a train station. Yet there are trains here. How peculiar, I thought, I must find out more about this place. I see an emotionless man with a large box of text next to his head. This box of text is not a virtual manifestation of his dialogue, the box is actually rendered in this strange world. Initially reluctant to trust a man who is constantly followed around by a large, white box of text, I eventually decide to take him up on his offer to investigate a nearby train. After all, I have a shiny, silver AK-47 in my hand, what could go wrong?
I approach what looks like a train, despite the fact that it is facing in a direction which seems most impractical for any sort of motion or travel. Since most of the area is blocked off by gates to stop anyone getting on the train, I walk alongside the train, only to be ambushed by a screaming zombie, what was once his jaw now a fleshy lump hanging from his face. I unload my twenty rounds of ammunition into him, killing him. Damn! Out of rounds! It sure was annoying to be given a gun with only twenty rounds whilst exploring this undead infested train station. No matter, the way ahead looks clear. I take a few more steps, and notice more figures in the distance; an undead woman in a hospital gown, presumably on her way for a check-up in a town with a larger hospital than her own, a man wearing an outfit which resembled a metallic KKK robe, and a grinning, horned demon which resembled some sort of toasted Dungeon Keeper. Since I was out of rounds, they cornered me instantly. Just like an article on Upworthy, what happened next shocked and amazed me.
Shrill screams and low growls fill the air, repeating like a broken record, yet never quite reaching their intended climax of anguish. Added to this symphony of horror is a loud whisper of I WILL KILL Y- I WILL KILL Y- I WILL KILL YOUUUU. More monsters join the fray, some swinging their arms at me, others simply opting to watch me die in a most perverted fashion. Particles of ice begin exploding around me, along with jets of hot fire. I back into some ammo, and quickly reload my gun. “I’ll send you all back to hell!” I don’t say but it probably would have been cool if I did. Click. A blinding purple flash emerges from the barrel of my weapon, but no bullets follow. It was too late for me. Duped once again by the “Purple Strobe” manufacturing error that plagues so many of today’s firearms.
Wait. I’m back. Why must you torment me by keeping me here Panzer Lord? I turn around to notice the enemies who had just been clawing my face off are now wandering around the corner of the train station, probably waiting for a bagel. I approach them, but they ignore me. I decide to investigate the train as instructed by the EverBox man. More enemies approach, some ignoring me in favour of a leisurely stroll around the station, others opting to run past me or jog together in perfect unison. I realise that these enemies are too slow to catch me if I sprint, so sprint past them I do. I reach a cluster of trains in front of a skybox. A group of identical men in military uniforms are standing in front of me, making firing motions with the guns in their hands. No bullets or sounds emerge from the guns, so I assume they were just practising for a play.
Okay that’s enough. If it isn’t clear to you already, I had more fun writing this than playing A New Reckoning. The game makes absolutely no sense, is filled with brain-dead AI, glitches, bugs
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this relationship. Unfortunately, my collection became too large, and I sold this issue, along with other Superman comics, at a garage sale. The cover price of Superman #1 is 75 cents, while the current value is $5. In the early Nineties, when Superman became all the rage because Doomsday killed him, I started buying some back issues of the iconic hero. I was living in Atlanta, Georgia, at the time, serving in the U.S. Army, and I found many back issues at local comic book shops in the area, picking this one up for about a quarter. My father had started reading Superman, dating clear back to Action Comics #1, and he bought me the death of Superman issue, which got me back into buying comics once more. For several years I picked up monthly Superman comics for my father, and we it was fun to have this relationship. Unfortunately, my collection became too large, and I sold this issue, along with other Superman comics, at a garage sale. The cover price of Superman #1 is 75 cents, while the current value is $5.
[gravityform id=”3″ title=”false” description=”false”]So, Parade’s End has now ended.
I have a love-hate relationship with BBC: love it for all it does, hate it for how little it does. Five episodes? That’s it? I could clearly see there was material enough for a whole season of drama. This is worse than Sherlock!
The first episode I skipped altogether at first, thinking “not another Edwardian drama… haven’t we got quite enough of that?” I was drawn to it, eventually, by Benedict Cumberbatch – nothing that man does is ever wrong – and the script writer, Tom Stoppard, of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead fame. The combination of two promised the entertainment would be of the more cerebral sort. And I was not disappointed.
I approached it with a fresh, clear mind, not having any idea what to expect. Not only I wasn’t aware this was going to turn into a war drama, rather than a simply period one – I didn’t even know it was an adaptation of a famous series of books. I suppose, for the first time, I shared the experience of people watching The Lord of the Rings without having read the books. Except, you know, with actual proper script, direction and good actors.
I don’t know if the adaptation was true to form and spirit of the novels. It certainly seemed to skip a lot of it. The shadows of what I assume must be the overarching great and complex plot of the original books, glimpsed often through the adaptation. There were so many characters and side-stories that, reportedly, some of the public used to more simpler fare complained to the BBC about the drama being “too complicated”. It did, at times, feel like the entirety of Game of Thrones squeezed into five one-hour long episodes. Interesting and entertaining of their own accord as they were, the side-shows must have stepped back into the shadows and thankfully by the episode Three we heard very little of all the MacMasters and mad priests and governmental schemes. There was only ever one thing we wanted the drama to focus on: the love triangle between Christopher Tietjens, his wife, and the girl everyone but him called his mistress.
So, I started watching the series for Cumberbatch, but I stayed for Rebecca Hall. Her Sylvia was by far the most compelling and three-dimensional woman ever to grace the TV screens, as far as I’m concerned. Far from the “unfaithful harlot” she seemed – and wanted herself to be seen – Sylvia was a bundle of complexities. Her relationship with Tietjens was as dark and deep as the ocean, and for all her outward exuberance, she never really pronounced what it was that she felt for him. But it was easy to see what attracted the two people to each other in the first place: from Rebecca Hall’s first appearance on the screen, you feel sorry for all the men who desired her, but could never be a match for her intelligence. Only Christopher has the brains and moral spine enough to stand against her. Sylvia is right now vying for the first place as my favourite female character in the history of television.
I didn’t care much for Valentine at first – not knowing she was actually going to become the love interest, I was ready to dismiss her as one of the side-shows distractions of the first episode. She doesn’t show up much later, either, and when she does, she has a tendency to be on the whiny side. She’s not match for Sylvia, that’s for sure; but oh, how she had grown on me! By the fourth episode I had no idea who to root for, and by the fifth I was with her all the way. Adelaide Clemens has come a long way from her action TV origins, and she has a bright future as the sort of “clever man’s Renee Zellweger”, provided she continues to be cast in things as well done as this one.
The complexity of its characters is what makes this show so stand apart from others. There are no cliches left upturned. The mark of its brilliance is the ability to make even a World War I behind-the-lines general into a sympathetic, well-meaning character, a sort of “anti-Melchett”. But it’s not just a topsy-turvy world where the harlots (olde-worldy for “sluts”) turn out the most faithful and the suffragettes the most delicate. Rather, it is a representation of the so-called “real life” as it is, with all of its many facets and shades.
Perhaps Christopher Tietjens himself starts out as the least multi-faceted of all characters: an old Tory, too smart and too moral for a world where neither of these is an asset, “the toryism of the pig’s trough”; a cliché in a top hat. But this is exactly why he is the main hero: he must grow up. It’s interesting to note that Cumberbatch is the only one having a real character development here: with everyone else, we just see their many layers being revealed as the story goes. Both Sylvia and Valentine are already living in the Twentieth Century, if in different parts of it. For Tietjens, all his layers have to grow on him from nothing, to match the changing, increasingly confusing future.
I could say more, for there is much more to say. I haven’t even mentioned the war itself: just when you thought there could be no new way to portray the life in the trenches, Parade’s End comes as fresh as if you’ve never even heard the words “shell-shock” and “no-man’s land”. I haven’t mentioned the lavish production values, which show London turn over the period of several years from being inhabited only by top-hatted men in horse-driven carriages to these same men donning bowler hats and driving around in automobiles. I haven’t mentioned the sonnets and Latin hexameters. You have to discover all this by yourself.
If you ever get a chance, do watch this drama: it’s truly exceptional. A frightfully well written piece and played brilliantly by all; and it made me speak Edwardian for a week – by God!
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10. Pumpkin Everything! 🎃Talk to the unemployed and many will tell you that experience isn't helping them get a job. A new study may know why: your potential to do great things is more valuable than what you've done already.
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Ideas and productivity blog 99u points to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that asked participants to play the role of people in deciding roles. The results favored those with potential more than those with experience in their field:
They found that people playing the role of basketball coach preferred a rookie player with great potential over an established player with a great record. They were also willing to pay more for the promising rookie, and they thought his sixth season would out-shine the experienced player's sixth season. Other participants playing the role of recruiting manager preferred a candidate with a high score on a leadership potential test, and thought he/she would perform better in the future, as compared with an equally qualified candidate (both had MBAs from NYU) with a high score on a leadership achievement test. These effects weren't due to a bias for youth – the pattern held in a similar experiment that took into account the perceived age of the candidates.
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When we don't know someone's capabilities but they seem promising, we're intrigued to find out what will happen and are filled with hope about what they'll be able to accomplish. These results suggest that when you're going out and looking for a job, you should focus more on showing what you're capable of doing and talking less about what you've done.
The Undeniable Allure of Potential | 99u
Photo by Lightspring (Shutterstock).A YOUNG woman is auctioning her imaginary friend on eBay on the advice of her psychiatrist.
In the ad, 22-year-old Londoner Georgia Horrocks explains that her invisible buddy, Bernard, manifested “at a time of emotional instability” during her childhood.
“My psychiatrist recommended that I say goodbye to Bernard, and although I would like some financial compensation it is more important that he finds a good home,” Ms Horrocks writes.
She hoped the “active” and “mischievous” Bernard would fetch as much as £200 (AUD 367), adding that he “will be sent via imagination to the winning bidder”.
Before you dismiss Ms Horrocks’ ad — or this story — as a dumb joke that nobody in their right mind would fall for, know that in 2007, a British man sold his imaginary friend for a whopping $2,750.
The vendor, “thewildandcrazyoli”, posted the following sales pitch: “My imaginary friend Jon Malipieman is getting too old for me now. I am now 27 and I feel I am growing out of him.
“He is very friendly. Along with him, I will send you what he likes and dislikes, his favourite things to do and his personal self portrait.”The Somoza family was an influential political dynasty who ruled Nicaragua as a family dictatorship from 1936 to 1979.
History [ edit ]
Anastasio Somoza García assumed the presidency after luring rebel leader Augusto César Sandino to peace talks, and murdering Sandino soon afterwards. Anastacio amended the Nicaraguan Constitution, concentrating power in his hands and installed his relatives and cronies in top government positions.[1] Although the Somoza only held the presidency for 30 of those 43 years, they were the power behind the other presidents of the time through their control of the National Guard. The differences in the Somoza's ruling style only reflected their adaptation to the U.S.-Latin American policy.[2] Their regime was overthrown by the Sandinista National Liberation Front during the Nicaraguan Revolution.
For more than four decades in power, the Somoza family accumulated wealth through corporate bribes, industrial monopolies, land grabbing, and foreign aid siphoning. By the 1970s, the family owned 23 percent of land in Nicaragua while the family wealth reached $533 million, which already amounted to half of Nicaragua's debt and 33 percent the country's 1979 GDP.[3]
Three of the Somozas served as President of Nicaragua. They were:
Other members of the Somoza family include:
Lillian Somoza de Sevilla Sacasa, daughter of Anastasio Somoza García
Hope Portocarrero, wife of Anastasio Somoza Debayle
Anastasio Somoza Portocarrero, son of Anastasio Somoza Debayle
References [ edit ]
^ Newton, Michael (2014). Famous Assassinations in World History: An Encyclopedia [2 volumes]. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. p. 539. ISBN 9781610692854. ^ Keen, Benjamin; Haynes, Keith (2009). A History of Latin America, Eight Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. p. 450. ISBN 9780618783182. ^ Birdsall, Nancy; Williamson, John; Deese, Brian (2002). Delivering on Debt Relief: From IMF Gold to a New Aid Architecture. Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute. p. 134. ISBN 0881323314.The media has been abuzz with OpenOffice being forked into LibreOffice by The Document Foundation in past couple of days. The Document Foundation, has already released a beta version of Libre Office that can be installed on Ubuntu.
Download appropriate version from here
Extract the file to ~/Desktop
Rename the file as libreoffice
Enter the following command into terminal and wait for the proccess to finish.
sudo dpkg -i ~/Desktop/libreoffice/DEBS/*.deb
Run the following command to finish the installation: sudo dpkg -i ~/Desktop/libreoffice/DEBS/desktop-integration/libreoffice3.3-debian-menus_3.3-9526_all.deb
That's it. You can now access LibreOffice from Applications > Office
Many Thanks to scouser73 from ubuntuforums for the info!
Please note that LibreOffice is still a beta version and not meant for production purposes.If you want to remove OpenOffice before installing LibreOffice, you can do so by running following command:Follow the instructions to install LibreOffice on Ubuntu:Protesters opposed to murder by cop (source; click to enlarge)
Arrest the Tulsa officer who killed Terence Crutcher
Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby should be arrested today for killing Terence Crutcher. She should've been arrested immediately. On this past Friday evening, she shot and killed a good man. Having just left night classes at Tulsa Community College, Terence Crutcher's SUV broke down in the middle of the road. That's normal. That happens. It's a nuisance, but we've all experienced it at one time or another.
Except for Terence Crutcher, car trouble got him killed. This epitomizes the black experience in America. Something that should have been routine and safe, turned out to be fatal. As it turns out, Officers Betty Shelby and Tyler Turnbough were actually being dispatched for another call when they came across Crutcher's broken down SUV. Thankfully, several cameras filmed the entire incident and eyewitnesses have come forward as well.
The officers say Crutcher approached them — and failed to obey the cops' commands.
As Crutcher reached into his SUV, Turnbough fired his Taser, and shortly after, Shelby shot and killed the man, authorities say.
But one eyewitness who spoke to Fox 23 in Tulsa communicated that everything about what the police have said happened is inaccurate. She said that Crutcher had his hands in the air and was walking very slowly and carefully, fully aware that being in the presence of police was dangerous, when he was shot and killed. Crutcher's relatives say he was unarmed.
This is never enough, though. For police to be held accountable, the evidence must be outrageously overwhelming. It appears it is in this case.
At 1:30 p.m. Monday, the Tulsa Police Department is going to release audio and video footage from the shooting. Fully aware of just how bad it is, they showed the footage on Sunday to Crutcher's family, their pastor, their attorney, and several local leaders. What they saw infuriated each and every one of them.
"His hands were in the air from all views," Pastor Rodney Goss told the Tulsa World.
What disturbed Goss the most, though, is something that we've seen many, many times in shootings like this. After they shot Terence Crutcher, Goss said the police acted like they could care less. They provided no first aid or comfort. According to Goss, several minutes went by before they even really took a look to check on him.
The real answer to the headline question requires a look at literally hundreds of cases of unjustified, unpunished police shootings, just a few of which have been in our faces and on our TV screens lately. All of the deaths have been violent, and all have been followed by calls for non-violence... until the next violent police shooting. Interestingly asymmetrical.But the case of Tulsa resident Terence Crutcher is the clearest yet, as you'll see below. Do cops in the U.S. have a license to murder, so long as the victim fits the right demographic "type"?A Tulsa, Oklahoma police officer shot a black man point-blank as he lay on the ground, tasered. It was caught on camera. The police lied about what had occurred, in an obvious attempt to justify their actions. The camera showed they lied. This is as clear as it gets.The question —We're about to find out. Shaun King, writing in the NY Daily News (emphasis mine):The last two paragraphs above present the police story — "officers say" and "authorities say." It's almost never true in cases like these — questionable police shootings — that "officers" or "authorities" tell the truth. (One common lie is about how dangerous it is to be a cop, thus the need for the shootings, just in case. Truck drivers, taxi drivers and chauffeurs have more dangerous jobs. Should they get to murder people too?)Here's what was caught on camera:And they didn't even act like it mattered:Read King for the final straw, the "one bad dude" comment. You'll also hear that comment coming from the helicopter cops in the second video below. Note how they also assume, from 500 feet, that he was "on something" as he stands by the car... because, you know, black people. (Yes, I'm saying those cops are racists, straight-up.)And now two views of the murder. For the first, notice the police time stamp at the top right. At 19:44:13 he's tasered to the ground. Six seconds later they shoot him.The helicopter view has a slightly different time stamp. You can see him tasered at 19:44:45, see that he's essentially motionless on the ground, then shot where he lay.Straight-up murder if you ask me. If private-citizen-you had shot him, prone and helpless on the ground, and this video was available, you'd be in jail today, even if your name was George Zimmerman.This is a real question. Are we so authoritarian — and so frightened — that we want our police to kill at will, so long as the victim is from the approved target pool?If so, let's just say so. If on-duty cops can shoot anyone they feel like, let's admit it and then let's take the consequences, which will not be pretty, by the way. (What do cops do to people who start killing?)Cops who shoot unarmed, unthreatening people are murderers. People who enable these murders are complicit. Watch to see what happens. If straight-up police murder isn't a crime, the criminals are everyone who doesn't force a change.a change. At least as I see it.GP
Labels: Black Lives Matter, equal justice, Gaius Publius, police, police violenceThe quest to increase healthy lifespan is becoming a pressing economic priority required to preserve the current standards of living. Rapidly increasing dependency ratios and unfunded social security and healthcare liabilities are an enormous and growing burden on the economies of developed countries (Zhavoronkov et al., 2012; Zhavoronkov, 2013). But the situation, if handled properly, is not hopeless; with advances in anti-aging treatments and preventative care, the negative economic impact of aging could be at very least reduced, while increases in productive longevity in developed countries could actually stimulate significant economic growth (Zhavoronkov and Litovchenko, 2013).
One of the impediments to industry transformation is the way aging is treated. While no doubt exists that aging is a complex multifactorial process leading to a progressive decline in function with no single cause or treatment (Zhavoronkov and Cantor, 2011; Moskalev et al., 2014), the issue of whether aging can be classified as a disease is widely debated by gerontologists, medical doctors, demographers, philosophers, policy makers, and the general public. This disagreement has until now hindered classification of aging as a disease and, consequently, the fitting of potential treatment options into established research, regulatory, insurance, and marketing frameworks.
By initiating a call for papers via a research topic with a descriptive “Should we Treat Aging as a Disease? Academic, pharmaceutical, healthcare policy, and pension fund perspectives” title in Frontiers in Genetics, we gathered the opinions of the many stakeholders including representatives of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, demographers, and research scientists. None of the representatives of the pensions fund and insurance industries queried responded to the call, which can be explained by the general attitude toward aging and longevity in these industries (Zhavoronkov, 2015).
Some of the prominent biogerontologists provided comprehensive weighted responses explaining the dangers of separation of aging from disease and benefits of proactive preventative approaches that are likely to result from recognizing the pathological nature of aging. In spite of the many breakthroughs providing proof of concept for successful interventions in aging in model organisms, human progress has been surprisingly slow. One major cause of inaction is a widely held, but flawed, conceptual framework concerning the relationship between aging and disease that categorizes the former as “natural” and the latter as “abnormal” (Faragher). Gems concluded a comprehensive review of the many arguments for and against classifying aging as a disease with a definite and eloquent recommendation that calls for a complete quote: “We must draw aside the rosy veil of tradition and face aging for what it is, and in all its horror: the greatest disease of them all” (Gems).
Bulterijs et al. explained the many benefits of classifying aging a disease (Bulterijs), while Stambler provided a historical perspective arguing that acknowledging the possibility of successful intervention into the aging process, in other words treating aging as a curable disease, has been a long and highly respected tradition of biomedical thought (Stambler). Dubnikov and Cohen provided an overview of multiple theories of aging and recommended further research to understand the relationship between aging and disease (Dubnikov and Cohen).
Vaiserman proposed taking a systems-oriented approach looking at the plurality of genetic pathways and epigenetic mechanisms for identifying aging-modulating interventions (Vaiserman) complementing the signalome-wide approach for geroprotector screening (Zhavoronkov et al.). Zarling et al., proposed using nitroxide agents as possible drugs targeting age-related macular degeneration and other age-related diseases (Zarling et al.), and Luo et al. proposed a healthcare economics-driven model for development and adoption of companion diagnostics (Luo et al.).
Advocates for longevity research provided new survey data indicating that the majority (74.4%) of Americans are interested to live to 120 or longer if health was guaranteed, but only 57.4% wished to live that long if it wasn't (Donner et al.), contradicting previous surveys that used different approaches to surveying the general population and generally indicated negative attitudes toward increased longevity and longevity-boosting interventions (Duncan, 2012; Pew Research Center, 2013).
Many age-related diseases and genetic disorders share common pathways with normal aging (Tacutu et al., 2011; Makarev et al., 2014; Aliper et al., 2015). There is evidence indicating that longevity can be extended with a variety relatively non-toxic interventions (Moskalev et al., 2015) and there are multiple promising treatments in the pipeline. However, while there are many scientists and organizations providing arguments for and outlining the many economic and societal benefits of recognizing aging as a disease, there are few proposals describing concrete steps toward classifying aging as a disease. Moreover, many arguments lack realization that aging in the form of senility and senescence is already classified as a disease by some of the most influential agencies.
The main international agency responsible for disease classification is the World Health Organization (WHO), which maintains and publishes the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD) since 1948. The 10th revision of the ICD, referred as ICD-10, was first published in 1992 (World Health Organization, 1992), and the 11th revision (ICD-11) is expected to be released in 2018 (http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/revision/timeline/en/).
WHO classifies aging as a disease in the ICD-10 with the “R54” code (World Health Organization, 1992). However, this code is generally regarded by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) statisticians as a “garbage code” (Murray and Lopez, 1996; Lozano et al., 2013) and cannot be considered to be actionable. Actionable classification of aging as a disease may lead to more efficient allocation of resources by enabling funding bodies and other stakeholders to use quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and healthy-years equivalent (HYE) as metrics when evaluating both research and clinical programs. In order to classify aging with an actionable code or set of codes linked to specific age-related diseases, authors propose an international task force to be organized to develop and communicate proposals to the WHO at the national and international levels (Zhavoronkov and Bhullar). We propose starting with reclassification of age-related muscle wasting or sarcopenia as a treatable medical condition, considering the number of interventions developed within the pharmaceutical industry and academia.
Author Contributions
AZ, AM organized the research topic and wrote the paper.
Conflict of Interest Statement
AZ and AM are affiliated with research-oriented companies but declare no financial interest in this study. AZ and AM declare that presently they are terminally ill with aging.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Dr. Leslie C. Jellen and Polina Mamoshina of Insilico Medicine for editing this manuscript and helping coordinate the research topic. We thank Dr. Daria Khaltourina, Dr. Edouard Debonneuil, Dr. Ilya Stambler, Dr. William Faloon, Dr. Robert Hariri and the delegates of the 2nd annual Practical Applications of Aging Research Forum at the Basel Life Science Week for taking part in the debate on this research topic.
References
Aliper, A. M., Csoka, A. B., Buzdin, A. Jetka, T., Roumiantsev, S., Moskalev, A., et al. (2015). Signaling pathway activation drift during aging: Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome fibroblasts are comparable to normal middle-age and old-age cells. Aging 7, 26–37. PubMed Abstract | Google Scholar
Duncan, D. E. (2012). How Long Do You Want To Live? New York, NY: N. Y. Times.
Lozano, R., Naghavi, M., Foreman, K., Lim, S., Shibuya, K., Aboyans, V., et al. (2013). Global and regional mortality from 235 causes of death for 20 age groups in 1990 and 2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010. Lancet 380, 2095–2128. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)61728-0) PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar
Makarev, E., Cantor, C., Zhavoronkov, A., Buzdin, A., Aliper, A., and Csoka, A. B. (2014). Pathway activation profiling reveals new insights into age-related macular degeneration and provides avenues for therapeutic interventions. Aging (Albany. NY). 6, 1064–1075. PubMed Abstract | Google Scholar
Moskalev, A., Chernyagina, E., de Magalhães, J. P., Barardo, D., Thoppil, H., Shaposhnikov, M., et al. (2015). Geroprotectors.org: a new, structured and curated database of current therapeutic interventions in aging and age-related disease. Aging (Albany. NY). 7, 616–628. PubMed Abstract | Google Scholar
Murray, C. J. L., and Lopez, A. D. (1996). The Global Burden of Disease: A Comprehensive Assessment of Mortality and Disability from Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors in 1990 and Projected to 2020. Boston, MA: Harvard School of Public Health on behalf of the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
Pew Research Center (2013). Living to 120 and Beyond: Americans' Views on Aging, Medical Advances and Radical Life Extension. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center Religion and Public Life Project.
Tacutu, R., Budovsky, A., Yanai, H., and Fraifeld, V. E. (2011). Molecular links between cellular senescence, longevity and age-related diseases - a systems biology perspective. Aging (Albany. NY) 3, 1178–1191. PubMed Abstract | Google Scholar
World Health Organization (1992). The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders: Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines. Geneva: World Health Organization.
Zhavoronkov, A. (2013). The Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform the Global Economy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar
Zhavoronkov, A., and Cantor, C. R. (2011). Methods for structuring scientific knowledge from many areas related to aging research. PLoS ONE 6:e22597. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0022597 PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar
Zhavoronkov, A., Debonneuil, E., Mirza, N., and Artyuhov, I. (2012). Evaluating the impact of recent advances in biomedical sciences and the possible mortality decreases on the future of healthcare and Social Security in the United States. Pensions Int. J. 17, 241–251. doi: 10.1057/pm.2012.28 CrossRef Full Text | Google ScholarThe fear of job-stealing robots has been recently stoked in the media and pundits frequently refer to automation as a key driver of long-term middle-class wage stagnation. But are robots actually transforming the labor market at an unprecedented pace? Nope—in fact, the opposite is true. First, it’s important to note that technology and automation have consistently transformed the way work gets done. So, technology itself is not a problem. Robots and automation allow us to increase efficiency by making more things for less money. When goods and services are cheaper, consumers can afford to buy more robot-made stuff, or have money left over to spend on other things. When consumers spend their leftover cash on additional goods and services, it creates jobs. These new jobs help compensate for the jobs lost to automation.
But are robots now eroding jobs and replacing human labor at a faster pace that the economy can’t absorb? Again, no. Perhaps surprisingly to some, the data on investments and productivity do not reveal worrisome footprints of accelerated robot activity: in fact, in recent years the growth of labor productivity, capital investment and, particularly, investment in information equipment and software has strongly decelerated in the 2000s. There is no basis for believing that robots or automation are having an unusual transformative effect on the labor market.
The first chart below shows that productivity and capital investment did indeed accelerate during the late 1990s tech boom. But productivity and capital investments were much slower in the recovery from 2002–2007, and decelerated further in the period since the Great Recession.
The second chart looks more closely at two components of capital investment, information processing equipment investment (mainly computers and communications equipment), and software investment. Information processing equipment investment grew at a 8.0 percent annual rate over the 2002–2007 period, roughly half the 15.6 percent rate of the 1995–2002 period, and grew even more slowly (4.8 percent annually) after 2007. If technology were rapidly transforming our workplaces, we would expect to see exactly the opposite—a surge in the use of information equipment and software in the production of goods and services. That is what occurred in the late 1990s, but it is not happening now.
We need to give the robot scare a rest. Robots are not leading to mass joblessness and are not the cause of wage stagnation or growing wage inequality. Recently, the New York Times referred to the robot scare as a “distraction from real problems and real solutions.” Instead, we should focus on policy choices that lead to things that truly threaten workers and their families like eroding labor standards, declining unionization, elevated unemployment, unbalanced globalization, and declining top tax rates.When I first stepped foot on Mexican soil, I spoke relatively good Spanish. I was by no means fluent, but I could hold a conversation. So when I asked a local ice-cream seller in downtown Guadalajara when he expected a new delivery of chocolate ice cream, and he said ‘ahorita’, which directly translates to ‘right now’, I took him at his word, believing that its arrival was imminent.
I sat near his shop and waited, my Englishness making me feel it would be rude to leave. Half an hour passed and still no ice cream arrived, so I timidly wandered back to the shop and asked again about the chocolate ice cream. “Ahorita,” he told me again, dragging out the ‘i’ ‒ “Ahoriiiiita”. His face was a mix of confusion and maybe even embarrassment.
I was torn. Waiting longer wasn’t appealing, but I felt it was impolite to walk away, especially if the ice cream was now being delivered especially for me. But finally, after waiting so long that I’d built up an appetite for dinner, dark clouds appeared overhead and I made a rush for the nearest bus to take me home. As I left, I signalled up at the sky to the ice cream seller to let him know that I obviously couldn’t wait any longer and it really wasn’t my fault. His face was, once again, one of total confusion.
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As I sat on the bus, rain pattering on the windows, I replayed the conversation in my head and decided indignantly that the ice cream seller was a liar.
This incident faded from my memory until years later when I came back to live in Mexico. I discovered that cracking what I came to call the ‘ahorita code’ took not a fluency in the language, but rather a fluency in the culture.
Cracking the ‘ahorita code’ took not a fluency in the language, but rather a fluency in the culture
When someone from Mexico says ‘ahorita’, they should almost never be taken literally; its definition changes dramatically with context. As Dr Concepción Company, linguist and emeritus researcher at the Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, told me, “When a Mexican says ‘ahorita’, it could mean tomorrow, in an hour, within five years or never.”
Ahorita llego, which directly translates to ‘I am arriving right now’, in fact means ‘I will be there in an indeterminate amount of time’, while ahorita regreso (‘I will be right back’) means ‘I will be back at some point but who knows exactly when’. ‘Ahorita’ is even used as a polite way of saying ‘no, thank you’ when refusing an offer. Even after almost seven years in Mexico, this response can still catch me off guard when I’m hosting friends; I find myself hovering, unsure if I should get my guest what I offered them or not.
Mexicans are famous in the Spanish-speaking world for their extensive use of the diminutive. While in most Spanish-speaking countries the addition of the diminutive ‘ita’ to an adverb like ahora (meaning ‘now’) would strengthen it to indicate immediacy (i.e. ‘right now’), this is not the case in Mexico. Dr Company explained that Mexicans instead use the diminutive form to break down the space between the speaker and the listener and lessen formality. In this case of ‘ahorita’, the addition of the diminutive reduces urgency rather than increasing it – a difference that can be extremely confusing for foreigners.
Subtle adjustments to the pronunciation of the word also affect the way ‘ahorita’ is interpreted. “The stretch in the ‘i’ sound in the word ‘ahorita’ is a demonstration of the stretching of time,” Dr Company informed me, implying that the longer the sound, the longer one can expect to wait. Equally, “if you want to imply that you really mean right now, you would say ‘ahorititita’,” she explained, noting the short, sharp sounds represent the idea that something needs to happen at once.
Difficulty interpreting what I have come to call ‘Ahorita Time’ is a reflection of different cultural understandings of time. Dr Company explained that if she is giving a talk in Mexico and goes over her allotted time, Mexicans “feel like I am giving them a gift”. In the UK or the US, however, “The audience starts to leave, feeling like I am wasting their time.” My Mexican friends plan parties for 7pm knowing that no one will show up until at least 8:30pm. Foreigners who are new to Mexico organise events for 8:30pm not knowing that means that most people will arrive
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I were buying a car, and the salesperson said, “That’s a nice ride, but I should mention that this vehicle causes death by explosion in six of 10 buyers,” then I’d buy something else.
Science gives odds of an event happening; it doesn’t tell us exactly when and to whom it will occur. It doesn’t say: “Do what the science says, and you, Tanya, will find love next Tuesday.” It says: “This is what happens to most people most of the time, so if you want to max out your odds, here’s how.”
If you want certainties, you have to pay someone with a crystal ball! If you want advice based on compelling tales…well, there’s always your friends’ experiences. Or mine. Stories are wonderful—but they’re not data. If you want the best odds, based in fact, you consult science.
Upshot? If you’re a college student, or in some other environment rich in single people, then you are already looking, without having to look. Stumbling on a great mate really could happen to you.
But if you’re reading this, you probably aren’t in that kind of environment. And even if you are, using strategy to look won’t hurt your chances of finding love; it will help.
Script to confront this harmful myth: “I increase my odds of finding a worthy partner by actively searching, not passively waiting.”
Hang in there: Using the strategies that help most people most of the time is very doable. Let’s find out what they are, and how you can apply them, starting today.
Duana C. Welch, Ph.D., is the author of Love Factually: 10 Proven Steps from I Wish to I Do, releasing on January 7, 2015; this entry is a partial excerpt. She also contributes at Psychology Today and teaches psychology at Austin-area universities. Get a free chapter of Love Factually!Back in November, a group of researchers compiled a huge amount of data about parking in Los Angeles. Before you brush that off as the most obtuse project ever, have a look at their results:
The red circle is all the parking in L.A. County, smooshed together. It takes up more space than Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, downtown, and most of Glendale—combined.
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The graphic, crafted from the paper’s data courtesy of the blog Better Institutions, gives us a supersized vision of what has been dubbed a “parking crater” by the very vocal urban planning blogosphere. Normally, it’s a dismissive term for a particularly unsightly and wasteful expanse of asphalt. Streetsblog USA runs an annual competition to locate the worst offenders, with Camden, New Jersey’s hideous, half-empty waterfront parking scrum taking 2015’s ignoble first-place trophy.
But the L.A. graphic turns the parking crater into a broader metaphor for the tradeoffs that a car-centric city like Los Angeles has made to accommodate cars. Without all that parking, the map seems to scream at us, look how much more city L.A. could have!
Because, at least on the face of it, parking spaces are both economic and social duds. You can’t live, do business, or grow anything on a parking space. They make it harder to move between nearby buildings, cutting into the so-called “agglomeration” that is one of the biggest economic benefits of urbanization. Relatively few even generate significant parking fees—the authors of the L.A. study found that in 2010, 98% of car trips there started or ended with free parking.
Of course, parking has one obvious advantage: You can park there. And having more of it does make driving a whole lot easier. But studies (including a new one out this week) have shown that’s not actually great—increasing parking also increases traffic congestion by making driving more attractive than alternatives like mass transit.
UCLA’s Donald Shoup has shown that free or cheap parking doesn’t just increase commuter congestion, but snarls downtowns by encouraging drivers to circle incessantly in search of a free spot. And all that extra driving also increases pollution.
For more on innovation in parking, watch:
As the researchers point out, many city codes are continuing to feed this vicious cycle by requiring set amounts of parking for new developments. That has led to developers and community activists from Miami to DC pushing cities to do away with those requirements.
And it’s working. Dozens of cities, including Los Angeles, have made at least some reduction in parking requirements. That will make them better prepared to take advantage of the coming wave of transportation advances, from the lower parking needs of driverless cars to the popularity of tiny electric vehicles to, at least in some cities, the millennial-driven rise of public transit.Snow could make for slippery Memorial Day weekend in Sierra
Photo: AL GOLUB, AP Tourists line up to pay the entrance fees at the Tioga Pass...
A low pressure system is expected to dump one to four inches of snow in higher elevations throughout the Sierra Tuesday, potentially making for slick road conditions for visitors traveling along high passes to Yosemite for Memorial Day weekend.
Meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Reno said snow showers are expected at elevations above 8,000 feet around the southern side of the greater Lake Tahoe basin, with snow falling heavier farther south.
“We’re looking at generally light amounts,” said Dustin Norman, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service. “We’re expecting some of the heavier showers down along Mono County.”
Norman said despite the low totals of snow expected, the weather could still impact driving conditions.
He said higher areas such as Carson Pass and Tioga Pass could be affected and make for less-than-ideal road conditions for travelers headed to parts of Yosemite this week for the holiday weekend.
Tioga Pass, a section of State Route 120 that stands as the eastern entry point for Yosemite National Park, just opened last week and is subject to close due to stormy weather.
Carson Pass is traversed by State Route 88 and is typically open year-round, pending large weather systems and avalanches.
Norman said there is a possibility of snow showers through the end of the week.
“I don’t think this kind of weather is untypical,” Norman said. “Compared to the last few years it may be irregular, but from an overall standpoint it’s not too irregular to have snow in higher elevations this time of year.”
Meanwhile, scattered showers and isolated thunderstorms are expected to bring up to a quarter of an inch of rain to lower mountain elevations.
“We are expected to stay in a pretty active period throughout the week,” Norman said.
On Friday, up to two inches of snow and ice in the Sierra set off road closures in both directions of Interstate 80 in Placer County, as officials said cars lost control and started spinning out on the slippery road.
Ice and snow, at around 6,000 feet, caused multiple spin outs, prompting officials to close sections of the highway until plows and tow trucks could clear the road, said CHP Sgt. Norman Vandermeyde.
Kevin Schultz is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: KevinEdSchultzThe Sunday Express 6 Sept. 2015 AN OPERATIVE working for Islamic State has revealed the terror group has successfully smuggled more than 4,000 covert ISIS gunmen into western nations – hidden amongst “innocent” refugees and here.
The ISIS smuggler, who is in his 30s with a trimmed jet-black beard, revealed the ongoing clandestine operation is a complete success.
“It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world and we will have it soon, God willing”.
IS(IS) is a child of the US, NATO, Israel and Saudi Arabia. So, IS(IS) threats to the west is Masonic policy to create the Chaos out of which they will create their New World Order (Agenda 21)
The operative said the undercover infiltration was the beginning of a larger plot to carry out revenge attacks in the West in retaliation for the US-led coalition airstrikes.
Islamic State extremists are taking advantage of developed nation’s generosity towards refugees to infiltrate Europe, he said.
The majority make for more welcoming nations like Sweden and Germany, turning themselves over to authorities and appealing for asylum.
Two Turkish refugee-smugglers backed up the claims made by the ISIS Syrian operative.
One admitted to helping more than ten trained ISIS rebels infiltrate Europe under the guise of asylum seekers.
The operative said he believed future attacks would only target Western governments – not civilians. (Ingratitude is the way of the world!)
The revelation comes just days after a spokesperson for Islamic State called on Muslims in the West to carry out terror attacks.
The Guardian 5 Sept. 2015 and The Telegraph 6 Sept. 2015: On Saturday night at Munich’s main station, dozens of Germans lined up behind police barriers to clap, cheer and distribute sweets to welcome refugees to their new home. A sophisticated official operation provided food and transport to temporary lodging.This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged it’s drastically underestimated the number of people becoming infected with AIDS here in the United States. The CDC had been reporting 40,000 people get infected each year, but now the agency estimates the figure is more like 56,000, an increase of 40 percent.
CDC officials said the higher infection rates were discovered after using the agency’s new blood-test technology. The Wall Street Journal reports the CDC knew about the increased number of cases since last year but waited to make the announcement until the opening of the International AIDS Conference in Mexico.
AIDS activists are now calling for increased federal funding for AIDS prevention programs. Since 2002, the CDC’s prevention budget has shrunk by 19 percent when adjusted for inflation.
Stephen Lewis joins us now from Mexico City, the former UN envoy on AIDS in Africa, the chair of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which funds community-based AIDS initiatives in Africa. And he co-directs AIDS-Free World, a new international AIDS advocacy group that is based in Boston.
We welcome you to Democracy Now!
You’re participating in the International AIDS Conference. What is most significant about this gathering this year?
STEPHEN LEWIS: I would say, Amy, what’s most significant, there are two things. One is that the conference is dealing with concentrated epidemics, that is, epidemics about — around men having sex with men, injecting drug use and sex work, much more than they have ever dealt with before. The concentration before, of course, was on the generalized pandemic in Africa, where the virus is transmitted heterosexually. But these high-risk groups, which have not received the attention they should over the years, are receiving much more attention at this conference, along with a similar emphasis on prevention.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the significance of the CDC understating the incidence of AIDS in this country by something like 40 percent, saying they were waiting until the AIDS conference, many months later, after they realized what was happening? And it also goes to the issue of funding for AIDS in the United States.
STEPHEN LEWIS: It’s completely irresponsible, and it takes one’s breath away. The important thing about statistical material, epidemiological material on AIDS is to release it as soon as you’re pretty confident of its content, because every measure of policy depends on the information you have. And so, they lost many months unnecessarily, when they had a dramatic revision of the figures, which showed that their own statistical compilations were sorely lacking.
And this constant cutting of the budget, the absurd emphasis on abstinence, the effort to criminalize sex work, when that’s a high-risk group, which must be dealt with, because of viral transmission, the whole approach of the Bush administration and of the CDC has been seriously wanting. I mean, the failure in the United States is mirrored only by the failure of some of the UN itself, which should have acted much more vigorously over the years.
AMY GOODMAN: Last week, we did a report on the new Black AIDS Institute report, which said that if blacks in the United States constituted their own country, the nation would rank sixteenth in the world in the number of people living with HIV, that two percent of adult black Americans are infected with the virus, and only four countries outside Africa have a higher HIV prevalence.
STEPHEN LEWIS: Yes. That was an astonishing news story. I remember I read it first by Larry Altman in the New York Times, and I have to say that, again, I was quite taken aback, because it demonstrates what all of us have known, or at least have intuitively known, that the carnage within the African American community is very, very significant and that it’s a leading cause of death particularly amongst African American women in their productive years, and yet the energy, the urgency, that should attach to the response is almost nowhere to be found.
It may be that President Bush can be heralded for the PEPFAR program dealing with matters international, although I’m not so excited about it as others are, but certainly there has been a failure domestically in the United States, which is clearly identifiable.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the effect the global food crisis is having on AIDS. Last week, the executive director of UNAIDS, Dr. Peter Piot, said the global food crisis is hindering the fight against AIDS.
DR. PETER PIOT: The current food crisis, which is true in many, many countries — and the poorer you are, the more affected you are by that — is affecting also the fight against AIDS. And we have the paradoxical situation that some people have access to pretty expensive and sophisticated drugs but have no food to eat, nothing to eat, or don’t have the money to take the bus to go to the center and have no job.
AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Lewis, your response?
STEPHEN LEWIS: Well, there’s no question that Peter’s right, of course, but the food prices are only a part of it. The oil prices are complicating things. The effect of climate on southern Africa, where the prevalence rates are highest, the matters of drought that flow from global warming, all of these things are like some kind of conspiracy focused on the southern end of the continent. And what you need is not merely food; you need nutritious food, particularly for those who are on antiretroviral treatment, so that the body can absorb the drugs. And the absence of nutritious food and the difficulty of having the food is desperately complicating things. And frankly, Amy, the breakdown of the international trade agreement, the Doha trade agreement, is yet further prejudicial towards Africa and will compromise the future of the continent. So the combination of food price rise and disease is really a calamitous one.
AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Lewis, I want to thank you very much for being with us. His new organization is called AIDS-Free WorldPresident Trump’s job approval rating dipped in April as his support among female registered voters hit a new low.
According to data from the latest Harvard-Harris survey provided exclusively to The Hill, 48 percent of registered voters approve of the job Trump is doing, compared to 52 percent who say they disapprove.
That’s down from a 49-51 split in March, a drop that is primarily due to a widening gender gap.
Fifty-five percent of men who are registered to vote approve of the job Trump is doing, a share that has grown from 53 percent in February.
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Among women registered to vote, however, Trump’s approval rating has fallen from 44 percent in February to 41 percent in April. Fifty-nine percent of female registered voters now disapprove of the job Trump is doing.
Those dynamics hold true with Trump’s favorability rating. Forty-four percent of registered voters overall have a positive view of the president, against 51 percent who view him negatively.
Fifty-one percent of male registered voters have a positive view of the president. Only 38 percent of women who are registered to vote view Trump favorably, however, down from 40 percent last month. A strong majority of them, 56 percent, have an unfavorable view of Trump.
Male registered voters say that Trump is a stronger leader than former President Obama, while female registered voters say Obama was the stronger leader. Those men are also more likely to support Trump’s missile strike in Syria and his Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, who is viewed negatively by a plurality of those women.
"Men see President Trump as a strong leader while women prefer the leadership of former President Obama," said Harvard-Harris co-director Mark Penn.
A majority of registered voters, 50 percent, say the country is on the wrong track, against 36 percent who say the U.S. is on the right course.
Registered voters are more bullish on the economy, with 41 percent saying it is on the right track and 38 disagreeing.
Some of Trump’s recent actions have been met with widespread approval.
Two-thirds of registered voters say the missile strike in Syria was justified and 55 percent say they’re happy the Senate approved Gorsuch for the Supreme Court.
And there are opportunities for Trump if he can achieve some of his state policy initiatives.
Seventy-five percent of respondents in the new poll say they support the administration’s proposed $1 trillion infrastructure package and strong majorities want to see Democrats and Republicans work together to reform the tax code.
Registered voters oppose a wall along the southern border by a margin of 62 to 38, however.
The online survey of 2,027 registered voters was conducted between April 14 and April 17. The partisan breakdown is 36 percent Democrat, 31 percent Republican, 30 percent independent and 3 percent other. Harvard-Harris Poll uses a methodology that doesn't produce a traditional margin of error.
The Harvard–Harris Poll survey is a collaboration of the Harvard Center for American Political Studies and The Harris Poll. The Hill will be working with Harvard-Harris throughout 2017. Full poll results will be posted online later this week.'I should be in Belgium squad'
By Football Italia staff
Radja Nainggolan believes that playing for Cagliari may be standing in his way of getting a Belgium call up.
The 25-year-old has played just five times for the Belgians, and took no part in World Cup qualifying.
And the midfielder has admitted that playing for the Isolani could be counting against him.
“I am a little disappointed [not to be involved in the national team],” he told Gazet van Antwerpen.
“I hope the Coach will follow my performances and perhaps give me a chance in the next friendlies.
“I am not giving up hope. I will fight to get into the team 100 per cent. The national team is full of champions, but I think I deserve my place – maybe not as a starter but in the 23.
“Look at Kevin De Bruyne, he is sitting in the stands at Chelsea but is part of the national team. I have nothing against Kevin – that is just an example. Kevin is a winner and has done a great job.
“But it seems silly to me that you should be called up just because you play for a big club.
“If I’d have signed for Inter, people would have started talking about me for Belgium – but I’m exactly that same player at Cagliari.”Poll: Clinton, Trump poised for big wins in Pennsylvania
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (Photo: DSK, AFP/Getty Images)
A new poll bolsters predictions that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are poised for big wins Tuesday in Pennsylvania.
Trump pulls 45% ahead of the Republican primary in the Keystone State, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll, well ahead of Ted Cruz (27%) and John Kasich (24%).
Clinton, meanwhile, leads Bernie Sanders by 15 points in the Pennsylvania poll, 55%-40%. Pennsylvania is the biggest of five delegate contests on Tuesday.
NBC News reports that Trump "performs the best among those who strongly support a candidate (getting support from 57% from that group), men (52%), those without a college degree (52%) and those in the Northeast part of the state (52%). He performs the worst among college graduates (37%), women (39%, white evangelicals (40% — but still leading Cruz's 36%) and in the Philadelphia suburbs (38% — leading Kasich's 34%)."
As for the Democratic race, NBC reports:
"Clinton leads among African Americans (67% to 29%), those ages 45 and older (66% to 28%), women (62% to 34%), self-identified Democrats (60% to 36%) and those strongly supporting a candidate (59% to 41%).
"Sanders holds the edge among those who are under 45 (60% to 37%), those who are'very liberal' (58% to 41%), independents (55% to 39%) and men (49% to 45%)."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1SrYHm5It’s a testament to the depth of Louisiana’s boudin scene that the 2013 Boudin Wars winner Hollier’s Cajun Kitchen has escaped the steady gaze of Boudin Link, the encyclopedic website devoted to eating the best of the Acadiana foodstuff. Does a restaurant exist if it’s not on Boudin Link?
Apparently.
Questions:
Will LeBleu’s Landing show up with their fried, bacon wrapped, smoked boudin?
Will Johnson’s Boucaniere show and prove that the ancient methods are still the best methods?
Will Market Basket Smokehouse return to defend their crown in the “specialty” category?
Will Nunu’s be at the event with their world-beating crawfish boudin?
Will Best Stop show up to enter in the brand new “boudin balls” category? We’ve eaten a lot of boudin balls over the years and have yet to sample any finer.
These questions will soon be answered at the 2014 Boudin Wars in Sulphur, Louisiana.
Event: 2014 Boudin Wars
Date: Saturday September 13th 2014
Place: Henning Cultural Center, Sulphur Louisiana
Time: 11am to 1pm
Cost: $10Next Game: at UCLA 4/8/2017 | 4:00 p.m. HT Pac-12 Networks
#HawaiiMVB
LOS ANGELES, Calif. – The fourth-ranked University of Hawai'i men's volleyball team closed out the regular season with a marathon four-set victory over No. 6 UCLA Saturday at the Wooden Center. Set scores in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation match-up were 41-39, 25-23, 18-25, 25-22.The Rainbow Warriors (24-4, 14-4 MPSF) have now won five straight regular season matches over the Bruins in Los Angeles dating back to 2013. UH enters next week's MPSF Tournament as the No. 3 seed and will host sixth-seeded Pepperdine in a quarterfinal round match at the Stan Sheriff Center, Saturday, April 15.Senior outside hitterand freshman oppositeeach tallied 11 kills to lead the Warriors. Fey also totaled 10 digs for his first double-double of the season and third of his career. Settercame within a block of a triple-double, finishing with 34 assists, 11 digs, and nine blocks.As a team, UH posted a season-high 17 team blocks with middle blockers(7) and(6) combining for 13. Mol also had three of the Warriors' seven aces on the night.UCLA (17-9, 10-8) was led by Jake Arnitz's 14 kills while Eric Sprague added 11 kills and eight blocks. The Bruins committed 31 service errors in the match compared to 12 for the Warriors and hit.287 for the match.In a marathon first set that lasted 49 minutes, the Warriors erased 12 set points and managed to steal the opening frame on their fifth set point as Mol put away the overpass. UH benefitted by 15 service errors by the Bruins and were out-hit.356 to.217. HBA graduate Michael Fisher got the start for the Bruins and tallied 10 kills in the set.In Set 2, the Warriors' big block came alive. UH scored six unanswered, sparked by a pair of aces by Mol and two Franciskovic blocks, for a 9-3 lead. The Bruins rallied to within one at 13-12 and tied it at 21 after Parapunov was ruled in the net. The score was tied twice more before the Warriors closed out the set with triple block on Dylan Missry and Eric Sprague's hitting error.The Bruins scored the first six points of Set 3 as UH shuffled its lineup. The Warriors closed to within one at 10-9 before UCLA extended its lead to 15-11 after a three-point run. UH would not threaten the rest of the way as the Bruins cruised to a 25-18 victory.In Set 4, the Warriors used a 6-3 run for a 16-13 advantage. The Bruins tied it at 20-20 after van Tilburg crossed the 3-meter line on his attack. But UCLA's serving woes continued with two more errors and a Fey-Mol double-block that put UH on top 23-21. Another Bruin service error gave UH set point and van Tilburg and Mol stuffed Micah Ma'a to end the match.Photo: AP
Thirty-two Americans associated with the feminist anti-war activist group Code Pink are in Pakistan for a march from Islamabad to that country's tumultuous tribal belt to protest American drone strikes that reportedly kill civilians along with their terrorist targets.
Code Pink members donned giant vagina costumes at the Republican National Convention in August, but according to two group members contacted by U.S. News, participants will be modestly dressed in the conservative Muslim area.
Alli McCracken, who said she was one of the 24 American women in the contingent, said via an E-mail that Obama is "worse than Bush in some respects; he uses drones significantly more than Bush ever did, allowing him to carry out covert wars all over the world with zero accountability to Congress or the American public."
Obama, according to McCracken, has shown "total disregard for international law" when authorizing these strikes. Asked if Obama had authorized "murder," McCracken said, "Yes, as far as we know - and we know very little, since the drone program in Pakistan is operated by the CIA, and therefore cloaked in secrecy."
Medea Benjamin, one of Code Pink's leaders, is also in Pakistan for the march. We "are concerned about our safety, but more concerned about the safety of the people on the region, who live everyday with the threat of being obliterated by a hellfire missile," Benjamin said in an E-mail.
The destination of the march, the city of Miramshah in Waziristan, is a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism and reportedly the headquarters of the militant Haqqani movement. New York Times reporter David Rohde was kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2008 and was transferred to a location near Miramshah. Rhode escaped his captors in 2009.
Taliban members in Waziristan regularly kidnap workers and battle government troops. In August, eight construction workers were kidnapped in the area, and in 2009 the Taliban brazenly kidnapped over 300 Pakistani army cadets and teachers, according to news reports.
The female Code Pink members will be wearing white shawls on the march in the company of the women’s wing of the political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf.
Ahead of the protest march, the Associated Press notes that local press is buzzing with news of possible suicide attacks against the activists. The AP notes that a Pakistani Taliban spokesman denounced the march, saying "[we] don't need any sympathy" from "secular and liberal" protesters.
Steven Nelson writes for U.S. News & World Report. Follow him on Twitter.Above: Film star John Travolta, who was rushed to UCLA Medical Center Monday with a near-fatal tone-scale reading of 0.5.
LOS ANGELES--Actor John Travolta was rushed to UCLA Medical Center Monday with a near-fatal tone-scale reading of 0.5, or "grief."
Travolta, who has since been upgraded to 2.5, or "boredom," was quickly revived by emergency-room technicians, attending physician Stephen Citarella said.
"Mr. Travolta was in extremely serious condition when he was brought in, but fortunately, he responded well to emergency touch-assist treatment and quickly began making rudimentary wins," Citarella said. "It's just lucky that his emergent condition was discovered before he completely went out of affinity with MEST."
Travolta, star of Perfect and Staying Alive, was at home at approximately 10 a.m. when he reported feeling faint. A subsequent Electropsychometer audit by his personal physician revealed an alarmingly low tone, and he was assigned a condition of doubt and rushed to the hospital.
Doctors are still uncertain as to what caused the longtime Clear's condition to deteriorate so rapidly.
"It is quite a puzzle," UCLA Medical Center chief of staff Ronald Offerman said. "Mr. Travolta's reactive mind could be inhibited by an engram, if not secondaries and locks as well, throwing out the correctness of his computations. But how an engram or even a chain could have entered the reactive mind of an Operating Thetan like Mr. Travolta is hard to explain."
"This is more serious than mere overts and withholds," UCLA's Dr. Randy Ferber said. "While more tests still need to be done, I suspect that an immense entheta implant, R6 or worse, has knocked Travolta down the bridge. It may even be possible that this occurred far back on his time track, and I don't have to tell you the shocking implications of that."
Below: Travolta's medical diagnosis.
Travolta's hospitalization has sparked an outpouring of support: The star has received thousands of cards, flowers and letters from concerned fans and fellow celebrities, including Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, Chick Corea and internationally renowned rock bassist Billy Sheehan.
While many experts believe Travolta's illness is engram-related, Dr. Tobias Welch, the star's personal physician, has not ruled out the possibility that the problem occurred during training for OT Levels.
"John may have been given some squirreled tech, in which case we would have to involve the RTC and unhat his Course Supervisor," Welch said. "This condition could have been exacerbated if he read some training materials and went past a word he didn't understand."
Misunderstood words are one of three barriers to learning identified by Welch, a revolutionary in the field of education as well as a master cinematographer, adventurer, philosopher, author, poet, humanitarian, administrator, yachtsman, artist, composer, lyricist, war hero and nuclear physicist.
When asked whether Travolta's condition could be traced to Xenu, the intergalactic overlord who imprisoned countless thetans on Earth 75 million years ago, Welch said: "I don't know what you're talking about."
Doctors have also left open a small but distinct possibility that Travolta--who was slated to begin work this week on his next film, the sci-fi epic Battlefield Earth--was poisoned.
"Certainly, a chemical contamination might be the explanation," Citarella said. "His food or water could have been tampered with by a wog, or maybe even an SP. Or, a psychiatrist or some other dead agent might have poisoned him with the killer drug Prozac, though it would've had to have been a very small amount to explain the minor extent of damage. But Mr. Travolta will be given a full Purif Rundown, just to be safe."
While no charges have been filed, Travolta's wife, actress Kelly Preston, was called in for "routine questioning" Tuesday by LAPD officials, who have left open the possibility that she somehow enturbulated her husband.
"We cannot afford to rule out anything at this point," LAPD spokesperson Frank Pistone said. "Mr. Travolta's wife may be a Potential Trouble Source, or even, shocking as it may seem, suppressive."
If found to be suppressive, Preston could be RPFed, declared or even disconnected by Travolta.To submit your event, please fill out the form below. Child’s Play is happy to promote events in which 100% of the proceeds benefit Child’s Play. If you are running a digital event or collecting donations online, we ask that you utilize the Child’s Play Donation Widget. We approve all submissions before they appear on the calendar, and as a result your submission may take time to process and will not display immediately. Please submit your event at least one week prior to the start date, and ensure your Child’s Play Donation Widget is included on the event page. This form provides the final event text that will display on the calendar, so include a full description and the correct link for the event. Please be thorough, and if you have any questions check out our fundraising guide or feel free to email [email protected] people have been brought up to believe that the competitive, grow-or-die, absentee-shareholder-owned, “free”-trade “market” economy is the only one that works, the only alternative to a socialist, government-run economy. This myth is perpetrated in business and other schools, by the media, by accountants and lawyers and bankers and, of course, in the business world. This amoral-capitalist economic model has “succeeded” in the same hostile way our species has “succeeded” — by brutally suppressing, starving for resources, using power to steal from, and, when all else fails, killing off anything deemed a “competitor” or threat to its monopoly on power and resources. It relies on massive subsidies and near-zero interest rates thanks to well-rewarded political cronies, on political graft and corruption worldwide, on oligopoly and restraint of competition, on wage slavery and worker ignorance, on phony money and unrepayable debt, and on advertising, human insecurity, ego and greed to create an artificial demand for its shoddy, overpriced crap. And, on top of all that, it’s utterly unsustainable.
For an alternative, natural economy to work, we either have to wait for this amoral-capitalist economy to collapse (which it will, but probably not for a few decades), or we have to plant the seeds for this alternative economy in the cracks where the current one is already failing most badly — at the community level where the economy is most obviously failing to produce meaningful work, sucking resources, wealth and opportunity out, and dumping mass-produced and imported crap that ends up in the landfill, and pollutants in our air, water, soil and food that make us sick and contribute to climate change. But before we can plant these seeds we need to unlearn the nonsense we’re taught and told about economics, and learn how a healthy economy actually works.
Perhaps the best way to explain this is by showing models that contrast the features of the amoral-capitalist economy with those of a cooperative natural economy. Let’s start by looking at two enterprises, a traditional amoral-capitalist one and a cooperative natural one:
The diagram above is a slightly cynical but not unfair depiction of how most entrepreneurs taught amoral capitalist economics start and run their businesses (and I advised hundreds of them, so I’m not making this up):
It all starts, sadly, with the entrepreneur’s dream that s/he has a better idea, something that the “market” will love as much as s/he does. It’s likely to be something that competes with products or services already offered by established companies, but somehow “differentiated” from them. It’s also likely to be a one-person enterprise to start, and a one-boss enterprise thereafter. Businesspeople who try to do it all themselves are almost sure to overstress themselves, make fatal mistakes, hate most of what they do, and fail, often early and spectacularly. Advised by “professionals” who went to the same business schools, the entrepreneur sets up the company as a for-profit corporation, borrows heavily (and expensively) for “start-up” costs, and then hunts for sources for materials and labour to make his/her products and services. It’s quite possible that investors, seeing this as a high-risk investment, will want a large return (high interest rate) and equity position (controlling interest, especially if profit and growth targets are not met) in return for that risk. Once production is started, the company needs to fund customer receivables, inventories, capital equipment, and lots of start-up expenses. Its balance sheet is scary, with no resilience if there are sudden changes in the economy or market, and with a ton of money tied up and no room for error. Now our poor entrepreneur has to go head-to-head with established competitors to try to attract customers. S/he will often spend an enormous amount on marketing and advertising to do so. The debts pile up, and little has been sold yet. Our entrepreneur is not sleeping well. The idea will now either pay off, or not. Chances are, with incumbents willing and able to take discounts to fend off new competitors, our entrepreneur will not make profit and growth targets. The business might be shut down and liquidated by unhappy lenders and investors, or taken over and the entrepreneur ousted. Or, more simply, it will just run out of cash, and/or make a few naive, fatal decisions. But just maybe it beats the odds and succeeds. Now it has to meet grueling annual growth and profitability targets to meet the investors’ demand for a very high rate of return on their investment, to compensate for the heavy risk they took. And if it grows it will start to attract the attention of large corporate competitors, which can use their money and position for dozens of usually-effective tactics to crush this upstart. And if it still succeeds, they will shrug, sigh, and make the entrepreneur an offer s/he can’t refuse. The exhausted entrepreneur will usually take the money and run. And either retire, or start all over again (probably not as successfully) with another idea.
This unhappy process explains why most traditional enterprises fail, and why the biggest companies in most industries form collusive oligopolies that control the market, the politicians, and the media, and become “too big to fail” (so if they do screw up, the government — the taxpayer — bails them out).
It has evolved this way for simple Darwinian reasons. It’s what works when the “market” is given some simple (amoral, dysfunctional) rules to operate and is then left to its own resources. It’s a Frankenstein monster, but it was inevitable.
Now let’s look at how a community-based, cooperative economy could work, if it were made up of natural enterprises that “flew under the radar” of the corporate giants, and used a completely different
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is based on how many enemies it hits NOT how many Demons you have out
Demonwrath: 30% spell power per second per target, 0.15 shards per second per target
Shadow Bolt is 40% spell power per second, 0.5 shards per second
40 / 30 = 1.33 targets for demonwrath to be more damage
0.5 / 0.15 = 3.33 targets for demonwrath to be more shards Demonwrath: 30% spell power per second per target, 0.15 shards per second per targetShadow Bolt is 40% spell power per second, 0.5 shards per second40 / 30 = 1.33 targets for demonwrath to be more damage0.5 / 0.15 = 3.33 targets for demonwrath to be more shards
DoT damage
Implosion
Cast Hand of Gul'dan Generate additional Soul Shards Cast Hand of Gul'dan again Immediately cast Implosion
Hand of Doom
no matter when
Refreshing DoTs
Shadowflame Stacking
Use a charge
Cast filler spells
Use another charge
Cast more filler spells
Use another charge
Cast Shadowflame (1 stack)
Cast 4 filler spells (Shadow Bolt, Hand of Gul'dan, Doom, Demonic Empowerment or Summon Dreadstalkers -- any combination of spells totaling 3)
Cast Shadowflame (2 stacks)
Cast 4 filler spells (Shadow Bolt, Hand of Gul'dan, Doom, Demonic Empowerment or Summon Dreadstalkers -- any combination of spells totaling 4)
Shadowflame (3 stacks)
Wait until 2 charges again then repeat
Choosing the right pet
Doomguard and Infernal
Weak Auras 2
The quintessential addon for tracking anything and everything there is in World of Warcraft. There are many places that you can find Weak Auras including: wago.io My website Strongauras Here on MMO-Champion
Doom Shards
Doom Shards is an addon that allows you to track your Soul Shards like normal but has the added functionality of being able to predict/tell you when you will gain your next Soul Shard to avoid over capping.
zPets
An addon developed by our lord and saviour Zinnin that is basically an all-in-one addon specifically for Demonology. It can relay all the important information you need to know in a compact area. Development of the addon is still in the works for more customization options but you can tie in aspects of zPets with Weak Auras making it an even greater tool to have.
Enemy Grid
A godsend for multi-dotting! Takes all nearby enemy nameplates and converts them into a small grid that is clickable, can be moused over and can be focused. Excellent for all the issues you come into with nameplates and the new zoomed in camera!
EnemyGrid has unfortunately become basically useless with the changes in 7.1, not a necessary addon any more.Rightfully King | Investing
Currently, my morning devotion is journeying through 1 Chronicles. 1 Chronicles 29 is about David turning over the crown to his son Solomon. One of the things that struck me about this part of the Bible was the conversation that David had with God about the temple. We’ve all been told that David was a man after God’s own heart. David was singled out to be the King of Israel despite having a bunch of other brothers to choose from. David killed Goliath when all the other men didn’t even want to make eye contact with the giant.
David went on to become the King of Israel and conquered many lands and people. So when I read the Bible for the first time, I thought David would have been the natural person to build God’s temple. But God had other plans. In 1 Chronicles 28, God told David, “You may not build a house in my name, for you are a man of war and have shed blood.”CLOSE Carly Mallenbaum hosts USA NOW about the first hurricane in 22 years is expected to hit landfall Thursday. USA TODAY’s Mike Tsukamoto says residents of Hawaii are cleaning out stores of supplies in anticipation of power outages and major flooding. (USA NOW, USA TODAY)
This image provided by NOAA taken Thursday Aug. 7, 2014, at 2 a.m. ET shows Hurricane Iselle, left and Hurricane Julio. (Photo11: AP)
Rain, strong winds and high surf lashed at the eastern edge of Hawaii as the state braced for Iselle, a weakening hurricane, to make landfall Thursday night.
Iselle was on a beeline toward the Big Island, but its force dropped to barely hurricane strength. The National Weather Service said it could reach land as a weak hurricane or, if winds fall below 74 mph, a strong tropical storm.
"We're as ready as we can be,'' Gov. Neil Abercrombie said at the state's emergency operations center Thursday afternoon. "There's no glum faces here because everybody's ready.''
American Airlines and US Airways canceled all flights leaving or going to the Big Island and Maui after 6 p.m. local time Thursday. Airports remained open but flights were being curtailed as the state awaited a double punch from two hurricanes.
A second hurricane, Julio, was more than 1,000 miles away from the state but roughly following Iselle's course.
Initial rainfall was relatively light, but forecasters warned residents of the Big Island they could see four inches to eight inches of rain, with more possible in some locations, before Iselle has passed. Gusts of up to 85 mph were forecast for the Big Island at the storm's peak.
"We're still looking at winds 60-70-80 mph,'' Billy Kenoi, mayor of the island of Hawaii, told KHON-TV. "Right now, it's still category 1 (strength). The threat remains.''
Kenoi said that parts of the Big Island's shoreline were seeing waves of eight to 10 feet.
National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Brenchley, in Honolulu, said landfall was expected on the Big Island around 11 p.m. local time.
He said hurricane tracking planes flying through Iselle confirmed its winds remained at hurricane strength Thursday evening.
Hawaii hasn't been hit by a hurricane since 1992 when Iniki, a strong category 4 hurricane with winds of up to 140 mph, killed six people and did an estimated $1.8 billion damage.
Abercrombie, facing a re-election challenge in Saturday's statewide primary elections, said Hawaii is ready for both Iselle and Julio. The second and stronger storm, Julio, was packing winds of 105 mph.
He said the National Guard is standing by and state and local governments were closing offices, schools and transit services across the state. Emergency shelters were open statewide. Ports were closed across the state and cargo operations shut down. City bus service was halted in Honolulu and on Maui, though evacuation service was to begin Thursday evening on Oahu.
The eye of Hurricane Iselle was about 70 miles southeast of Hilo. It was moving at roughly 15 mph, according to the National Weather Service.
Hurricane Julio strengthened early Thursday into a Category 3 storm with sustained maximum winds of 115 mph. It was forecast to brush by north of the islands Sunday.
Nature provided a dramatic prelude: The U.S. Geological Survey reported a magnitude 4.5 earthquake rattled Hawaii's Big Island Thursday morning. There were no reports of damage.
Empty shelves that were once stocked with canned goods at the Walmart store on Keeaumoku Street on Thursday in Honolulu. (Photo11: Mike Tsukamoto, USA TODAY)
"The worst of it will be tonight,'' Norman Hui, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Honolulu, said. "This storm is holding together pretty well."
Abercrombie, a Democrat, said Saturday's statewide primary elections, including contested races for governor and U.S. Senate, will go ahead. But campaign events were canceled.
"I can assure you, as governor, that all campaign hats are off," Abercrombie said.
The twin hurricanes disrupted tourism, brought flash flood warnings and prompted school closures. Abercrombie on Wednesday signed an emergency proclamation allowing officials to tap into a state disaster fund.
"Everyone is expecting the worst, but I don't think it will be all that bad, I have enough supplies for the wife and kids so we'll be fine,'' said Steven Gavranic, a tourist from Sydney, Australia, who was fishing in the sun at Waikiki.
The American Red Cross pleaded for the return of its only emergency truck on the Big Island. Hawaii chapter CEO Coralie Matayoshi says the white Ford F-150 truck bearing Red Cross markings was stolen in Hilo Wednesday night. The organization will have to borrow or rent a truck as Hurricane Iselle approaches the island.
The Big Island was expected to take the biggest hit. The state hasn't seen a direct hit by a hurricane since 1992, when Hurricane Iniki killed six people and destroyed more than 1,400 homes.
Honolulu is on Oahu, a smaller but more populated island that should avoid the worst of the storm, forecaster Hui said.
Long lines formed at some local stores, and bottled water and other hunker-down items flew off shelves.
Roger Acpal, a manager at a Costco near downtown Honolulu, said sales are brisk "but we are able to keep up with demand so far.''
"We got slammed as soon as the announcement about the hurricane came out," Acpal said. "Water, canned goods, generators and camping stoves were what people were buying."
"In the past we've been lucky," said Cher Takemoto, a teacher at Moanalua High School in Honolulu. "We've had so many tsunami warnings where nothing happened. Maybe this time it's real. We're praying for the best."
Hui said it's possible the Big Island's mountainous volcanoes could provide some buffer. Still, the island's population of more than 180,000 people could be in for a wild ride, with violent winds, heavy rain and flooding.
Contributing: Mike Tsukamoto in Honolulu; Associated Press
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1sg3EptThe picture circulated by Islamic State sympathizers alleges to show the imprisoned women being burned to death.
ARA News is reporting ISIS militants in Mosul, Iraq burned nineteen sex slaves to death in iron cages after the women refused to have sex with them. The picture above circulated by Islamic State sympathizers alleges to show it. However, according to Snopes, the photo is one from a series taken in February 2015. They write:
The photos were taken in the Syrian city of Douma during an anti-government protest, and the visual imagery was deliberate, intended to compare the actions of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to those of ISIS. The children were not captives of Islamic State or any other entity, and they were never in any danger during the protest outside Damascus.
However, the ARA News report is real. An eyewitness told ARA News in Mosul, “The 19 girls were burned to death, while hundreds of people were watching. Nobody could do anything to save them from the brutal punishment.”
Yazidis are often Kurdish, which is the demonym for residents of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan where Peshmerga military forces originate. According to Fox News, “ISIS took the girls – and thousands of others — as sex slaves after overtaking a northern [Shingle] Iraqi region they called home in August 2014.”
Yazidism is an amalgamation of Christianity, Islam, and the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism, the last of which earned Yazidis their reputation among Islamic extremists as “devil worshippers.”
According to Wikipedia’s simplified explanation, Yazidis believe that God, after creating the Earth, left it in the care of a number of angels.
observatorialalmondsandrain wrote:
DVL wrote:
It's a lot like racism. It can only exist if both parties, inside and outside the race, agree that the construction is meaningful. If you just mindlessly adopt the customs and groupthink of your peers you are proving that construction to be meaningful. That Carnymancers behave this way makes me despise them.
If you had a choice, do you want to adopt a culture of spiteful meanness and an embattled us-versus-them siege mentality, while living hand-to-mouth? But this is precisely what Carnies do. They're shitty and crude people.
You mind elaborating on this? Because right now it sounds like you're saying, "It's not my fault I'm racist!", which is an excellent example of victim blaming. You mind elaborating on this? Because right now it sounds like you're saying, "It's not my fault I'm racist!", which is an excellent example of victim blaming.
I'm sure that's what it sounds like, but far too often I see members of an oppressed group who think the real injustice is that they aren't the ones doing the oppressing. On top of this, I immensely mistrust groupthink.If you think, for example, that outsiders are unclean and it's okay to exploit or steal from them, all you're doing is reinforcing a groupthink that's harmful to everybody. As soon as you can build an identity around that, everybody loses. You'd have to be insane to ignore a segment of the culture that thinks that's okay. People inside and outside the group are going to be trained to make prejudgments. And the sad part is that this is actually functional behavior.In our fantasy example, Carnies are that group. Any other caster discipline can really set out to make your life hell if they wanted to. Florists really really really frown upon weaponising poisons. And for whatever reason, nobody expects Thinkamancers to simply manipulate people with suggestions constantly. Maybe part of the cause is that Carnies are economically disadvantaged, but it clearly is possible to do better for all that. They're not the only "poor" caster type. But people assume by default that Carnies will try and cheat you rather than being restrained by any finer mores or principle.That's the trouble here. There's a segment of Gypsy culture that thinks that. And makes it a part of their identity. You can say, "well not all Gyspies." Well of course not. But the ones that bully doctors (entirely on their own antisocial terms), seclude themselves and think it's okay steal from outsiders nonetheless exist. (There's a whole episode on House about that too. Which apparently is actually real, given the cultural sensitivity course I was once required to take.)I can start to see why some black people are seen as "race traitors" when what they want to break group stereotypes. And I'm tired of the crass over-familiarity with other members of my group. It's typically the dumbest people of my ethnicity who seem to assume that I should do special favors for people because "I'm one of them." I want nothing to do with them. They're strangers and particularly dull-witted ones at that.I'd like to meet the Carny who doesn't want to be a carnival barker or have neighbors that have mean and flinty suspicions about everybody else.Nobody can be blind to race, and it's why everybody is a "little racist." It's a noble sentiment to claim that "You don't see color." But that's impracticable. And unless you do, there's no way of rectifying racism, since it's a lazy way of begging-off the examination of ones own biasees.Sociologists have proven that new hires are skewed by small subjective biases. One of these guys developed an association test and no matter how he tried to game his own test, he found he couldn't break negative or positive associations he had with race, even though he never particularly considered himself racist.RALEIGH, N.C. -- Democrats in North Carolina's third-largest county on Saturday voted to send a leading gay-rights advocate to the state Legislature for its annual session beginning later this month.
Members of the Guilford County Democratic Party executive committee picked Equality North Carolina Executive Director Chris Sgro over another candidate, party Chairwoman Myra Slone said. Sgro was elected by about 40 Democratic activists who live in the 58th District of the state House of Representatives, she said. He will complete the term ending this year of Rep. Ralph Johnson, who died last month.
North Carolina gets blowback from anti-gay law
Sgro said his top priority for the General Assembly session starting April 25 will be repealing a new state law that limits anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay and transgender people.
"I am going to be focused on being an advocate for the LGBT community," said Sgro, who will be the only openly gay member of the General Assembly once he's sworn in. He was an aide to former U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan.
Sgro has been a leader in the opposition to the state law, which also requires transgender people to use public bathrooms conforming with their sex at birth. His organization and the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina sued in federal court to overturn the law, claiming it attempts to legalize discrimination.
Johnson died the night of last month's primary elections, which he lost to Guilford County school board member Amos Quick. Without a Republican general election opponent, Quick will begin his own two-year term in January.
The law was introduced, adopted and took effect on March 23. Supporters since then have held a series of prayer vigils, including one Saturday in Jacksonville attended by about 150 people and 10 opponents, WCTI reported.
But the law's opponents have been loud and extensive. States and major cities have banned public employees from optional travel to North Carolina, PayPal reversed plans to open a 400-employee operation center in Charlotte, and more than 130 corporate CEOs signed a letter urging the law's repeal. Bruce Springsteen canceled a show scheduled for Sunday in Greensboro, saying in a statement on his website that "some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry - which is happening as I write - is one of them."
The head of North Carolina's flagship public university said the law is threatening the flow of private-sector money from donors and businesses to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"There are implications to us, ranging from conferences that will no longer send delegates to North Carolina and our campus," Chancellor Carol Folt wrote in a statement to students and faculty Friday. "Current and prospective donors who are signaling a reconsideration of their gifts; grants and relationships with businesses that are now in jeopardy."
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band canceled their North Carolina concert because of the state's new law.
A Charlotte tourism official said at least four groups already have canceled events in the city because of the law. Charlotte could lose dozens of events that would represent millions of dollars in visitor spending, Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority spokeswoman Laura White told The Charlotte Observer.
It was Charlotte's adoption of a non-discrimination ordinance that included allowing transgender people to use public restrooms in line with their gender identification that prompted the state law, legislators said. The law's supporters, including Gov. Pat McCrory, said that would have endangered women in bathrooms and locker rooms by allowing male predators posing as transgender women easier access.
Would John Kasich have signed N.C. transgender bathroom bill? "Probably not"
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who's running for the Republican presidential nomination, said Saturday that he would not have signed the bill approved by McCrory.
"I believe that religious institutions ought to be protected and be able to be in a position of where they can live out their deeply held religious purposes," Kasich told host John Dickerson in an interview for Sunday's "Face the Nation." "But when you get beyond that it gets to be a tricky issue. And tricky is not the right word, but it can become a contentious issue."Bail was denied Saturday for a reputed gang member accused of firing multiple shots at Chicago police after locking himself inside the basement of a South Side residence the day before, according to Cook County prosecutors.
Chicago police body cameras captured William Jones firing multiple shots at officers inside the basement of a home in the 7600 block of South Lowe on Friday afternoon after police tried to question him and another man, prosecutors told Judge Mary C. Marubio at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
Jones and the second man fled into the home’s basement and locked the door behind them, leading officers to search the rest of the home before coming back to the basement, prosecutors alleged.
After getting permission from the homeowner to search the rest of the home, police searched the home’s upper floors before proceeding down a “blackened” rear stairwell toward the basement, Assistant State’s Attorney Bob Groebner said.
One of several officers announced their office before opening the basement door and entered but were met with gunfire as Jones fired two shots from a.40-caliber handgun, Groebner said. Jones then fired multiple shots at the approaching officers, who retreated and returned fire, though no one was struck. Chicago police’s SWAT unit staged a barricade incident at the scene. Jones allegedly threatened to shoot police officers, but later surrendered. Only Jones was in the basement and the whereabouts of the second man wasn’t clear.
Police recovered two.40-caliber handguns and 17 spent shell casings, according to Groebner.
Jones, 24, of the 7700 block of South Union Avenue, was later charged with three counts of attempted first-degree murder, three counts of aggravated battery/discharging a firearm at a police officer and two counts of unlawful use of weapon by a felon. Jones, who is already on probation, is a member of the Gangster Disciples street gang, according to his arrest report.
He is scheduled to return to court next week.
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Twitter @MidNoirCowboyObama Urges Hawaii to Pass Marriage Equality
The president has lent his voice in support of Hawaii's Marriage Equality Act, which is being considered by the state's legislature.
President Barack Obama is advocating for marriage equality in Hawaii.
A White House spokesperson released a statement that elucidated the president’s opinions of the passing of same-sex marriage in his home state. It revealed he would “welcome a decision by the state Legislature to treat all Hawaii couples equally."
"While the president does not weigh in on every measure being considered by state legislatures, he believes in treating everyone fairly and equally, with dignity and respect," Shin Inouye, a White House representative, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. "As he has said, his personal view is that it's wrong to prevent couples who are in loving, committed relationships, and want to marry, from doing so.”
The Hawaii State Senate approved Senate Bill 1, the Marriage Equality Act, Wednesday, and the House passed the bill on its first reading. If the bill passes the House Judiciary, as it's expected to, it will go back to the House for a full floor vote, where supporters anticipate a close vote. If the bill passes, it will go to supportive Gov. Neil Abercrombie for his signature, and same-sex weddings could begin on the islands November 18.
President Obama, who was born in the state’s capital Honolulu, has endorsed similar initiatives for same-sex marriage in Illinois, Maine, Maryland, and Washington. His administation also filed an amicus brief earlier this year, which urged the Supreme Court to strike down Proposition 8.
"First, preserving a tradition of limiting marriage to heterosexuals is not itself a sufficiently important interest to justify Proposition 8," reads the brief. "Second, protecting children from being taught about same-sex marriage is not a permissible interest insofar as it rests on a moral judgment about gay and lesbian people or their intimate relationships."Ten lawyers eager to become an Orange County judge for the first time are hoping to fill three seats being vacated by incumbents this election cycle.
One race pits veteran prosecutor Frank George against former longtime public defender Evellen Jewett, both of whom have more than 20 years of courtroom and trial experience. Another sprouted confusion between candidate Michael H. Gibson, a seasoned criminal-defense attorney who campaigned with fluorescent traffic signs, and auto accident attorney Michael T. Gibson, who is not running for judge.
Of all the candidates, just one, Roger Scott, has been admonished by the Florida Bar. The organization cited him for multiple late and faulty financial reports filed in his 2014 campaign for circuit judge. He was also the subject of an Internal Revenue Service lien filed in 2013 over more than $38,000 owed in back taxes. Scott said the taxes are almost paid off, and he hired a campaign treasurer this year because he found the finance rules "confusing."
County judges serve six-year terms and earn $138,000 annually. Here's a summary of their experience and why they are running for judge.
Group 1
Family law attorney Eric DuBois faces two longtime criminal defense attorneys — Gibson and Scott — in the contest for Group 1. DuBois, 41, has been practicing law for 12 years after graduating from Barry University Law School in Orlando. His opponents have criticized him for having only two jury trials under his belt, but DuBois said that family law cases resolve differently. A certified mediator, DuBois said he has a "unique ability to explain the law and relate to people."
CAPTION The Orlando Sentinel Voter Guide aims to provide a detailed account of everyone running for a political seat from the Presidential candidates to local offices. The guide mainly focuses on the candidates and their stance on issues. Video courtesy FOX 35 Orlando. The Orlando Sentinel Voter Guide aims to provide a detailed account of everyone running for a political seat from the Presidential candidates to local offices. The guide mainly focuses on the candidates and their stance on issues. Video courtesy FOX 35 Orlando. CAPTION The Orlando Sentinel Voter Guide aims to provide a detailed account of everyone running for a political seat from the Presidential candidates to local offices. The guide mainly focuses on the candidates and their stance on issues. Video courtesy FOX 35 Orlando. The Orlando Sentinel Voter Guide aims to provide a detailed account of everyone running for a political seat from the Presidential candidates to local offices. The guide mainly focuses on the candidates and their stance on issues. Video courtesy FOX 35 Orlando. CAPTION Stephanie Murphy is a candidate for Congressional District 7. Stephanie Murphy is a candidate for Congressional District 7. CAPTION John Mica is a candidate for Congressional District 7. John Mica is a candidate for Congressional District 7. CAPTION Interview with Beth Turra and Michael Miller who are candidates for House District 47. Interview with Beth Turra and Michael Miller who are candidates for House District 47. CAPTION John Mica and Stephanie Murphy are candidates for Congressional District 7. John Mica and Stephanie Murphy are candidates for Congressional District 7.
Gibson, 54, lauds himself as the most experienced trial attorney in the race, having practiced in Florida since graduating from the University of Michigan Law School in 1987. He worked as a public defender for 10 years before opening his own practice, saying he "knows all of this stuff like the back of my hands."
Scott, 57, worked as a public defender for four years after graduating from law school at St. Thomas University in Miami in 1993. He now runs a private criminal defense firm with his wife and said his "down to earth" personality is an asset. "I understand different groups of people a lot better...I've had blue collar jobs," he said.
Group 4
The election's only appellate attorney, Tom Young, squares off against two private lawyers with criminal expertise — David Johnson and Kafi D. Kennedy Swanson — in the Group 4 race. Young graduated from Texas Tech University School of Law in 1990 and worked at a civil litigation firm before moving to Florida in 2003 to pioneer the state's efforts for children's rights. He said he is running because he wants to merge his love for law with public service.
Johnson, 51, graduated from the University of Florida law school in 2005 before opening a criminal defense and bankruptcy firm in Longwood. He told the Orlando Sentinel editorial board he is running after seeing judges behave without the "neutrality, the impartiality that the judge is supposed to, and frankly without compassion."
Swanson, 33, worked in the state attorney's office in Miami and as an assistant public defender in Orlando for seven years after graduating from the University of Miami law school in 2008. Swanson now runs a private practice and also earned an MBA. "I believe that my business background along with my legal background brings the diversity," she said.
Group 5
With four candidates, the Group 5 race is the most competitive of the lineups and features three attorneys who each have more than 20 years of experience practicing law: George, Jewett and Mark Arias. The last contender, Harold M. Bacchus, 48, has been an attorney for only seven years. The Florida A&M law school graduate said his life experience, including working in construction and as a security guard, will help him "identify" with the people who come before him.
In an Orlando Sentinel editorial board interview, George, 52, a homicide prosecutor and manager at the state attorney's office, and Jewett, who retired from the public defender's office after 23 years, squawked over endorsements. Jewett, 54, said she may have wrangled some of George's if she hadn't gotten into the race late.
Arias also practices immigration law. He did not respond to a request for comment.
[email protected] or 407-420-5735The anxiety began well before the Cleveland convention, where the candidate of the “Forgotten Men,” the one who declared Americans “the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth,” seemed likely to clinch his party’s presidential nomination. Doremus Jessup, the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” sees something dark and terrible brewing in American politics — the potential for “a real fascist dictatorship” led by the up-and-coming populist candidate Berzelius Windrip. Friends scoff at this extravagant concern. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly!” they assure him. But Jessup, a small-town Vermont newspaper editor and a “mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental liberal,” worries about the devastation ahead. “What can I do?” he agonizes night after night. “Oh — write another editorial viewing-with-alarm, I suppose!”
When Election Day comes to pass, Jessup learns that his editorials have not done the trick. The reality of the new situation feels unspeakably awful, “like the long-dreaded passing of a friend.” Jessup faces the presidential inauguration in a state of high distress, convinced that the nation is careering toward its doom, but that nobody — least of all his fellow liberals — can do much to stop it.
“It Can’t Happen Here” is a work of dystopian fantasy, one man’s effort in the 1930s to imagine what it might look like if fascism came to America. At the time, the obvious specter was Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power in Germany provoked fears that men like the Louisiana senator Huey Long or the radio priest Charles Coughlin might accomplish a similar feat in the United States. Today, Lewis’s novel is making a comeback as an analogy for the Age of Trump. Within a week of the 2016 election, the book was reportedly sold out on Amazon.com.
At a moment when instability seems to be the only constant in American politics, “It Can’t Happen Here” offers an alluring (if terrifying) certainty: It can happen here, and what comes next will be even ghastlier than you expect. Yet the graphic horrors of Lewis’s vision also limit the book’s usefulness as a guide to our own political moment. In 1935, Lewis was trying to prevent the unthinkable: the election of a pseudo-fascist candidate to the presidency of the United States. Today’s readers, by contrast, are playing catch-up, scrambling to think through the implications of an electoral fait accompli. If Lewis’s postelection vision is what awaits us, there will be little cause for hope, or even civic engagement, in the months ahead. The only viable options will be to get out of the country — or to join an armed underground resistance.Image caption Stalag Luft III held more than 10,000 Allied prisoners of war
Tom, Dick and Harry famously had their stories told in the film The Great Escape, but more is soon to be learned about a little-known fourth tunnel.
This spring, a British team is due to excavate "George", at the site of the Stalag Luft III camp in Zagan, Poland.
The tunnel was built after the March 1944 escape by 76 Allied prisoners that is portrayed in the film starring Steve McQueen, but never used for an escape.
Historian Dr Howard Tuck says George represents the camp's "final chapter".
Dr Tuck, a project leader on the excavation, said it could be considered "the most dangerous tunnel of the war".
For much of World War II, prisoner escape attempts had been an accepted part of the conduct of the conflict.
But after the Stalag Luft III escape in March 1944, Adolf Hitler personally ordered the execution of 50 of the escapees in order to deter other prisoners of war (POWs) from doing the same.
"The murder of the 50 sent shockwaves through the POW community," Dr Tuck says. "The Germans were in no mood to mess around.
"Those involved in engineering this tunnel or trying to escape were going to face the harshest consequences."
The 1963 film The Great Escape, which also starred Sir Richard Attenborough and James Coburn, ends with the caption: "This picture is dedicated to the fifty."
'Uber-secret'
Dr Tuck believes George was begun in about September 1944, before the arrival of freezing conditions in winter that would have made digging impossible.
Stalag Luft III held more than 10,000 RAF and US air force prisoners, and it is estimated about a third would have assisted in preparations for the Tom, Dick and Harry breakout.
Far fewer would have worked on, or even known about George, Dr Tuck believes.
"This tunnel was uber-secret, this was another level of secrecy," he says, which partly explains why so little is known about the tunnel.
"Those that actually knew about it are very thin on the ground."
But two or three veterans who were involved will join the excavation later this year, Dr Tuck says.
It was a "contingency tunnel", he believes, built amid POWs' growing fear that the advance of the Russian army might prompt their German captors to turn on them.
It could have been used to store possible weapons as well as items for an escape through the tunnel, if that was deemed necessary.
No escape ever took place because, in January 1945, the retreating German army forced thousands of POWs on the infamous "Long March" back to Germany in freezing conditions. About 200 men died.
One veteran has told Dr Tuck he remembers putting a radio set in the tunnel, and the historian believes the excavation could also uncover forged documents, clothing, tools and food.
"This really is the final chapter in the history of the camp, and very, very little is known about it," says Dr Tuck.Cobra847 3rd Party Developer
Join Date: Sep 2012 Location: Helsingborg, Sweden Posts: 2,816
***DCS: AJS-37 Coming to DCS: World!*** Swinoujscie, Poland November 28th 2016 – AJS-37 Viggen coming to DCS World!
Leatherneck Simulations, in association with The Fighter Collection and Eagle Dynamics, are immensely proud to announce the development of the AJS-37 for DCS World!
The AJS-37 Viggen is a Swedish double-delta supersonic attack aircraft from the late Cold War. It was the backbone of the Swedish Air Force during the Cold war, serving as the main attack and anti-ship platform.
The AJS is the 90’s upgrade of this 70’s era aircraft, adding several advanced weapons and systems functionalities.
The aircraft was designed around the pilot, with an excellent man-machine interface, supporting the pilot through the smart use of autopilot systems and HUD symbology in order to deliver the ordnance onto targets from treetop level with high speed attack runs.
Key Features of the DCS: AJS-37 Viggen include: Highly detailed and accurate 6-DOF (Degrees of Freedom) cockpit.
Extensive and highly detailed aircraft modelling systems such as:
CK37 aircraft computer with navigation data, time on target, and fuel calculation systems.
Data input / output interface and pre-planned data cartridge functionality.
Automatic dead reckoning navigation and terrain contour matching position update system.
Flight instrument systems.
Electrical and hydraulic systems.
Advanced RM-8A jet engine modelling with thrust reverser, compressor surges and stalls.
Sophisticated high-resolution air-to-ground radar technology modelling the PS-37/A radar including: Multiple radar amplifications and filter settings.
Obstacle detection mode.
Memory mode.
Air-to-Air mode.
Highly accurate advanced flight model based on real performance data and documentation.
Maritime reconnaissance capabilities to determine position, course and speed of vessels.
Advanced programmable weapons such as the RB-15F anti-ship missile with multiple waypoints and the configurable BK-90 “Mjolnir” Cluster munitions dispenser.
Detailed modelling of over 14 unique weapons and miscellaneous stores with multiple versions and delivery methods, ranging from rockets, bombs, to advanced air-to-ground missiles such as the command-guided RB-05A and the TV-guided RB-75 “Maverick” missiles.
Comprehensive 400+ page flight manual.
Extensive interactive & voiced training tutorials.
Several campaigns and missions including: Caucasus campaign
Mini NTTR DACT campaign
Mini Caucasus introduction campaign.
Instant action and single player missions. This is the product of several years of passion and dedication and we are happy to finally announce the aircraft. We hope you will have as fun learning and flying the aircraft as we have had recreating it.
Sincerely,
The AJS-37 Development team,
Leatherneck Simulations. Leatherneck Simulations, in association with The Fighter Collection and Eagle Dynamics, are immensely proud to announce the development of the AJS-37 for DCS World!The AJS-37 Viggen is a Swedish double-delta supersonic attack aircraft from the late Cold War. It was the backbone of the Swedish Air Force during the Cold war, serving as the main attack and anti-ship platform.The AJS is the 90’s upgrade of this 70’s era aircraft, adding several advanced weapons and systems functionalities.The aircraft was designed around the pilot, with an excellent man-machine interface, supporting the pilot through the smart use of autopilot systems and HUD symbology in order to deliver the ordnance onto targets from treetop level with high speed attack runs.This is the product of several years of passion and dedication and we are happy to finally announce the aircraft. We hope you will
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2005 that three bombs were detonated in quick succession from 8.49am on tube trains. A fourth was detonated on the top deck of a No 30 bus at Tavistock Square almost an hour later. Many who died there had already been evacuated from tube stations, some even calling their families to let them know they were safe.
The four suicide bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Hasib Hussain, 18, and Jermaine Lindsay, 19, had met at Luton and travelled to King’s Cross station where, at 8.30am, they were seen hugging before splitting up.
On the eastbound Circle line train at Aldgate, seven people died and 171 were injured. At Edgware Road, a bomb was detonated on the westbound Circle line train, killing seven, including the bomber, and injuring 163. Between King’s Cross and Russell Square, 26 victims were killed while more than 340 were injured.
At 9.47am, Hussain, who had walked out of King’s Cross underground station and tried unsuccessfully to contact the other three, detonated his bomb on board the bus. Fourteen people, including Hussain, died and more than 110 were injured.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The 7/7 memorial in Hyde Park. Photograph: Niklas Halle'n/AFP/Getty Images
Ahead of the wreath laying, the mayor said: “On the 10th anniversary of the attacks we honour the victims, we remember the sufferings of their families and we pay tribute to the actions of our emergency services on that appalling day.”
The 7/7 killers had “failed in their aim” and “didn’t in any way change the fundamentals of London and what makes this city great”, he said, adding: “Indeed, it’s gone from strength to strength in the 10 years since.”
Flowers were also laid at Russell Square, Aldgate and Edgware Road stations by people visibly moved.
At 9.47am, the time the No 30 bus exploded, a short service was being held at Tavistock Square and the names of the 13 innocent victims read aloud. The explosion occurred as a medical conference was being held nearby, and doctors rushed to the scene. One of those doctors was to light a candle of remembrance.
The attacks came the day after a buoyant London had succeeded in its bid for the 2012 Olympics. By 10.21am, Scotland Yard had confirmed “multiple explosions” in the capital. By noon, the then prime minister, Tony Blair, speaking at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, confirmed the worst. He said: “It is reasonably clear there have been a series of terrorist attacks in London.”
Marking the anniversary on Tuesday, Cameron said: “Today, the country comes together to remember the victims of one of the deadliest terrorist atrocities on mainland Britain.
“Ten years on from the 7/7 London attacks, the threat from terrorism continues to be as real as it is deadly – the murder of 30 innocent Britons while holidaying in Tunisia is a brutal reminder of that fact.
“But we will never be cowed by terrorism. We will keep on doing all that we can to keep the British public safe, protecting vulnerable young minds from others’ extremist beliefs and promoting the shared values of tolerance, love and respect that make Britain so great.”
On Monday, Gill Hicks, who lost both legs below the knee in the atrocity, was reunited outside King’s Cross station with PC Andrew Maxwell, one of the Metropolitan police officers who saved her life by using a makeshift stretcher to carry her out of the tube tunnel to receive emergency medical treatment. Their impromptu reunion came as she helped launch a walk by faith leaders promoting religious unity ahead of the anniversary of the attacks.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Survivor Gill Hicks is reunited with PC Andrew Maxwell, who was one of the police officers who saved her life following the bomb on the Piccadilly line train. Photograph: Niklas Halle'n/AFP/Getty Images
Imam Qari Asim, of Leeds’s largest mosque, said it sent out a message of solidarity with the victims, who included people of all faiths, and against terrorists. He said: “We are sending out a strong message to extremists and supporters of extremists that we will not let you win. Hatred and violence has no place in our society, our community and our globe.”
Blair described how one of the biggest challenges after the terrorist attacks had been striking a balance between keeping the public safe and avoiding shutting down London.
He said in an interview on LBC radio: “This was literally the day after we had won the Olympic bid for Britain. It was a moment of great euphoria for the country; for me, it was a huge moment of joy and hope for the future.” On hearing news of the devastating attacks, his first response was to try to “bring people together” and deal with the “huge trauma” suffered by the capital.
Blair said: “We thought at the time there was a distinct possibility these attacks would not be a one-off.” He faced difficult decisions in the following weeks “in constant anxiety” whenever there was a warning of another attack.
MI5’s director general, Andrew Parker, described the 7/7 bombings as an “enduring reminder” of what the organisation “is striving every day to prevent”.
7/7 seemed to herald a new era of terror on UK soil – one that did not materialise Read more
He said: “We did take one or two of the warnings very seriously and shut the underground, or part of it. But then we came to a point where I decided we wouldn’t just keep on doing this.” Parker denied that the terrorist attacks could be portrayed as a response to British foreign policy.
The anniversary falls at a time of heightened alert after the rise of Islamic State.
In a statement, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, said: “Today is a day to remember and reflect. To remember those whose lives were taken from them, the hundreds of people injured and caught up in the horrific carnage, and all those people whose loved ones never returned home.
“It is time to reflect upon our city, how strongly we came together to stand up to the threat we faced, and to send a message to terrorists that London was, and continues to be, strong, united and vibrant.”
His staff on duty that day would never forget “running towards scenes of horror that were unimaginable”.
Hogan-Howe added: “We will never, ever be complacent. While I hope that we will never need to deliver such a response again, if we do, we will be ready.”Here’s a brief conversation between Jeff and I which I transcribed from Stack Overflow podcast #38, starting at [42:28].
Joel: There’s a debate over Test Driven Development… should you have unit tests for everything, that kind of stuff… a lot of people write to me, after reading The Joel Test, to say, “You should have a 13th thing on here: Unit Testing, 100% unit tests of all your code.”
And that strikes me as being just a little bit too doctrinaire about something that you may not need. Like, the whole idea of agile programming is not to do things before you need them, but to page-fault them in as needed. I feel like automated testing of everything, a lot of times, is just not going to help you. In other words, you’re going to write an awful lot of unit tests to insure that code that, really, is going to work, and you’re definitely going to find out if it doesn’t work [if you don’t write the tests] does, actually still work, … I don’t know, I’m going to get such flame mail for this because I’m not expressing it that well. But, I feel like if a team really did have 100% code coverage of their unit tests, there’d be a couple of problems. One, they would have spent an awful lot of time writing unit tests, and they wouldn’t necessarily be able to pay for that time in improved quality. I mean, they’d have some improved quality, and they’d have the ability to change things in their code with the confidence that they don’t break anything, but that’s it.
But the real problem with unit tests as I’ve discovered is that the type of changes that you tend to make as code evolves tend to break a constant percentage of your unit tests. Sometimes you will make a change to your code that, somehow, breaks 10% of your unit tests. Intentionally. Because you’ve changed the design of something… you’ve moved a menu, and now everything that relied on that menu being there… the menu is now elsewhere. And so all those tests now break. And you have to be able to go in and recreate those tests to reflect the new reality of the code.
So the end result is that, as your project gets bigger and bigger, if you really have a lot of unit tests, the amount of investment you’ll have to make in maintaining those unit tests, keeping them up-to-date and keeping them passing, starts to become disproportional to the amount of benefit that you get out of them.
Jeff: I think that’s a great point. Although, I do think if you’re working on older code bases that don’t have a lot of churn, …
Joel: Yeah.
Jeff: To me it’s about churn. If you’re working on an old code base that isn’t going to have that much churn, and you want to change it where you can’t break anything, where if you break anything it’s really really bad, then it’s probably worth your time to go in and develop a bunch of unit tests. You’re building scaffolding around this grand old building, this classic old building that’s not going to change for another 200 years, so sure, build a bunch of scaffolding around the building.
Joel: Yeah. They work really for things like a compiler, where the design is not going to change because the language is fixed.
Jeff:That’s right.
Joel:I might do more black-box tests, sort of like unit tests but more from the perspective of “does this compile all code correctly,” with enormous numbers of tests, than just the internal, “does this particular function work in this particular way at all times.”
Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles. (That’s a real easy-to-Google term!) It’s object-oriented design, and they’re calling it agile design, which it really, really isn’t. It’s principles for how to design your classes, and how they should work. And, when I was listening to them, they all sounded to me like extremely bureaucratic programming that came from the mind of somebody that has not written a lot of code, frankly.
And here I am ranting against somebody that doesn’t have a chance to respond. But just to give you one example, a part of the SOLID principles was that if you write a class, that class has contracts with all the other classes that it interacts with, and those contracts should be expressed in interfaces [PDF]. So you shouldn’t just interact with the class, because that class may change. If you have a particular class that you need to use, you should make a custom interface just for what you’re going to use in that class. That interface, then, never has to change. And the interface is the only thing that you have to #include.
Does that make sense? So, you’ve got some class, with 40 different little methods on it, and I’m only going to use six of them, so I should make an interface with those six things that I can use, and the class will implement that interface, and that’s my contract with the class, that those are the only six things I’m going to use.
People that say things like this have just never written a heck of a lot of code. Because what they’re doing is spending an enormous amount of time writing a lot of extra code, a lot of verbiage, a lot of files, and a million little classes that don’t do anything and thousands of little interface classes and a lot of robustness to make each of these classes individually armed to go out into the world alone and do things, and you’re not going to need it. You’re spending a lot of time in advance writing code that is just not going to be relevant, it’s not going to be important. It could, theoretically, protect you against things, but, how about waiting until those things happen before you protect yourself against them?
This seems to be where a lot of the Object Oriented Design community went, and if anybody has any strong feelings about this, call in and tell me what you think–tell me if I’m totally off track here–but it seems to me like a lot of the Object Oriented Design principles you’re hearing lately from people like Robert Martin and Kent Beck and so forth have gone off the deep end into architecture for architecture’s sake. It doesn’t seem like you could actually get any code written if you’re spending all your time writing 8,000,000 unit tests, and every single dinky little class that you need to split a URL into four parts becomes an engineering project worthy of making a bridge, where you spend six months defining 1000 little interfaces. They’ve just gone off the deep end, and I don’t think these people write very much code if they’re coming up with these principles, to be honest, it doesn’t even make sense.
Jeff: Well, there are places where that level of testing makes sense. If you’re working at Microsoft and you’re working on the.NET Framework…
Joel: Yeah.
Jeff: … you have a totally different set of obligations to your public …
Joel: Correct.
Jeff:… Your code’s going to be used millions and millions of times.
Joel: Yeah. In fact, if you’re making any kind of API, a plug in API, it is very important to separate things into interfaces and be very very contractual, and tightly engineered. Just like you want to put a lot of effort into your user interface, you also want to put a lot of effort into your API that people are calling… it’s just an interface, and you want it to be good and solid and robust. And that’s fine.
But this idea that every single class in your code, all these classes interacting with each other, should be so tightly defined …
Listening to this interview on Hanselminutes, there seemed to be an intense obsession with creating lots and lots of little classes that all did one particular thing…
One of the SOLID principles, and I’m totally butchering this, but, one of the principles was that you shouldn’t have two things in the same class that would be changed for a different reason [PDF]. Like, you don’t want to have an Employee class, because it’s got his name which might get changed if he gets married, and it has his salary, which might get changed if he gets a raise. Those have to be two separate classes, because they get changed under different circumstances. And you wind up with millions of tiny little classes, like the EmployeeSalary class, and it’s just… (laughs) idiotic! You can’t build software that way! The way real software works is that you create these very imperfect things, and they work great. They really do. And then you have a little problem, and you go and you fix the little problem, because it’s code, and you have an editor, and you edit it. These classes are not going to go wander off flying in the universe all by themselves and need to work perfectly and unchanged until the end of time.
Jeff: Right. The longer I think about this, the less I care about code hygiene issues (laughs). Because the unit of measure that really matters to me is, how quickly you can respond to real business needs with your code. And by that I mean, how well are you serving the people that are using your code. To me that’s what it’s all about. Anything that gets in the way of you fixing your code or improving your code in a way that your customers can appreciate, is a negative. If that means using Ruby, or having lots of unit tests: whatever’s working for you: do that. But if it’s getting in the way, if it becomes friction, like, “I’d love to have this great new feature but I’d have to have 1000 unit tests,” that’s a negative.
Joel: Yeah. And the worst thing that happens is that you get people that just stop thinking about what they’re doing. “This is the principle, to always write unit tests, so I’m always going to write unit tests,” and then they’re just not thinking about how they’re spending their time, and they wind up wasting a lot of it.
Jeff: Yeah, it’s a balancing act. And I don’t want to come out and say I’m against [unit] testing, because I’m really not. Anything that improves quality is good. But there’s multiple axes you’re working on here; quality is just one axis. And I find, sadly, to be completely honest with everybody listening, quality really doesn’t matter that much, in the big scheme of things… There was this quote from Frank Zappa: “Nobody gives a crap if we’re great musicians.” And it really is true. The people that appreciate Frank Zappa’s music aren’t going, “that guitar was really off.” They’re hearing the whole song; they’re hearing the music, they’re not really worried whether your code has the correct object interfaces, or if it’s developed in a pure way, or written in Ruby or PHP… they don’t really care about that stuff. We do internally, but it’s important to balance that, I think, and I think that gets missed a lot, which is, maybe, the point you’re getting at.
Joel: Yeah.
Jeff: I think over time, more and more, I’ve become really lax on my thinking about this, because what matters is what you deliver to the customer, and how happy the customer is with what you’ve delivered. There’s many, many ways to get there.FIGURE 3.
NaPB increases the expression of BDNF and NT-3 in primary mouse astrocytes via CREB. A, cells were treated with different doses of NaPB for 2 h followed by monitoring mRNA expression of CREB by qPCR (top) and RT-PCR (bottom). B, time course (30, 60, 120, 180, and 360 min; 0.2 m m ) responses of CREB mRNA transcription was monitored by qPCR (top) and RT-PCR (bottom). C, total CREB expression is significantly up-regulated by NaPB. Cells stimulated with 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, or 0.5 m m NaPB for 24 h were subjected to immunoblotting with anti-CREB and anti-β-actin and analyzed by densitometry (top). D, NaPB time-dependently induces significant increases in CREB phosphorylation. Cells stimulated with 0.2 m m NaPB for 15, 30, 60, or 120 min were subjected to immunoblotting with anti-CREB-Ser(P)133 (pCREB) anti-CREB, and anti-β-actin and analyzed by densitometry (top). E, NaPB-mediated induction of phosphorylated CREB is localized to the nucleus. Astrocytes stimulated with 0.2 m m NaPB for 60 min were immunostained with anti-GFAP (green) and anti-CREB-Ser(P)133 (red) and treated with DAPI (blue). Whole cells and nuclei were captured using ×40 and ×60 objective lenses, respectively. Scale bar, 2 μm. F, the phosphorylation state of CREB is elevated by NaPB. Cells seeded in 96-well plates were treated with 0.2 m m NaPB for 15, 30, 60, or 120 min, fixed, permeabilized, subjected to infrared in-cell Western blotting with anti-CREB (blue) and CREB-Ser(P)133 (orange) antibodies, and analyzed for relative fluorescent units (top). G, NaPB induces DNA binding of CREB. Cells stimulated with 0.2 m m NaPB for 15, 30, or 60 min (left) were subjected to EMSAs. A supershift assay was performed with anti-CREB antibodies or IgG (right panel) to verify the presence of CREB in complex. H, NaPB elevates transcriptional activity of CREB. Astrocytes were transfected with pCRE-Luc (blue), pAP-1-Luc (orange), and pNFκB-Luc (navy). After 24 h of transfection, cells were treated with NaPB for 4 h followed by monitoring the luciferase activity in cell extracts. I and J, CREB siRNA successfully suppresses CREB expression. Cells were unstimulated or transfected with 0.25 μg of scrambled or CREB siRNA for 48 h and subjected to immunoblotting (I) with anti-CREB (blue) and anti-CREB-Ser(P)133 (orange) antibodies followed by densitometry (J). K and L, NaPB-mediated induction of BDNF and NT-3 mRNA is dependent upon CREB. Cells transfected with 0.25 μg of control or CREB siRNA for 48 h were unstimulated (blue) or treated with 0.2 m m NaPB (orange) or 0.2 m m NaFO (navy) for 6 h, and BDNF (K) and NT-3 (L) mRNA was examined by qPCR. M–O, NaPB-mediated induction of BDNF and NT-3 protein is dependent upon CREB. Cells transfected with 0.25 μg of control or CREB siRNA for 48 h were unstimulated (blue) or treated with 0.2 m m NaPB (orange) or 0.2 m m NaFO (navy) for 24 h, lysed, and immunoblotted with anti-BDNF and anti-NT-3 antibodies (M). Densitometry was performed on blots for NT-3 (N) and BDNF (O). Results represent three independent experiments. Each treatment condition is represented by two independent bands in C, D, I, and M. Data were analyzed for statistical significance by one-way ANOVA (*, p < 0.05; **, p < 0.01). Ab, antibody; MRGD, merged image; N.S., nonspecific; RLU, relative luciferase units; Scr, scrambled. Error bars, S.D.Right Leg Hospital, Left Leg Cemetery
Mirko Cro Cop is riding a seven-fight win streak and just became the 2016 Rizin Open-Weight Grand Prix Champion days ago, but the 42-year-old Croatian says that health concerns are finally causing him to hang up his trademark red-and-white checkered Hayabusa fight shorts in 2017.
Cro Cop, the PRIDE legend and UFC Veteran, appeared on NOVA TV this week after his two-win, tournament winning performance at Rizin 4 to discuss his impending retirement, what his last fight camp was like, and talked about what the future will hold.
The original post on www.fightsite.hr was in Croatian, so Reddit user ‘OGPablo’ translated the story earlier today:
Filipović was first asked what is the next step in his life and his career and he said something we all heard before, but this time he insists it is final: “I signed a 15 fight deal with Rizin! I’m kidding of course, this was definetly my last great competition, my last great tournament, surely the end of my career. I have health issues and I can’t do it anymore. There is just a possible farewell fight, but only if I’m able to fix my injured knee.I don’t ever again want to go through what I went through during this training camp. I am 43 and as far as MMA is concerned, I gave all I had. I know I had retired before, but this time it is for good. ” He also spoke on the victory over Amir Aliakbari and all the health problems he had to overcome to win this tournament: “I was happy and proud, proud of myself first, and then proud of my team because even though this is an individual sport I couldn’t have done it without them. They all contributed. Training camp was great, maybe the best of my career. I knew this was going to be my last tournament and it turned out perfectly” Until now, he always came back out of retirement. The lure of the cage/ring was too much to handle. But things aren’t like they used to be: “It will be tough, that’s for sure. People used to joke with me about how many times I’ve retired and then came back, but I promised my family this time it’s for real. There is too much stress involved, I can’t do it anymore and I’m at peace with that.”
Cro Cop also mentioned towards the end of the interview that even though he may never compete in a mixed martial arts bout again — he loves the training, and he will continue to train young prospects as he nears the half-century mark.
“I will continue to train, I have been training all my life, it is a part of my life I can’t do without,” said Filipovic.
Even though Mirko Cro Cop was able to turn back the clock for the 2016 Rizin World Grand Prix, do you think the Croatian is making the right choice in hanging up the gloves at 42 years old or would you like to see him get one more big money fight in Japan before he calls it a career?
Will the first-round knockout win against Amir Aliakbari at the Rizin World Grand-Prix 2016: Final Round be the final victory in Cro Cop’s 49-fight career?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk3pnNwaRvkEven A.J. Green is searching for answers.
Green’s Bengals just took a 33-7 whipping at home by way of a formerly three-win Chicago Bears team starting a rookie quarterback. Bengals players have cited a lack of energy and problems executing as the reasons for the disaster, which featured a stadium filled mostly with Bears fans by the fourth quarter.
As for Green himself, he had a handful of odd plays yet again. An errant pass got tipped and went for an interception and he got stripped on the sideline.
“Any great receiver will have patches,” Green told reporters after the game. “This has been a strange season. I feel like my focus is there, but things just happen. I have to pick my game up. I played like (bleep) today.”
Green was far from alone in his poor play. The offensive line collapsed, Andy Dalton’s accuracy faltered as the game wore on and the defense coughed up just shy of 500 total yards.
But Green’s strange season has been more consistent than most realize. We can even gloss over the fight with Jalen Ramsey resulting in his ejection and only look at his dropped and tipped passes to highlight the fact he’s had an uncharacteristically off season.
Statistically, Green is fine and well on his way to another 1,000-yard season based on his 950 yards and eight touchdowns. But the mistakes stick out more than the predictable production.
Of course, part of the problem might be the pieces surrounding Green, as he’s sitting on nearly 50 more targets than any other player on the roster and defenses have shifted secondaries his way without suffering repercussions.
But Green isn’t the one to make excuses and he’s taking ownership of his bad season. It’s what a leader would do and if there’s something typical about Green this year, it’s his candid, self-critical responses to the adversity.Sacramento police released 15 videos Wednesday from a fatal September standoff with a suspect wanted for killing a mother and daughter in Meadowview, including footage showing him open fire on officers before being struck and dropping to the ground, as well as video of an officer falling backward after getting shot.
Eric Arnold, 41, of Sacramento was killed Sept. 7 after he struck two officers on 27th Avenue in south Sacramento.
“I’m hit, I’m hit, I’m hit,” an officer says on one of the videos.
One officer was shot in his bullet-proof vest, while the other one was hit in the leg. Both were treated and released with non-life-threatening injuries.
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Prior to the confrontation, a police camera detected Arnold’s truck at Interstate 80 near Watt Avenue. Officers in marked patrol cars began following him at 65th Street and Fruitridge Boulevard. They tracked him through south Sacramento, north on Franklin Boulevard and then east on 27th Avenue, where he stopped.
On the video, officers order Arnold to exit his truck and get his hands up. After some hesitation, Arnold opens the door and then fires at police, prompting them to shoot and kill him.
Arnold was wanted in the Sept. 1 deaths of Erica Wallace and her 17-year-old daughter, Kiara LaSalle. He was suspected of having shot the two victims and attempting to burn their bodies, which were found in the bathtub by a fire crew that responded to a carbon monoxide alarm at the house on Janrick Avenue in Meadowview.
SHARE COPY LINK Sacramento police officer Victor Wolfe was one of two officers injured in a shootout with murder suspect Eric Arnold.In Hornindal, in beautiful remotest Western Norway, if you tried to explain to the locals the fuss being made about cloudy New England IPAs, they would laugh, or look bemused. There are around a hundred or so people in the area who make beer, in a tradition going back hundreds of years. All of it is cloudy, and it likely always has been. This is partly, probably, because Hornindal is one of the centres of “raw ale”, rå øl in Norwegian, where the wort stays unboiled before fermentation. That is far from the only difference between what is called locally kornøl, literally “grain ale” (to differentiate it from other farmhouse brews such as birch sap beer – bjørkesevjeøl – or beer made just from sugar). All the beers are made with water that has had juniper branches boiled in it (but never the berries – too bitter). Hops are used lightly, if at all: a small bag of hops will be hung in the vessel that collects the wort. Perhaps most importantly, the yeast, known as kveik (a word that goes back to Old Norse kvikur, and seems to be related to the English word “quick” in the sense “alive”), will have been collected and dried from previous brews, and will give flavours quite unlike those from yeasts used by “mainstream” brewers. These are beers that push out the boundaries of the ale experience.
Now the rural brewing traditions of Norway are becoming more widely known, thanks in considerable part to the hard work of Lars Marius Garshol, whose writings have made him the Michael Jackson of gårdsøl (“farm ale”). Yeast companies are studying, and selling, kveik yeast, and commercial brewers in Norway are starting to make gårdsøl-style ales. The movement now has its own shop window, the Norsk Kornøl Festival in Hornindal, which has just been held for the second time, and I was privileged and honoured to be invited by the organisers to come and report on the event.
Hornindal is not a simple destination if you’re leaving from West London: one plane to the giant shopping mall with airport attached that is Amsterdam’s Schiphol, then another plane 700 miles north to Ålesond, a town on the west coast of Norway about level with the Faroes. After that it’s a further hour and a half to cover a distance of just over 30 miles as the Norwegian kråke flies, but double that by road and ferry, even with the multiple kilometres-long tunnels that have been drilled through the mountains and under the fjords by North Sea oil income. The scenery, however, is spectacular, and Hornindal itself is stunning: it sits at the top of the 14-mile-long Hornindalvatnet, the deepest lake in Europe, with the surrounding mountains going up to over 4,600 feet.
The two-day kornøl festival is held in the sports hall attached to the school in the village of Grodås, a substantial building which also looks to have benefited from North Sea oil cash. Last year, its first, the festival saw ten home brewers handing out their brews, three commercial brewers and around 450 visitors. (Since Grodås has a population of only some 350, this was, in local terms, hordes.) This year, home brewer number were up to more than two dozen, there were 11 commercial brewers represented, and 600 visitors turned up, from as far away as Canada, Denmark, Poland, the UK and Lithuania.
The Lithuanians brought their own brewery with them, in the back of a van, and put on a demonstration in the hall of Lithuanian-style farm brewing, including mashing with hot rocks, (filling the air with steam and gorgeous smells) and brewing with a super-fast yeast that produced a drinkable 5.2 per cent abv beer in 15 hours. Go back and read that again: 15 hours from raw wort to drinkable beer. It was still warm as cow’s milk when we tried it the next day, orange and cloudy, slightly tart, but delicious. The Norwegians boggled. The Poles boggled. I boggled. Canadian yeast scientist Richard Preiss, who had flown in from Ontario to give a talk at the festival on kveik and collect more samples of same for his company, Escarpment Laboratories, itched to get that yeast-monster back to the lab.
The beer I was most thrilled to drink wasn’t from Lithuania, though, or Hornindal, but Stjordal, near Trondheim, about 175 miles to the north-west. Home malting is still common around Stjordal, with an estimated 200 maltsters in the district, and Stjordal represents one of the three major centres, with Hornindal and Voss, about 100 miles to the south, of farm brewing still remaining. Håvard Beitland brews on a farm that has been in his family since the early 1800s, growing his own barley, malting it himself and them smoking it, using locally cut alder wood, in the farm’s smokehouse, which is several hundred years old and is also used to smoke elk meat, venison and salmon (The ashes from the maltings fire are used to make lutefisk.). His beer is brewed with 80 per cent smoked malt, 20 per cent pale malt, a standard lager yeast from the EC Dahls brewery (a Carlsberg subsidiary) in Trondheim – and nothing else, no hops, no herbs, no outside flavourings. This is an ale in exactly the sense that an English brewer of the 13th century would recognise, a survivor from 800 years ago. It was dark, delicious and far from the sweet mess some have speculated pre-hop herbless ales must have been: there was sweetness in the background, but also a tannic dryness, probably from the husks of the grain, and, of course, the smokiness, just the same smokiness that medieval ale brewers would have had, since wood-dried malt was pretty universal.
Hornindal home brewers do not, generally, do their own malting, preferring to use whatever malt they can buy – usually pale malt. It has been suggested that this preference for pale over dark is because in the past, Hornindal farmers would have sun-dried their malt, which can only result in pale grain. They also use hops, though unboiled: Terje Raftevold, a teacher from Hornindal who was one of the home brewers at the festival, made his raw ale in a typical local fashion, having been taught how to brew by his uncle, who ran a small sheep farm. Today he makes beer for weddings, and at Christmas. For the brew he took to the festival, he used half lager malt and half pale malt, boiling up his mash water with juniper branches (einer log in Norwegian), then mashing, and afterwards running the wort into a can in which was suspended a bag containing a small amount of Hallertau and Northern Brewer hops. Many of the home brewers were using Cornelius kegs (should that be Kornølius?) to serve their beers. Terje had his in a jug, and complained it was under-conditioned, but to my cask ale attuned palate it was almost perfect – though, as was universal, far cloudier than any acceptable cask ale would be.
Another local farm brewer, Lars Andreas Tomasgård, uses pilsner malt and 200 grams of East Kent Goldings boiled up in a small amount of wort to make his raw ale, with the fermentation done with kveik yeast his grandfather had acquired from a neighbour in 1959. The brewing equipment at his farm, Lars-tunet, is “older than me, and I’m 55,” he says. The resultant ale is, again, cloudy and tart, but excellent, with the lemony, slightly astringent result that comes from boiling juniper branches in the mash water.
Torkjel Austad, in his 30s, from Setesdal, 200 miles away to the south, had learnt to brew three or four years ago from a Setesdal brewer, and made a boiled ale with pale ale, pilsner, smoked and caramalt malts, “half a shopping bag” of mountain juniper in the mash water and a small amount of Saaz hops in the mash and in the subsequent boil. That boil took two to three hours, during which time the volume of the wort reduced 30 per cent. The result was a beer with an abv of 10 per cent, and dangerous drinkability.
It was fascinating to discover, going round the tables where the home brewers sat, how easy it was to spot the raw ales: they all had a roundness on the tongue, a fullness, that the boiled ales did not. Lars Marius Garshol has suggested that Norwegian farm brewers accept a lower extraction rate than commercial brewers would seek because they believe they are getting better flavours, and around Stjordal they sometimes use a percentage of unmilled
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brands, just like Coach, who misuse Native designs and images… In each of these cases, I take the time to lay out, point by point, why these brands are wrong to appropriate Native designs, talking about the power dynamics at play, the long history of the stealing of Native culture, and the government policies put in place to prohibit us as Native peoples from practicing our cultures. When I saw the Coach line, I couldn't fathom how I was supposed to break it down again."
Nelson also pointed to social media as a useful arena. "Our community has not necessarily infiltrated mainstream media enough to get our voices out there. Social media is useful to educating people. For me, I can at least still voice my concerns, and have a way to take action against these types of appropriations."
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And at least some brands are starting to take notice, said Keene. "With the recent Ralph Lauren line, we got the website taken down within 48 hours. That never would have happened back in 2010." Ralph Lauren's response, posted by CNN back in December, offers a fitting mea culpa:"We recognize that some of the images depicted in the RRL look book may have caused offense and we have removed them from our website."
On another occasion, she said, pushback led to progress. "Paul Frank back in 2012 had a similar fiasco, but it ended with a collaboration with Native designers which was really positive." Elie Deker, President of Saban Brands (which in turn owns Paul Frank) issued a statement at the time: "This collaboration has been an opportunity for us to help raise awareness about cultural misappropriations, which unfortunately happen too often in product, promotion and fashion." He added:
"Our partnership with these four talented Native American designers was the direct result of our own awakening to this issue from our Paul Frank Fashion's Night Out event back in September of 2012. We hope this 'Paul Frank Presents' collaboration will demonstrate more appropriate ways to engage and celebrate the Native American communities."
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Your move, Coach.
Danielle Wiener-Bronner is a news reporter.From the moment some people get their new Android device they are longing for a way to get even more from it, which is why we’re certain that many of you will be happy that the Kindle Fire HD 7 can now be seen running Android CM10. It’s currently not fully completed, but the video below will show you just how far development of this process has come.
CyanogenMod 10 was made stable almost a month ago now, so as you can see it’s down to developers to get it to work on certain devices. We already knew how desperate Samsung Galaxy S3 owners were to get CM10 running on their devices, which is why they were running a less stable version in the summer.
You’ll see in the video that the dev has installed CyanogenMod 10 on his Kindle Fire HD 7, so what you get to see is all the fun stuff after a quick reboot. It’s clear to see that things are not perfect and there is still some work to do, but it’s certainly a nice thing to see the CyanogenMod logo appear on the Fire HD screen just spinning round. The work that has been done to CM10 was for an 8.9-inch tablet, so you’ll notice some subtle differences with this port because it’s now working on a 7-inch device.
While there is still a way to go, it’s good to see a full working touchscreen, the soft keys are also there, but stay on all the time, and Wi-Fi is working. However, let’s not get our hopes up too much because there is no sound, Bluetooth, and video is currently not working. Angry Birds fans will be pleased to see the Star Wars edition working on the Kindle Fire HD 7 running Android CM10. The biggest issue that we can see is the size of the screen itself, as many parts of it seem to be shrunk down to phone size instead of tablet size. Reverendkjr is unsure why it is doing it so has asked for a little help in order to resolve the issue.Police choke non-violent protester at Occupy San Diego (video)
[Video Link]
From the description for this video by photographer and military veteran Adam Plantz:
Bob O'Grady being arrested in the San Diego Civic Center Plaza for laying inside of his sleeping bag to stay warm while a group of non-violent occupiers from San Diego, Los Angeles, Irvine, Encinitas, and other transplants from various locations across the US pow-wow under an erected U.S. flag in the heart of the plaza; in celebration of Veteran's Day. SDPD uses excessive force to apprehend Bob, a SDPD officer uses a choking technique I never knew was legal in the continuum of force ladder. That must come after using a closed fist to assault the suspect in the face.
The San Diego Reader reports that O'Grady is 28 years old, and that he was choked and arrested at around 2:35 AM Saturday morning in San Diego's Civic Center Plaza after police ordered him to "exit his sleeping bag and sit up." The video above shows that he appeared to pose no threat to the armed officers surrounding him. Read eyewitness reports here.Published: Wednesday, May 17, 2017 @ 10:59 AM
A Florida judge is weighing a request by a defense attorney to allow the jury to view his client’s penis as evidence in a murder trial.
Richard Henry Patterson, 65, of Margate, Fla. is on trial in the death of his girlfriend, whose body was found in her apartment in October 2015. Prosecutors say Patterson choked her to death, then left her body there for several days before calling his attorney first, then contacting authorities.
>> Read more trending news
Defense attorney Ken Padowitz said Francisca Marquinez died accidentally by choking to death during oral sex. He filed a pretrial motion with a Broward County judge requesting that the jury view his client’s penis, saying it was required for the jury to fully understand Patterson’s defense.
According to the Sun Sentinal newspaper, the autopsy was inconclusive as the medical examiner could not determine the manner of death. Prosecutors claim the decomposition of Marquinez’ body after several days in her apartment led to the uncertainty.
Prosecutor Peter Sapak told Judge Lisa Porter he had no objection to the defense motion, but that there were several details to work out first. Porter has not said whether she will allow the motion and, if so, under which conditions.
Patterson is charged with second-degree murder and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.Share
Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge have arrived, and they lead the pack of Android phones in 2016. Neither of them reinvent the wheel from a design perspective, but plenty of notable changes help elevate them above previous Galaxy phones. There’s plenty to know if you’re considering migrating from an iPhone or another Android.
If you’re feeling curvy, check our full review of the Galaxy S7 Edge. This review will focus on the standard, flat-screened Galaxy S7. It may look the same as last year, but this new Galaxy packs a few new surprises, joyful moments, and disappointments under its glossy exterior.
Editor’s Note: We’ve updated this review after a few months of using the Galaxy S7. We’ve also added news of its availability unlocked from online retailers.
Beautiful, waterproof, fragile, fingerprints
If you’re at all familiar with the Samsung’s 2015 Galaxy devices, you know precisely what to expect from the Galaxy S7. This year, it’s all about refinement. The GS7 sports the same smooth, brushed-metal bumper sandwiched between front and back glass. It’s gorgeous. This improved design extends to the camera on the back, which still protrudes, but only about half as much as last year’s model.
With a 5.1-inch flat AMOLED screen that is the envy of every other phone, and a gentle curve to its back, the S7 is very comfortable to hold in your palm. It’s almost identically sized to last year’s Galaxy S6 (and the Galaxy S5, for that matter). Overall, it’s a comfortable smaller phone that most people should be able to hold (unless you prefer very extra tiny phones like the old iPhone 5S).
But glass is still glass, and the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are covered in the stuff, potentially making them the most fragile phones available this year. Because that Gorilla Glass is proprietary and curved on the back, it may also cost hundreds of dollars to replace broken or cracked screens, should the slippery phone fall from your grasp. Don’t buy a Galaxy S7 without a case.
The other major caveat to the glass design this year is how easy it is to cover in fingerprints. A week of use left our S7 so caked in fingerprints that it feels downright grimy to hold (another reason to get a case). If this sort of thing bothers you, consider a competing phone, or buying a nice case. Seriously, you’ll want a case. We can’t stress that enough.
We can’t complain for too long, though. Unlike many competitors, Samsung has water and dust-proofed the Galaxy S7. It has an IP68 rating, meaning dust should not penetrate its electronic innards, and you can submerge it in up to a meter of water for 30 minutes with no damage.
This should be an absolute relief for anyone who’s ever used their phone in the rain or near the water, and a return to form for the Galaxy brand. The Galaxy S5 was waterproof in 2014, but the peace-of-mind feature was missing from the Galaxy S6 devices and Note 5.
An audio mystery
We don’t have a lot to say on the audio front. The Galaxy S7 has a standard audio jack on its bottom and a single speaker. Sound from the speaker is expectedly tinny and weak, like all phones outside of the HTC One series, which have dual-front facing speakers. The full-volume sound from an iPhone 6S is still noticeably crisper than the S7, but neither device hits it out of the park.
Our audio experts haven’t had enough time to spend with it yet, but the S7 may lag behind this year’s other Android flagships when it comes to high-res audio. Our initial impressions were mixed.
Always On and Android Marshmallow
Following in the footsteps of innovations Motorola made two or three years ago, both Samsung and LG are adding Always On screens to their flagship phones this year. The GS7 always shows a clock when the phone is asleep. This feature should disable once you put the phone in your pocket. You can change this screen to show a calendar, as well.
It’s a safe investment if you want a top-of-the-line Android phone.
There aren’t a ton of other software innovations. Samsung has loaded the phone with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but it has kept the S6’s bubbly, colorful TouchWiz interface and old-school menus. The interface is easy enough to use, but a little resistant to change. For example, Samsung still doesn’t have on-screen navigation buttons, instead sticking with haptic buttons on either side of its physical Home button below the screen, which is also an outdated location for that button (if you aren’t an iPhone user). Competitors like the Xperia Z5, LG G5, and Nexus 6P have found other places to stick their Home buttons.
But we digress. Samsung’s settings menus have grown cluttered and disorganized, and the S7 even lacks the fun Flipboard home screen app that previous Galaxy phones had, so you’ll need to download a launcher if you want to read news from the home screen.
Gamers also get a couple other small, but fun features. The Galaxy S7 can record gameplay, has a gaming Do Not Disturb mode, and lets you throttle your frame rate to save battery life through a special game launcher.
Samsung Pay, which lets you pay via NFC or even tap on a standard magnetic card reader, is still present. It appears that on some carriers, Samsung Pay will not come preloaded, though Android Pay will.
A new app called Samsung+ is also on Google Play, but not loaded on the phone. It gives loyal Samsung fans access to perks and deals, but more importantly has customer service information and always-available 24/7 video support.
Available unlocked in the U.S.
The Galaxy S7 is one of the most popular phones in the world, but initially, it was only available locked to wireless carriers in the United States — that is to say, you could only buy a version that worked on your specific network. Thankfully, though, that is no longer the case.
Beginning on June 30, unlocked versions of both the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge became available in the U.S. Samsung says the models work on all four major carriers — Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T — and, unlike the carrier-locked variants, ship free of any third-party apps and services. The Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are available on Samsung’s web store, Amazon, eBay, and brick-and-mortar retailers like Best Buy, Sam’s Club, and Target, and cost $670 and $770, respectively.
The unlocked Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are, in terms of hardware, identical to their carrier-locked counterparts: they sport Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processors, 4GB of RAM, water resistant exterior casing, wireless charging, and contactless payment with Samsung Pay. And they come with Samsung’s full manufacturer warranty.
Samsung Galaxy S7 Compared To
The lack of overbearing apps is one of the best reasons to buy unlocked. The Verizon testing units used heavy-handed wording to try and pressure us into using Verizon cloud backup for managing contacts and vital info. Worse, the default messaging app was replaced with a Verizon Messaging+ app. We cannot think of a reason to ever use a messenger app created by your wireless carrier, and highly recommend you make Google Hangouts or Samsung’s messenger your default.
There are nine Verizon apps on the phone we reviewed, three Amazon apps, and a bunch of Samsung and Google apps. Verizon’s offerings include gems like NFL Mobile and Go90, which is a Verizon Mobile TV network app that we don’t particularly want to use. But they are unremovable.
Now that there is an unlocked version, you can avoid all this bloatware.
A battery case, Gear 360 cam, and more
The battery capacity of the Galaxy S7 improves to 3,000mAh this year, which is several hundred mAh larger than the S6, but the battery life still doesn’t last much more than a day.
Samsung is making its own battery case for the S7, which should extend your battery life by about 3,100mAh or roughly 2X the battery life of the phone. Because the battery is non-removable, this or a portable charger are your best options for days when you need some extra gas.
The DT Accessory Pack
In addition to the battery case, Samsung is making a case with a camera lens enhancer built into it (like an Olloclip) and an updated wireless charging pad that sets the phone at an angle and can charge at high speed.
Finally, 360 cameras are the hot new item this year, along with virtual reality, and Samsung is never one to let a trend pass it by. To capitalize, it will release the Gear 360, a dual-camera 360-degree action cam that looks like a tiny robot out of Portal or Wall-E. By stitching photos together from two 15-megapixel fish-eye cameras, it creates a VR-ready spherical image or video. We tried taking a couple videos and stills on it, and though they won’t win any awards, for home movies and viewing, they do get the job done. If you own a Gear VR (our favorite mobile VR headset), you can almost instantly view your 360 videos in actual virtual reality.
One other cool note about the Gear 360 (read our full Gear 360 writeup) is that its handle splits out into a quirky little tripod. Unscrew that tripod and it can connect to any other camera stand.
A powerful, warm phone
If impressive specifications help you sleep at night, the Galaxy S7 may as well be Ambien. It runs on a new quad-core 2.15GHz + 1.6GHz processor, but the maker of that processor will vary by region. In the United States, we’re getting a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, but in the rest of the world, Samsung is using an Exynos chip of its own design. Samsung claims the new processors are supposedly about 30 percent faster than the Galaxy S6, and the integrated graphics processor is about 64 percent faster.
The Galaxy S7’s Snapdragon 820 processor runs circles around most every competitor.
Initial benchmarks are showing that the Galaxy S7’s Snapdragon 820 processor runs circles around most every competitor. Luckily, our model runs on the 820. It’s done very well in our initial tests, performing just above the Google Pixel C tablet in 3D Mark’s Sling Shot 3.1 test and narrowly outperforming the iPhone 6S on the Ice Storm Unlimited graphics test. On AnTuTu, it blew away all competition by a massive margin, outperforming every listed Android device, including the Galaxy Note 5. Other benchmarks have shown similarly good results. This is a great phone for gaming.
It’s also a great phone for calling. We had no issues making or receiving calls on the Verizon network.
Be warned, however. Though it doesn’t get “hot,” the GS7 feels noticeably warm at most times, despite its new liquid cooling. Even with a case, this is a warm phone.
Aside from the processor, the Galaxy S7 comes with 4GB RAM, 32GB of storage, and the Nano SIM tray also has a Micro SD card slot that can hold any cards available today (up to 200GB). Samsung has even struck a deal so the GS7 and S7 Edge are the first phones compatible with the Vulkan API, which should aid high-end game development.
An improved camera
Samsung really wants a better camera than the iPhone, and it has one, by some measurements. The S7 has a 12-megapixel rear cameras that operates faster thanks to an F1.7 lens (up from F1.9 in last year’s), and focuses faster thanks to its “dual-pixel” design. Samsung claims that every pixel in the lens also acts as a focus pixel, and that this is a first for smartphones.
In a direct shoot off in low-light and dark conditions, the Galaxy S7 often outperformed the iPhone 6S. Samsung’s camera was able to capture sharper images in the dark and illuminate areas that the iPhone could not. The speed of focusing also helped it grab a few shots of moving scenes that the iPhone was unable to shoot as smoothly.
Previous Next 1 of 9 Jeffrey Van Camp/Digital Trends Jeffrey Van Camp/Digital Trends Jeffrey Van Camp/Digital Trends Jeffrey Van Camp/Digital Trends Jeffrey Van Camp/Digital Trends Taken with the Galaxy S7 Jeffrey Van Camp/Digital Trends Jeffrey Van Camp/Digital Trends Jeffrey Van Camp/Digital Trends Jeffrey Van Camp/Digital Trends
It’s a victory for Samsung, but the GS7 camera is not perfect. Samsung’s photos often come out warmer (more yellow and orange) than in reality, and than on the iPhone. So while it can grab a clearer, lighter shot, Samsung has some work to do in making that photo look realistic. Some S7 shots came out looking like they already had Instagram filters applied.
Selfies on the S7 were not noticeably worse or better than competing phones, like the iPhone.
Pricing in the U.S.
Beginning on June 30, you can get unlocked versions of both the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge in the U.S. These models work on all four major carriers — Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T. The unlocked Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are available on Samsung’s web store, Amazon, eBay, and brick-and-mortar retailers like Best Buy, Sam’s Club, and Target, and cost $670 and $770, respectively.
The Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge is available to order on all major carriers in the U.S. — AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, U.S. Cellular.
The Galaxy S7 will come in black and gold to start, and prices range from $620 to $695. U.S. Cellular has the lowest price if you pay in full, but Sprint is offering the best price with an installment plan. Sprint also has the best overall deal with its 50 percent off a second Galaxy S7 offer.
U.S. Cellular – $620 prepaid / $672 ($28 for 24 months) / $200 with 2-year contract
Sprint – $650 ($27.09 for 24 months)
T-Mobile – $670 ($27.92 for 24 months)
Verizon – $672 ($28 for 24 months)
AT&T – $695 ($23.17 for 30 months)
Check out a full list of locations here.
Warranty
The Galaxy S7 has a standard one-year limited warranty that covers the device and its battery, unless you do damage to it. If the waterproofing fails you may or may not get a replacement, so we don’t suggest you dunk it intentionally, and glass breaking is not covered. Samsung can choose to replace your device or repair it.
You also have the option to “opt out of arbitration” if you buy the Galaxy S7. Samsung gives users 30 days to opt out of the feature from purchase, and email and number to contact are in the warranty booklet. Arbitration takes away your right to file a complaint in the court of law against Samsung, if you believe it has wronged you.
Conclusion
The Galaxy S7 looks fantastic and is more comfortable to hold than the Galaxy S6 was last year. We’re very impressed with Samsung’s new camera, increased battery capacity, accessories, and waterproof design. Those benefits come on top of an industry-leading AMOLED screen and powerful processing power of the Snapdragon 820.
Our biggest worry is breakability. With more curved glass than ever, these phones may be expensive to fix if dropped, and they’re slippery as all hell to hold. Samsung hasn’t yet provided us details on how expensive it is to replace the glass in the GS7. We highly recommend a case of some sort. It will protect the phone, save you from an annoying amount of fingerprint smudges, and block some of the heat that comes from the phone.
If you’re concerned by breakability and you’re with AT&T, you could always buy the Galaxy S7 Active instead. It has all the same specs, but they’re packed into a more rugged body that can handle drops without shattering as well as extended dips in deep water. The Active has a bigger battery as well, which solves some of our battery concerns. So long as you don’t mind its looks, the Active is a better choice.
However, if you do want the regular S7 for its beauty, take advantage of the free Gear VR with early orders. The Gear VR was our favorite product of 2015, and we recommend you try it out if you get the chance. It’s the first chance you’ll get to try legitimate VR at home.
Though we prefer the Galaxy S7 Edge because of its larger screen and battery, the standard S7 is an absolutely fantastic phone. It’s a model for what phones will be like this year, and is a safe investment if you want a top-of-the-line Android phone.Very #FakeNews CNN published a series of charts on hate groups in the United States.
Hate crimes against blacks are less common today as 20 years ago.
Anti-Semitic hate crimes continue to be the most commonly reported hate crime.
Antifa continues tremendous growth in members and violent acts.
The Atlantic reported:
For antifa, the result has been explosive growth. According to NYC Antifa, the group’s Twitter following nearly quadrupled in the first three weeks of January alone. (By summer, it exceeded 15,000.) Trump’s rise has also bred a new sympathy for antifa among some on the mainstream left. “Suddenly,” noted the antifa-aligned journal It’s Going Down, “anarchists and antifa, who have been demonized and sidelined by the wider Left have been hearing from liberals and Leftists, ‘you’ve been right all along.’ ” An article in The Nation argued that “to call Trumpism fascist” is to realize that it is “not well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason.” The radical left, it said, offers “practical and serious responses in this political moment.”The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will launch a dedicated advice line on Wednesday 1 November at 10am to help small organisations prepare for a new data protection law.
The phone service is aimed at people running small businesses or charities and recognises the particular problems they face getting ready for the new law, called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The GDPR replaces the current Data Protection Act and comes into force on 25 May 2018. Regulated by the ICO, the GDPR strengthens the rules around personal data and requires organisations to be more accountable and transparent. It also gives people greater control over their own personal data.
There are already resources on the ICO website (ico.org.uk) to help organisations employing fewer than 250 people prepare for the GDPR. But the new phone line will offer additional, personal advice to small organisations that still have questions.
People from small organisations should dial the ICO helpline on 0303 123 1113 and select option 4 to be diverted to staff who can offer support. As well as advice on preparing for the GDPR, callers can also ask questions about current data protection rules and other legislation regulated by the ICO including electronic marketing and Freedom of Information.
Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said:
“All organisations have to get ready for the new data protection rules, but we recognise that the 5.4 million small organisations in the UK face particular challenges. “Small organisations want to be ready when the new law comes into force in May 2018, but they often struggle to know where to start. They may have less time and money to invest in getting it right and are less likely to have compliance teams, data protection officers or legal experts to advise them what to do. “Our new phone service and all the other resources already on our website plus even more advice and guidance yet to come will help steer small businesses through the new law.”
In addition to the new phone service, the ICO has also announced plans to simplify its popular “12 steps to take now” graphic in response to calls from small and micro businesses that they need access to targeted information about how to prepare for the GDPR.
And the ICO is revising its simple-to-use SME toolkit – a resource used by around 9,000 businesses a month since January 2016 – into a GDPR resource that will allow businesses themselves to identify gaps in their own preparation for the new law.
Organisations that have yet to begin preparing for the law change can access a range of resources on the ICO’s dedicated data protection reform web pages.
The “12 steps to take now” graphic has been viewed 73,000 times since it was updated in May and is the most downloaded document on the ICO website.
ICO staff have spoken at nearly 100 stakeholder events where “getting ready for the GDPR” has been a key theme and around 10,000 people have viewed sector-specific webinars highlighting GDPR issues.
By the end of the year, the ICO will publish a Guide to the GDPR. It expands the content of the current overview to make it a comprehensive guide along the same lines as the current Guide to Data Protection.
Notes to EditorsThis is a special piece for 10,000~ page views. I've been on this site for a surprising chunk of my life, everything from seventh grade to my senior year of high school. I've seen a lot here, spent too much time, and enjoy all of it. EXCEPT THAT ONE GUY! I thought this somewhat unfinished work could slightly represent both the vast time I've been here, and the time I still have. What is left blank in the image does not stop this from being a complete work, just a not finished one. It is still a full sheet of paper I would call artwork.
Let me explain the actual image. The paper it's on is 39 inches. Meaning, the work is three feet in length, all done in micron pen. It’s far too large to scan, so I had to take a picture of it, which practically destroyed all the small detail it once had; let alone the overall quality. I’ve spent several dozen hours on it, quite possibly more. So it’s a bit disappointing to see a lot of the fine points get scraped away.
Anyways, yes, 10,000 page views is millions less than what I get on youtube, but it kinda feels a bit more special. A bit more personal. There’s absolutely no logic in that stament, but it’s my train of thought. I love you stupid people. I hope I don’t follow the trend of my family members and die before I can present a proper collection of art.This is the fifth and final installment in a series of stories following former Stony Brook star Miguel Maysonet on his journey to the NFL draft.
After one of the longest days of his life, Miguel Maysonet returned Sunday to comfortable surroundings -- the Stony Brook football stadium, where for three autumns he was the show.
Maysonet, attending the Stony Brook spring game, was stopped immediately by well-wishers, including the parents of kicker Ben Solis, Philadelphia Eagles fans from Pennsylvania. They asked him to sign a few Eagles caps, gave him an Eagles T-shirt to keep and handed him the sports section of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which mentioned his name.
It's official: He's a member of the Eagles after agreeing to a free-agent contract Saturday night.
With the T-shirt draped over his right shoulder, Maysonet walked down to the field and past the cheerleaders. They recognized him instantly behind the sunglasses and greeted his arrival with a brief cheer. He smiled. It was a good moment, almost a great moment.
This wasn't how Maysonet envisioned his return. His goal was to become the first player in school history to be drafted, but he wasn't among the 254 players selected over the three-day event. The snub provided a hard lesson about the business of the NFL, but it also steeled his determination.
Miguel Maysonet wasn't drafted but agreed to a free-agent contract with the Eagles. Joe Robbins/Getty Images
"I was a little bit upset at first that I didn't get drafted," he said. "But it doesn't matter how you get to the NFL. The only thing that matters is what you do when you're there. I'm going to try to prove them wrong, all the teams that passed up on me. I'll show them I'm a good running back."
Maysonet was perhaps the best on the FCS level, rushing for more than 1,900 yards last season. He was the first Stony Brook player to attend the scouting combine and projected as a possible late-round pick, with ESPN draft analyst Todd McShay calling him one of the top sleepers.
On Saturday, Maysonet received calls from several teams throughout the draft, each one expressing interest. In the end, 22 running backs were chosen by 18 different teams -- a seven-hour emotional rollercoaster that left him exhausted.
"It was a little frustrating," said Maysonet's agent, Joe Linta. "Listening to the phone calls, you would've thought he'd be drafted by five teams in the last two rounds."
Maysonet watched the draft from his home in Riverhead, Long Island, where he was supported by more than 70 friends and family members. It started as a party, turned into a vigil and ended a as party.
Everybody loves a feel-good story. Maysonet endured a tough childhood, living in a small apartment above an auto repair shop. His mother worked two jobs and couldn't afford the cost of Pop Warner football, so he didn't play organized ball until the seventh grade. He was a natural, captivating people with his skill and upbeat personality.
So it was no surprise that his house was filled with well-wishers, hoping to hear his name called at Radio City Music Hall.
The anticipation started early. At 11:30 a.m., before the fourth round, Maysonet received a text and follow-up call from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
We're interested.A group of Israelis rescued several drowning Syrian and Iraqi refugees near the Greek shore on Sunday morning. Upon spotting the refugees, the Israelis stopped their yacht and fished out 11 refugees, including four children, and, tragically, a deceased infant.
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After providing first aid to the refugees, the Israelis notified Greek authorities.
Syrian refugee on yacht holding her dead baby (Photo: Gal Baruch)
The incident occurred across the Turkish town of Kas, next to the Greek island of Kastellorizo. Shlomo Asban, the yacht captain, recounted the rescue: "I've been sailing for 40 years and this is the first time something like this has happened to me. We heard cries for help from the water, stopped the boat and found a teenage refugee with a life vest. We pulled him out of the water and he told us that his brother was missing and apparently dead.”
Pulling refugees out of the water (צילום : שלמה אסבן וגל ברוך)
X
At that stage the Israelis believed that the boy was the sole survivor, but a few minutes later they spotted other refugees in the water alongside a rubber boat that had sunk. "We retrieved a total of 12 people, including a dead six-month-old baby who was in his mother's arms, said Asban."
Esban also recounted that "the mother held the baby in her arms all night long. We found out they were Syrians and Iraqis, gave them water and cell phones to talk with their families. After we told them that we Jews from Israel, they kissed us and thanked us.”
Syrian and Iraqi refugees on Israeli yacht (Photo: Gal Baruch)
Gal Baruch, a resident of Rinatya who was also on board said: "The first boy we identified spoke Arabic and said he was from Syria. We asked if there were other people, but he started to cry and pointed out in all sorts of directions. We combed the area with binoculars and then we found a large group of people. In the group there was also a person who suffered a heart attack and diabetic shock. We gave him sweets to eat and we saved his life.”
Baruch added that "it was hard on us. It’s not easy to see such a sight. We are a team that is at sea a lot and we have never encountered difficult scenes like these. The team behaved properly and acted according to maritime law, which says you have to save people regardless of where they come from. After an hour of sailing, we removed the refugees safely and they were transferred to the Greek authorities.”The American Gaming Association estimates that $4.2 billion will be wagered by Americans on Super Bowl 50, according to Darren Heitner of Forbes.
The amount would be about an 8% increase from money placed on last year's championship between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks.
The AGA said they believe that $149 billion was wagered on sports by Americans in 2015, a $5 billion increase from 2014.
• Off the Grid: The place of medical marijuana in NFL
“As Americans celebrate a milestone Super Bowl, they’ll also bet a record amount on the Big Game,” AGA president and CEO Geoff Freeman told Forbes. “Just like football, sports betting has never been more popular than it is today. The casino gaming industry is leading the conversation around a new approach to sports betting that enhances consumer protections, strengthens the integrity of games and recognizes fans’ desire for greater engagement with sports.”
Super Bowl 50 will be played between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers on Feb. 7 at Levi's Stadium in San Francisco.Some of Easter Island's famous stone Moai statues stood more than 30 feet high and weighed up to 82 tons.
On Sunday, the moon will pass betweenthe sun and the Earthand throw its dark shadow upon our planet's surface in one of nature'sgreatspectacles: a total eclipse of the sun. It could be the ultimate cosmicphotoop, but only if you're on the remote Easter Island.
The July11 solar eclipse will mark the third summer in a row such acelestial eventhas occurred. But unlike last year, when literally tens of millions ofpeopleexperienced the passage of the shadow as it swept across India andChina,Sunday's eclipse will be experienced by at best, tens ofthousands.
Still, there will be several thousandindividuals who arehoping to get a view of the totally eclipsed sun from perhaps one ofthe mostisolated and remote spots on the face of the Earth: the legendary andmystical EasterIsland.
A recordnumber of visitors are there now towitness Sunday's big sky show, many of whom hoping to get what likelywill bethe photo-op of the century: capturing an image of the solarcorona with oneor more of Easter Island's enormous statues, known as "moai," in theforeground!
Writesscience journalist, DanFalk: "I've been looking forward to this remarkable natural event formorethan a decade. It's an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Iintend topull this off without any kind of digital manipulation.
"Obviously,with Photoshop,one could pretend to have witnessed a total eclipse over the EiffelTower, orfrom inside your local Starbucks for that matter. But where's thechallenge inthat? My goal is to capture a single, unique scene, just as it appearedto theunaided eye."
(Thisgraphic shows the ground track depicting where this totaleclipse of 2010will be visible from and when.)
The largest concentration of eclipsewatchers will likelycongregate within the Patagonian town of El Calafate, which is at thevery endof the eclipse path. But, as I recently mentioned in an interview onNPR'sScience Friday, you could probably put the total number of people whoarewithin the totality path of Sunday's eclipse inside Yankee Stadium,with plentyof room to spare.
Thelast time a total solareclipse was visible from Easter Island was more than 13 centuries ago,on Sep.24, 656 AD, and the next time islanders get to see one will be 314years fromnow, on Feb. 25, 2324.
Hereis an extra fact to dwellupon as eclipse day nears: since anthropologists believe the island wasonlysettled no earlier than 700 A.D. means that until this coming Sunday,no humaninhabitant has ever seen a total solar eclipse from the island.
Exotic eclipse locale
Easter Island, also known as Rapa
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Is she ready for them? Three years into a successful comics run and counting, the world’s answer is YES!
5. The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente
These six interlinked short stories—set within a new (and fantastic) universe—give a voice to female characters who have been harmed to further male hero’s plotlines. Illustrated by Annie Wu, the collection highlights the stunning stories behind the stories, revealing that the women are superheroines in their own right.
6. The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore
New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore uncovers Wonder Woman’s backstory, her links to the early suffragettes and the secrets of her creators’ lives in this tremendous work of nonfiction.
THE SUPERNATURAL
7. The Immortals (Olympus Bound Series) by Jordanna Max Brodsky
Greek Gods battle against the Manhattan Skyline in Brodsky’s debut—and Selene DeSilva discovers through a shocking crime that she’s one of them: the goddess Artemis.
8. Hurricane Heels by Isabel Yap
Alex, Ria, Aiko, Natalie and Selena have been fighting as superheroes for years, since a fateful summer camp where a goddess enlisted their help to protect the world and gifted them each with powers. Now that they’re older and life’s gotten more complicated, how much longer can they keep saving the world?
9. Red Threads of Fortune (The Tensorate Series) by JY Yang
Sanao Mokoya, a fallen prophet, a master of the elements and the daughter of the supreme Protector, has abandoned the life in which her visions once shaped the lives of citizens. After a tragedy, she now hunts deadly monsters with the help of a pack of dinosaurs.
10. Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson
Abby and Makeda, daughters of a celestial demigod and a human woman, were born conjoined. Now separated adults, they must learn to work together again to help find their missing father.
WOMEN OF WORLD WAR I AND II*
11. Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal
Ginger Stuyvesant leads a secret ring of spy translators for the British during World War I. What makes the group unique is that they’re mediums who can talk to ghosts as they return from the front.
12. I Was a Spy! by Marthe McKenna
A young nurse in occupied Belgium, Marthe was recruited by British intelligence during World War I and spent time pretending to be a double agent in order to avoid detection by the Germans. She helped sabotage enemy phone lines, instigated an aerial attack on the visiting Kaiser and reported on train movements in her region. Caught and sentenced to death, she ultimately lived to write her story.
13. Blackout (All Clear Series) by Connie Willis
Time traveling historians are sent back from 2060 to World War II, leading to intrigue on both sides of the timeline. Oxford researchers Polly Churchill, Merope Ward and Michael Davies discover with growing horror how much one action can change the past—and the future.
14. Tomorrow to be Brave by Susan Travers
Susan Travers—the only woman to officially serve in the French Foreign Legion—drove a car directly through the Nazi’s African lines in 1942, leading a charge that took her across the Libyan desert, through minefields and below stukka bombers to break a 15-day siege. Her memoir chronicles her experiences, culminating in her being awarded both the Legion d’Honneur and the Military Medal.
15. Nancy Wake by Russell Braddon
A New Zealander known during World War II as the “White Mouse,” Nancy Wake was active in the French Resistance and escaped the Nazis multiple times. She was on the Gestapo’s most wanted list by 1943, and she eventually became the virtual leader of a band of 7,000 French Resistance fighters.
*Both wars are included, because while the Wonder Woman movie was set during WWI, Wonder Woman originally appeared during WWII in the comics.
BADASS SPIES
16. Everfair by Nisi Shawl
Lisette Toutournier and Fwendi are spies in this steampunk reimagining of the Victorian Congo. In Everfair’s alternate history, King Leopold’s horrific wars are turned into a new opportunity for the people of the Congo.
17. Code Name Verity (Code Name Verity Series) by Elizabeth Wein
Two women are separated when their spy plane crashes behind enemy lines. When the Gestapo arrests one of them, she tells a story of secrets, coded messages, daring action and true loyalty.
18. The Witch Who Came in From the Cold (Seasons 1 and 2) from Serial Box
In cold-war era Prague, Soviet and American spies navigate dangerous territory made even more treacherous by the presence of magic. When tradecraft meets witchcraft, things can get complicated very fast.
(Editor’s Note: This list’s author guest-wrote one episode in the second season… and there is absolutely a shopping montage in that episode. And if you’re unfamiliar with Serial Box, it’s a new type of publishing company that releases novelette-length episodes of a given series over the course of 10-16 weeks.)
SHOPPING/TRAINING MONTAGES
19. Barrayar (Vorkosigan Saga Series) by Lois McMaster Bujold
Book three of the series of the series contains one of the best shopping montages. It also tackles motherhood, personal identity and survival in a post-revolutionary science fictional universe.
20. Court of Fives (Court of Fives Series) by Kate Elliott
When Jessamy sneaks out to train for an elite sporting event, events begin to unfold that put her family in mortal danger. The training montages she endures in the series’ first book are fast-paced and beautifully written in this epic tale of a girl struggling to do what she loves while constrained by class and privilege.
Many thanks to author Aliette de Bodard, educator Kathryn Gullo, blogger Natalie Luhrs and librarian Ryan Labay for suggesting some of the titles on this list!
Fran Wilde’s high-flying debut, Updraft, also features a badass young woman main character, archery, training montages and cool tech like man-made wings. Her novels and short stories have been nominated for two Nebula awards and a Hugo, and include her Andre Norton-winning debut novel, Updraft (Tor 2015), its sequels, Cloudbound (2016) and Horizon (2017), and novelette “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” (Tor.com Publishing 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, iO9.com, and GeekMom.com. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook and at franwilde.net.A PROMINENT JOURNALIST and author has pleaded guilty to six sexual offences against a girl under the age of 17.
The 53-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, admitted engaging in sexual acts with the girl and exploiting her by inviting her to participate in sexual acts. Judge Patricia Ryan remanded him on continuing bail until July 3, 2017 when he will be sentenced.
He pleaded guilty on the morning of his trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to two counts of defilement of a child in Dublin between December 5, 2010 and February 19, 2011 and to four counts of inviting a child to participate in a sexually explicit, obscene or indecent act between January 2010 and March 2011.
Prosecuting counsel, Shane Costelloe SC, said the DPP is not proceeding with a further three charges relating to the victim. The full facts of the offending will be heard on the sentence date.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Protesters surrounded Jeremy Hunt on his walk to the conference site
Thousands of people have attended an anti-austerity protest near the Conservative Party's annual conference in Manchester.
Police said 60,000 took part in the march close to Manchester Central, where the conference is being held.
Organisers the TUC said the rally was also to highlight an "unfair" Trade Union Bill.
The government said its long term economic plan was "turning the country around" after "difficult decisions".
It added the proposed changes to strike legislation would protect the public from disruptive action.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Unions represented at the rally include Unison, the NUT, GMB, USDAW, RMT and FBU
Image copyright Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Image caption A conference delegate was hit by an egg as the demonstration made its way through the city centre
Union leaders and officials from campaign groups addressed a rally in the city centre before leading the procession.
Singer Billy Bragg warmed up the crowd with a set on stage, changing the lyrics to his best-known songs to add topical references such as "take the money from Trident and spend it on the NHS".
Although the protest was largely good-natured, four arrests were made, including one man for allegedly spitting at a journalist.
A conference delegate was hit by an egg as the demonstration made its way through the city centre.
The Conservative conference is under way, with 12,000 delegates expected to attend over the four days.
A so-called "ring of steel" has been built around the conference venue and the nearby Midland Hotel.
At the scene
Kevin Fitzpatrick, BBC Greater Manchester political reporter
Huge numbers of people are winding their way through the city's streets this afternoon in Manchester.
Many of those gathered are holding placards and are chanting slogans against the cuts. Some are pushing prams, others in wheelchairs.
A few hundred feet away from the site of the Conservative conference, the sound of whistles and horns fills the air.
These people are angry, passionate and determined to have their voice heard.
Len McCluskey, Unite general secretary, told the rally the protest was "sending a very clear message" to the government that they faced a fightback.
Paul Novak, assistant general secretary of the TUC, said: "The government is driving through tens of billions of pounds worth of cuts to public services right across the country and at the same time trying to gag the ability of unions to protest and try to defend services.
"There are 6.5m working people in this country who are voluntarily members of unions.
"The government is trying to force through an anti-democratic bill that puts real limitations on the right to strike and people's right to protest. We think that's absolutely unfair."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne arrived earlier for the first day of the conference
The Trade Union Bill, which proposes higher voting thresholds for ballots, passed its first Commons hurdle last month despite fierce Labour criticism.
The bill, which would apply to unions in England, Wales and Scotland, will also:
Double the amount of notice unions have to give before a strike can be held - from seven to 14 days
Allow employers to use agency workers to replace striking staff
Introduce fines of up to £20,000 on unions for repeatedly failing to ensure picket supervisors wear an official armband
End the so-called check-off system for collecting union subs direct from a salary
A spokesman for the Conservatives said: "More people are now also in work than ever before and the trade unions who represent a number of them do have a constructive role to play in representing their rights.
"However, it is vital that these are balanced with the rights of businesses, who have a right to expect that they are not going to be disrupted at short notice by strikes organised by only a small number of union members."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Greater Manchester Police said 60,000 people were in Manchester for the protest
In an email to conference attendees, delegates were warned not to wear Conservative-branded badges and lanyards when walking around Manchester.
Asked if this was a "sad" state of affairs, Prime Minister David Cameron told BBC One's Sunday Politics: "No, not at all. I think all my party members will enjoy very much being in Manchester.
"There are a lot of demonstrations planned, and obviously people need to take care in respect of that, but people will be enjoying all that Manchester has to offer."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The protest was largely good-natured, with Greater Manchester Police only making four arrests
On Saturday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tweeted: "Ahead of Tory Conference I urge all activists to focus on policy & to take no part in personal attacks."
A two-day anti-austerity "protest rave" in Piccadilly Gardens was shut down by police officers on Sunday morning.2016 Fantasy Football - Choose Article Fantasy Football Rankings ---------------------- Fantasy Rankings --------------------- 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Quarterbacks - 9/7 Chet Gresham's Fantasy Football Quarterback Rankings - 8/30 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Running Backs - 9/7 Chet Gresham's Fantasy Football Running Back Rankings - 8/30 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Wide Receivers - 9/7 Chet Gresham's Fantasy Football Wide Receiver Rankings - 8/30 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Tight Ends - 9/7 Chet Gresham's Fantasy Football Tight End Rankings - 8/30 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Defenses - 6/15 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Kickers - 6/15 2016 Fantasy Football Rookie Rankings - 5/13 2016 Fantasy Football Rookie Rankings: Dynasty - 5/13 2016 Fantasy Football Rookie Rankings: Dynasty by Chet - 5/27 --------------- Fantasy Football Mock Drafts --------------- 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 9/1 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 8/31 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: Real Draft - 8/29 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: Standard - 8/25 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: 2-QB - 8/25 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: Standard - 8/24 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 8/18 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 8/13 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: Standard - 8/11 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: Standard - 8/4 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 8/4 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 8/2 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 7/28 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft - 7/21 2016 Fantasy Football 2-QB Draft - 6/9 2016 Fantasy Football: MFL 10 Draft - 5/13 --------------- Fantasy Football Cheat Sheets --------------- 2016 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet: Top 250 - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet: Top 250 PPR - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet: Top 250 2-QB - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet: Top 250 Touchdown-Only - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet: Custom - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Dynasty Rankings - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football PPR Rankings - 8/29 (Chet) 2016 Fantasy Football Spreadsheets - 9/7 --------------- Fantasy Football Articles --------------- 2016 Fantasy Football Stock Report: Training Camp - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft Simulator - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Sleepers - 9/4 2016 NFL Preseason Recap, Fantasy Football Notes - 9/3 2016 Fantasy Football Preseason Stock - 9/2 2016 Fantasy Football Preseason Quarterback Targets - 9/2 2016 Fantasy Football Waiver-Wire Targets - 8/31 2016 Fantasy Football Busts - 8/31 Fantasy Football Auction Advice - 8/24 2016 Fantasy Football Round-by-Round Strategy Guide - 8/18 2016 Fantasy Football Daily Fantasy Football: Preseason Week 2 Streaming Options - 8/18 2016 Fantasy Football Draft Queue: Wide Receivers and Tight Ends - 8/17 2016 Fantasy Football Draft Queue: Quarterbacks and Running Backs - 8/16 2016 Fantasy Football Training Camp Notes - 8/10 2016 Fantasy Football Wide Receivers to Avoid - 8/6 2016 Fantasy Football Running Backs to Avoid - 8/5 2016 Fantasy Football Notes - 7/26 2016 Fantasy Football Late-Round Wide Receiver Targets - 7/21 2016 Fantasy Football Late-Round Running Back Targets - 7/19 2016 Fantasy Football ADP Values - 7/14 2016 Fantasy Football: C.J. Anderson Profile - 7/7 2016 Fantasy Football Favorite MFL Players - 6/29 2016 Fantasy Football: 2016 NFL Draft Fallout: Chip Kelly - 6/23 2016 Fantasy Football: Eli Manning Profile - 6/22 2016 Fantasy Football: Eli Manning Profile - 6/15 Fantasy Football Beginner's Guide - 6/7 2016 Fantasy Football: Running Back Drafting and ADP - 6/3 2016 Fantasy Football: Quarterback Drafting and ADP - 6/1 2016 Fantasy Football: Eli Manning Profile - 5/25 2016 Fantasy Football: Jordan Matthews Profile - 5/24 2016 Fantasy Football Rookie Dynasty Draft Wrap-up - 5/18 2016 Fantasy Football News Reports - 5/15 2016 Fantasy Football: 2016 NFL Draft Fallout - 5/11 2016 Fantasy Football: MFL 10 Quarterback Values - 4/30 2016 Fantasy Football: MFL 10 Wide Receiver Values - 4/28 2016 Fantasy Football: Tight End Strength of Schedule - 4/25 2016 Fantasy Football: Wide Receiver Strength of Schedule - 4/21 2016 Fantasy Football: Running Back Strength of Schedule - 4/20 2016 Fantasy Football: Quarterback Strength of Schedule - 4/19 2016 Fantasy Football: MFL 10 - 2/19 2016 Fantasy Football Sleepers: Philip Rivers - 2/16 2016 Fantasy Football: Quarterback ADP vs. Reality - 2/12 2016 Fantasy Football Fallout: Marshawn Lynch Retires - 2/11 2016 Fantasy Football Fallout: Calvin Johnson Retires - 2/9 2016 Fantasy Football Forecast: Dynasty - 1/21 2016 Fantasy Football Forecast: Tight Ends - 1/19 2016 Fantasy Football Forecast: Wide Receivers - 1/14 2016 Fantasy Football Forecast: Running Backs - 1/13 2016 Fantasy Football Forecast: Quarterbacks - 1/12
2016 Fantasy Football - 10 Busts (Aug. 31):
Jamaal Charles, RB, Chiefs ADP: 2.02.
Jamaal Charles hasn't regained the full-time running back role despite his return, as Spencer Ware has been handling most of the first-string duties. The Chiefs aren't going to use Charles all that much early in the year in an effort to preserve him for the playoffs. Plus, Ware has been very impressive. I've been avoiding Charles all summer, and I'd urge you to do the same.
Matt Forte, RB, Jets. ADP: 4.06.
It feels like Matt Forte is being chosen two or three rounds too early. Forte is not nearly the dominant player he once was, and he's certainly not going to handle the full workload on his new team; all reports indicate that Forte and Bilal Powell will share touches evenly. The Jets have a crowded backfield, so I wouldn't take Forte before the sixth frame.
Arian Foster, RB, Dolphins. ADP: 5.02.
Arian Foster had a solid third preseason game, but it doesn't matter because he'll be injured by the middle of October. Drafting him in the fifth round is a huge mistake.
Chris Ivory, RB, Jaguars. ADP: 6.06.
Everyone seems to remember how dominant Chris Ivory was in the early part of the 2015 campaign, but they seem to have forgotten that he was so bad down the stretch that he was benched and barely used in Week 17's must-win contest. Ivory, like Marion Barber before him, isn't going to last very long because of his running style. He's not even Jacksonville's starter, so taking him in the sixth round is just dumb.
Latavius Murray, RB, Raiders. ADP: 3.08.
It's mind-boggling to me that players like Jeremy Hill and DeMarco Murray are being chosen after Latavius Murray. Oakland's coaching staff soured on Latavius Murray last year, and there's no reason to think that 2016 will be drastically different. Murray is way too risky to warrant a late selection in the third round.
Julian Edelman, WR, Patriots. ADP: 4.12.
Taking Julian Edelman in the fourth round just seems crazy to me. Edelman has had surgery on his foot twice in the past 10 months, and he just re-injured it recently. The Patriots should consider themselves lucky if Edelman plays eight games.
Devonta Freeman, RB, Falcons. ADP: 2.07.
Most remember the great start Devonta Freeman had to begin his 2015 campaign, but few recall how much he struggled down the stretch, gaining 3.4 yards per carry or worse in five of his final six contests. He didn't get off to a good start in his preseason opener. He's currently way overdrafted at 2.07.
Carson Palmer, QB, Cardinals. ADP: 7.06.
Carson Palmer has looked off to me through two preseason games. His arm strength seems diminished. Perhaps it's nothing, but there's a chance Palmer is on a major decline. I wouldn't trust him in the seventh round.
John Brown, WR, Cardinals. ADP: 7.01.
John Brown missed practice Tuesday with a headache. Brown missed two-plus weeks of practice with concussion symptoms and was finally cleared. Now, he's likely to go back into concussion protocol, as he continues to have headaches. Given this troubling issue, as well as Carson Palmer's preseason struggles, I'd stay as far away from Brown as possible.
Doug Martin, RB, Buccaneers. ADP: 2.12.
I'd be worried about Doug Martin this season. He was second in rushing this past year, but he signed a big contract extension in the spring. Martin had been lethargic beforehand, so will he revert to that state? Also, the Buccaneers appear to be interested in allowing Charles Sims to handle more of a workload.
Jimmy Graham, TE, Seahawks. ADP: 11.03.
I warned you about Victor Cruz last summer, telling you not to draft him in any round. I'll say the same thing about Jimmy Graham. The Seattle tight end sustained a torn patellar tendon, which is nearly impossible to come back from, period, let alone less than a year.
Torrey Smith, WR, 49ers. ADP: 10.05.
Why is anyone drafting Torrey Smith? Seriously, I don't think I'd take him in the 110th round; let alone the 10th.
2016 Fantasy Football - Choose Article Fantasy Football Rankings ---------------------- Fantasy Rankings --------------------- 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Quarterbacks - 9/7 Chet Gresham's Fantasy Football Quarterback Rankings - 8/30 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Running Backs - 9/7 Chet Gresham's Fantasy Football Running Back Rankings - 8/30 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Wide Receivers - 9/7 Chet Gresham's Fantasy Football Wide Receiver Rankings - 8/30 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Tight Ends - 9/7 Chet Gresham's Fantasy Football Tight End Rankings - 8/30 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Defenses - 6/15 2016 Fantasy Football Rankings: Kickers - 6/15 2016 Fantasy Football Rookie Rankings - 5/13 2016 Fantasy Football Rookie Rankings: Dynasty - 5/13 2016 Fantasy Football Rookie Rankings: Dynasty by Chet - 5/27 --------------- Fantasy Football Mock Drafts --------------- 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 9/1 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 8/31 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: Real Draft - 8/29 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: Standard - 8/25 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: 2-QB - 8/25 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: Standard - 8/24 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 8/18 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 8/13 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: Standard - 8/11 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: Standard - 8/4 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 8/4 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 8/2 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft: PPR - 7/28 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft - 7/21 2016 Fantasy Football 2-QB Draft - 6/9 2016 Fantasy Football: MFL 10 Draft - 5/13 --------------- Fantasy Football Cheat Sheets --------------- 2016 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet: Top 250 - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet: Top 250 PPR - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet: Top 250 2-QB - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet: Top 250 Touchdown-Only - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Cheat Sheet: Custom - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Dynasty Rankings - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football PPR Rankings - 8/29 (Chet) 2016 Fantasy Football Spreadsheets - 9/7 --------------- Fantasy Football Articles --------------- 2016 Fantasy Football Stock Report: Training Camp - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Mock Draft Simulator - 9/7 2016 Fantasy Football Sleepers - 9/4 2016 NFL Preseason Recap, Fantasy Football Notes - 9/3 2016 Fantasy Football Preseason Stock - 9/2 2016 Fantasy Football Preseason Quarterback Targets - 9/2 2016 Fantasy Football Waiver-Wire Targets - 8/31 2016 Fantasy Football Busts - 8/31 Fantasy Football Auction Advice - 8/24 2016 Fantasy Football Round-by-Round Strategy Guide - 8/18 2016 Fantasy Football Daily Fantasy Football: Preseason Week 2 Streaming Options - 8/18 2016 Fantasy Football Draft Queue: Wide Receivers and Tight Ends - 8/17 2016 Fantasy Football Draft Queue: Quarterbacks and Running Backs - 8/16 2016 Fantasy Football Training Camp Notes - 8/10 2016 Fantasy Football Wide Receivers to Avoid - 8/6 2016 Fantasy Football Running Backs to Avoid - 8/5 2016 Fantasy Football Notes - 7/26 2016 Fantasy Football Late-Round Wide Receiver Targets - 7/21 2016 Fantasy Football Late-Round Running Back Targets - 7/19 2016 Fantasy Football ADP Values - 7/14 2016 Fantasy Football: C.J. Anderson Profile - 7/7 2016 Fantasy Football Favorite MFL Players - 6/29 2016 Fantasy Football: 2016 NFL Draft Fallout: Chip Kelly - 6/23 2016 Fantasy Football: Eli Manning Profile - 6/22 2016 Fantasy Football: Eli Manning Profile - 6/15 Fantasy Football Beginner's Guide - 6/7 2016 Fantasy Football: Running Back Drafting and ADP - 6/3 2016 Fantasy Football: Quarterback Drafting and ADP - 6/1 2016 Fantasy Football: Eli Manning Profile - 5/25 2016 Fantasy Football: Jordan Matthews Profile - 5/24 2016 Fantasy Football Rookie Dynasty Draft Wrap-up - 5/18 2016 Fantasy Football News Reports - 5/15 2016 Fantasy Football: 2016 NFL Draft Fallout - 5/11 2016 Fantasy Football: MFL 10 Quarterback Values - 4/30 2016 Fantasy Football: MFL 10 Wide Receiver Values - 4/28 2016 Fantasy Football: Tight End Strength of Schedule - 4/25 2016 Fantasy Football: Wide Receiver Strength of Schedule - 4/21 2016 Fantasy Football: Running Back Strength of Schedule - 4/20 2016 Fantasy Football: Quarterback Strength of Schedule - 4/19 2016 Fantasy Football: MFL 10 - 2/19 2016 Fantasy Football Sleepers: Philip Rivers - 2/16 2016 Fantasy Football: Quarterback ADP vs. Reality - 2/12 2016 Fantasy Football Fallout: Marshawn Lynch Retires - 2/11 2016 Fantasy Football Fallout: Calvin Johnson Retires - 2/9 2016 Fantasy Football Forecast: Dynasty - 1/21 2016 Fantasy Football Forecast: Tight Ends - 1/19 2016 Fantasy Football Forecast: Wide Receivers - 1/14 2016 Fantasy Football Forecast: Running Backs - 1/13 2016 Fantasy Football Forecast: Quarterbacks - 1/12
Injured/injury risk Potential bust Potential sleeper Rank higher in touchdown leagues Rank lower in touchdown leagues Rank higher in PPR (points per reception) leagues Rank lower in PPR leagues
This is a list of my top 2016 fantasy football busts - players you should avoid unless they fall far in your draft. The Average Draft Position (ADP) is found on FantasyFootballCalculator.com.I was dead on with some of my busts last year, namely Victor Cruz, Nelson Agholor, Joseph Randle and DeMarco Murray, all of whom were being chosen in the sixth round or earlier. However, I whiffed big time on two players: Tom Brady and Brandon Marshall.Buy Photo Devin Clark, older brother of Logan Clark, holds up a photo taken last summer of his brother at his home in Reno on Dec. 13, 2016. (Photo: JASON BEAN/RGJ, RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL-USA TODAY NETWORK)Buy Photo
Devin Clark walks up to front doors on Trainer Way in Reno. He holds a red binder filled with lined school paper. He knocks.
Devin, 16, looks nervous as he explains his presence at dozens of homes in the neighborhood. A mile up the road at Hug High School, his brother Logan was shot by a school police officer as he waved knives in a crowd of students on Dec. 7.
CLOSE Logan Clark's older brother Devin talks with the RGJ about his reaction to the shooting at Hug High School last week. Jason Bean
Devin is asking people to sign a petition demanding laws that would require Washoe County School District police officers to carry pepper spray and Tasers, and that those be used as a first response when what happened to his brother happens next time.
According to Reno police, a school police officer told Logan, 14, to drop the knives he was wielding after reports of a fight. Soon after, the officer fired one shot, hitting the high school freshman in the chest.
“It helps take my mind off it a little bit,” Devin said as he walks door to door, explaining to neighbors that he is the older brother of the boy who was shot. Devin looks like his brother. Wearing only a white t-shirt with #loganslaw and #Isupportlogan handwritten with marker, Devin insists he’s not cold.
It’s his brother he is worried about.
He said Logan is in stable but critical condition. Logan had a stroke on Friday and is in a medically induced coma after brain surgery.
Devin has been at it for two days, between hospital visits. Tuesday morning, he tried asking for signatures outside the Walmart on Second Street before he was asked to leave.
“I tell him that I love him and we are rooting for him,” said Devin of visiting with his brother in the intensive care unit at Renown Regional Medical Center.
Devin hasn’t been back to Hug since the shooting. He’s not sure he will ever go back.
Last week, when a teacher told the class the school was going on a code red lockdown, Devin was at first excited thinking he would get out of classwork.
Then he started getting messages on his phone about what happened.
“I just sat in the corner of my class crying,” he said. It wasn’t until police came into the room and searched every student that he told an officer Logan was his brother. Devin said his phone and belongings were taken.
He said Logan would not have hurt anyone but was protecting himself from upperclassmen who had threatened to rob and hurt the teenager.
“I just want lethal force to be the last resort,” Devin said.
The Reno Gazette-Journal has filed a public records request seeking information from the school district on what equipment school police officers carry. The district has not replied yet.
Devin said his brother was wrong to bring two knives to school but didn’t deserve to be shot.
“I just don’t think a kid should be shot for their emotions or defending themselves,” he said.
The family’s attorney, David Houston, said Logan had reported to school officials he was being bullied and was defending himself from being hurt by older students. Houston said Logan was punched and was bleeding from the mouth.
"I don't know why the first response is to try and shoot a kid without trying some other sort of intervention," Houston said last week.
The petition was started by Demick LaFlamme, whose son D.J. is friends with Logan.
LaFlamme said he has lost friends over his support for Logan.
“Friends come and go, but when something bad happens, you have to do something so it doesn’t happen again," LaFlamme said.
By Tuesday afternoon, Devin, LaFlamme and family friends walking door to door had a few dozen signatures and more than 500 on change.org, an online petition site.
Devin said the plan is to get as many signatures as possible and to bring the petition to school officials Wednesday afternoon.
LaFlamme said a peaceful march is planned at Pat Baker Park at 3 p.m. Wednesday.
“This is a good kid, with a heart of gold,” LaFlamme said.
“I can’t just be angry. I have to do this for my brother” Devin said. “He deserves a life. Everybody deserves a life.”
Update: Organizers of the petition said a march will be organized from Pat Baker park to the Washoe County School District offices.
Buy Photo Demick LaFlamme holds up a phone photo of Logan Clark in the hospital at his home in Reno on Dec. 13, 2016. LaFlamme's son Kyle is seen on the left. (Photo: JASON BEAN/RGJ, RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL-USA TODAY NETWORK)
Read or Share this story: http://on.rgj.com/2hCPiAGHanchon’s Log, Fifth Day of the Month of Giving
Final testing of the Samsar is progressing as expected. We’re still having some trouble with the plasma relays, half the EPS conduits are down and my engineers absolutely refuse to have anything to do with those Federation replicators, but those are all problems that can be successfully resolved.
Captain Kim is returning to the system in three days. I’ll ask him to send over a team to deal with the replicator issue.
My people are a spacefaring species. We are accustomed to building and maintaining a fleet. We did so without support for decades before we settled on this world, and we will continue to send out survey ships, trading expeditions, and, most importantly, the collection vessels which allow us to continue our species.
The collection vessels will be more important than ever now. We’ve lost so many, and replacing them with those in the Temple is now no longer as straightforward a choice as I once thought.
But the Kobali are not warriors. This conflict has forced us into those roles, and it is an uncomfortable fit at best.
The Samsar is the first of our warships. A cruiser designed for defense with the help of our friends from the alliance, it is unique for a Kobali vessel. The Regenerative Integrity Field will help us greatly during an attack, but it is not the ship that concerns me.
It is her crew.
My people are a gentle race. Kind. Compassionate. When they are confronted by an enemy, their first response is not to fight. Our friends have helped us in this regard, but … the Alpha Quadrant must be a very dangerous place. As friendly and accommodating as the officers from the alliance are, they are … harder than we are. It is to their advantage, as they have been able to do much we could not, but I do not know if I would ever wish to be like them.
This war has taken much out of my people. I pray it does not harden our hearts as well.
Discuss in the forums.Frequently asked questions
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have some taxing ICE rezzed on them, you can start drawing cards and playing economy operations to increase your maximum hand size. Because you have such high-impact economy operations along with Jackson Howard and Archived Memories to recur them, it’s not difficult to accumulate 15 cards in your hand with a few Hedge Funds to spare.
The ICE in this deck is purely taxing. Every single piece has 2 or more subroutines, and that generally means that the runner is going to have to pay in one way or another to get past them. Only having two servers to protect in most cases means that you have more money to draw cards and snowball advantage with economy operations while the runner takes blind, expensive stabs at your centrals.
The agenda spread says a lot about how this deck plays. Why 3 Corporate War and not 3 Efficiency Committee? Well, the short answer is that it doesn’t actually matter. You hardly every actually score those 4//2s. If you don’t want to score them, why wouldn’t you play a couple of Profiteerings instead of the 4th 4/2? If you did, you’d be giving the runner more agendas to steal, you’d be shorting yourself one non-agenda deck slot, and by the time you want to score a Profiteering, you’d probably be rich enough to Biotic out the win in the next few turns anyway. Most importantly, because you’re a slow Fast Advance deck, you aren’t in any hurry to score. If it’s turn 7 and you still haven’t found a 3-advancement agenda, it makes very little difference, because by the time you want to score, you will have seen over half of your deck and are bound to have something available.
One interesting consequence of drawing your whole deck is that you find yourself in situations where the runner cannot possibly win the game even if they steal every agenda in R&D. This allows you to focus entirely on defending HQ with taxing ICE, and makes running Beta Tests appealing even when you don’t have a Jackson Howard ready to resuce agendas from the bin. When you only have one server to defend, and it costs the runner upwards of 10 credits to get in, that really is the ultimate way to create the kind of credit disparity that slow Fast Advance decks need to start scoring.
Sit Down and Stay a While
In the end, slow decks can afford you a lot of advantages. You can reduce variance by seeing more cards, (there’s bound to be a SanSan and an Astroscript in there somewhere!), you have more time to potentially outplay your opponent, and you’re never totally out of a game just because the runner is fully set up. Do yourself a favor and put away the Chimeras for a second, pick up a Slow Fast Advance deck, and pour yourself a cup of coffee. It’s time to take back the late game from the runners. We’re in it for the long haul.
If you want to see me slog it out with some slow decks, check out my YouTube channel or my Twitch stream!
https://www.youtube.com/user/DargenioDan
http://www.twitch.tv/mediohxcore
Dan D’Argenio
Mediohxcore on the Forums
Calc3 on Reddit
[email protected] you’re about to sign on the dotted line for a Porsche Cayman, then pen down. At least until you’ve seen this, Renault’s alternative.
It’s our best look yet at the Alpine sports car that lands in 2017. There have been teasers before, but this Alpine Vision is described as 80 per cent related to the car you’ll actually be able to buy.
If you know your history of Renault’s sports car relative, you’ll recognise the design cues. The quad front lights, rear window shape and overall profile all unapologetically nod to Alpine’s exceedingly pretty A110, a sixties sports car with a strong rallying CV.
You want the important stats? The Alpine Vision is driven by its rear wheels, the turbocharged four-cylinder petrol engine powering them is mounted in the middle, and that operates through a twin-clutch paddleshift gearbox.
There are no firm numbers yet, but we reckon around 250bhp is likely from a production version. That’s nearly 50bhp less than a new 718 Cayman, but the Alpine ought to be around 300kg skinnier, weighing a Clio-like 1,100kg. 0-62mph, Renault says, will arrive in “less than 4.5 seconds”.
It’ll be a wee while before we get to drive an Alpine, but all the right words are being said. “Weight-saving and agility are valued over pure power,” says Alpine, while its coupe will offer a chassis with a “playful personality”. In a sports car market typically hung up on big power and even bigger grip levels, there’s plenty to get excited about when a car vehemently shuns both in favour of fun. Think Toyota GT86…
The finished product will not be a GT86 rival, however: Renault is punching for Porsche, and we can expect a £40,000-plus price-tag for its finished sports car, with the 718 Cayman its chief rival. Though the Alfa Romeo 4C and Lotus Exige are surely on the French company’s radar, too.
Fittingly, then, the interior is plushly appointed. There’s aluminium and carbon aplenty, while highlights include fancy TFT instruments and a pair of “sensuous and technical” quilted leather bucket seats. And while we’re quoting Alpine’s literature, it must be noted the interior starter button holds “the promise of an imminent sensory explosion.” Eww.
We’ll see this Alpine Vision concept at the Geneva motor show at the beginning of March, while a production version follows later in the year. Autumn’s Paris motor show would be a good bet, given Renault will have an appreciative home crowd to show it off to.
What do you think, TG.commers? Sleepless nights ahead in Stuttgart?Free hoagie alert!
Wawa Welcome America’s Hoagie Day returns this Wednesday, July 2 with tons, literally 4.5 tons, of free hoagies for all to enjoy.
On Wednesday, July 2, beginning at noon, spend your lunch break on Independence Mall with all of the freshly-made hoagies you can imagine.
Wawa Hoagie Day also serves as a salute to members of the military, police force and firefighters. Throughout the day, watch local police and fire departments compete in a variety of Hoagie-centric events and enjoy a patriotic performance by the United States Army Fife and Drum Corps.
Just across Independence Mall, the National Constitution Center opens its doors for free all day long on Wednesday, July 2 and promises a variety of special programming like an exhibition about the history of the hoagie and live music.
Wednesday lunch plans, check!
Wawa Welcome America Hoagie Day
When: Wednesday, July 2, noon-2 p.m.
Where: Independence Visitors Center Lawn, 1 N. Independence Mall West
Cost: Free
More info: www.welcomeamerica.comTrade tiff: Alberta premier checking if Saskatchewan’s Wall breaking rules
RED DEER, Alta. — Cross-boundary political sniping between Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and Saskatchewan's Brad Wall has escalated over Wall's attempt to poach oil and gas firms.
Wall's government sent letters earlier this week to several Calgary-based energy companies offering them incentives to relocate to Saskatchewan. The government is offering to subsidize relocation costs, trim taxes and royalties and help find space in unused government buildings.
Notley on Thursday called Wall's plan short-sighted and self-defeating. She said it probably breaks regional free-trade rules as well.
"The efforts of the province of Saskatchewan at this point likely do violate the New West Partnership as well as the (federal Agreement on Internal Trade)," Notley said in Red Deer where she was announcing a new courthouse.
"If I was a business owner that resided in a smaller market, say Saskatchewan, that depended on an agreement that gave me access to a bigger market, say Alberta, I would be very concerned.
"(The New West) trade agreement actually promotes back and forth of business operations that contribute to prosperity on both sides of the border. And you don't touch one without pulling a really large string."
Notley said her government will review the trade agreement and decide how to respond, but won't pull out of the deal, which reduces trade barriers among the four western provinces.
The partnership allows for dispute resolution with fines that can reach $5 million.
Speaking in Regina, Wall said he doesn't believe he is violating any trade agreements, although he acknowledged he did not consult legal counsel before sending the letters.
"We are letting folks know about existing policies. I think all provinces will continue to do that and have done that," Wall said.
"We haven't got a specific relocation program we are putting in the window... that would be counter to the spirit of those trade deals."
Wall ruled out paying companies to relocate to Saskatchewan.
"There would never be a direct payment to any company like that. We would use existing tax tools."
A tax incentive for companies that bring head office jobs to Saskatchewan was put in place years ago, Wall said. Companies could use money from it to defray things such as moving costs.
Notley said Wall's policy lacks leadership and vision.
"In the long term, if we're going to grow prosperity throughout Canada, what we need to do as government leaders is invest in growing businesses in our provinces, not trying to steal business from other provinces," she said.
"That's a zero-sum game and it doesn't help everybody out in the long run."
Scott Saxberg, CEO of Crescent Point Energy, said he received a letter from Wall this week, but it was nothing new. Wall asks him to move every time he sees him, he said.
Saxberg suggested Notley change her approach to Wall.
"She should be 'Game on' and try to attract more business to Calgary," he suggested.
Last summer, Saskatchewan cried foul after Alberta rejigged beer markups and introduced grants to help Alberta craft brewers.
And last week the premiers traded barbs over their budgets.
— By Dean Bennett in Edmonton. With files from Dan Healing in Calgary
The Canadian PressFreeBSD 9.1-RC3 Available...
The third release candidate of the 9.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for amd64, i386, powerpc64, and sparc64. The MD5/SHA256 checksums are at the bottom of this message. The ISO images and, for architectures that support it, the memory stick images are available here: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/9.1/ (or any of the FreeBSD mirror sites). This is expected to be the last Release Candidate. Unless a major show-stopper is discovered within the next few days the final Release Builds will be started. If you notice any problems you can report them through the normal Gnats PR system or here on the -stable mailing list. If you want to do a source-based update to an existing system using SVN the branch to use is releng/9.1. If you would like to use CVS instead use RELENG_9_1. The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 9.0-RELEASE, 9.1-BETA1, 9.1-RC1, or 9.1-RC2 can upgrade as follows: # freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.1-RC3 During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly. # freebsd-update install The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing. # shutdown -r now After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components, and the system needs to be rebooted again: # freebsd-update install # shutdown -r now Users of earlier FreeBSD releases (FreeBSD 7.X, 8.X) can also use freebsd-update to upgrade to FreeBSD 9.1-RC3, but will be prompted to rebuild all third-party applications (e.g., anything installed from the ports tree) after the second invocation of "freebsd-update install", in order to handle differences in the system libraries between FreeBSD 7.X or FreeBSD 8.X and FreeBSD 9.X. Checksums: SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 86d57e699ae0e298a420ff168e6abe7b715e6dee8350149ed2f230885b1973ec SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-amd64-disc1.iso) = 11c7e4ab16294794bf950073901f9a4dc8f735de08b02a321b63c4702af60f98 SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-amd64-memstick.img) = ccd983a7e1f37c0bb4b87c6cacc3945d38be8add66ea0689c0b8e0a72c75ad58 MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 278a0ee9e00dba88068f1ad1c509429c MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-amd64-disc1.iso) = 78ea831eaf495e2f713d5cd5ffc5f083 MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-amd64-memstick.img) = f37c7ff68025bc065465d3d647b6e7e0 SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-i386-bootonly.iso) = 8b944a3b263de04db2e0cb38b068a4ceca6e2fe4f8af5344567696e09b7df66a SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-i386-disc1.iso) = e7c19e2aadb0c6ce072265511d84fd0d39c6e60628231d8dc31023d410e285d6 SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-i386-memstick.img) = 1ebb2ebf6b20376df7c3719f5b1bbbdd47ae2054e3a23019d8fdc93734f78fe5 MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-i386-bootonly.iso) = f14703b350e7f2357d23250c6eeee4ef MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-i386-disc1.iso) = 13405032579c52182bedfcd84a294871 MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-i386-memstick.img) = 515d0866470d2edd1d99867e83387c35 SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-powerpc64-bootonly.iso) = b46212dc2fa3308fc58465bb999b4ec857245826fd1cb122af758e8b340afaf4 SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-powerpc64-memstick) = bfda2bf019eb4c540d280608a81ba9d67402ab0248c38c33badb4548e725f657 SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-powerpc64-release.iso) = b5e0948df8d7f62a7e620647d90c3c47f89ad71cf310277d86ef139c8ba25961 MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-powerpc64-bootonly.iso) = d474edb9aac9aa5e9ad226a1e345cbd9 MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-powerpc64-memstick) = aa443c1ae88773cc6c0a070ca2c6784f MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-powerpc64-release.iso) = 237aaf75f2f6b2192cf0e1f51c190dc8 SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = e1d61b01ba8d03c324f0a828527741542fd0b337d3281b1f943658f5f482ae9e SHA256 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-sparc64-disc1.iso) = 9b59c368f0572198ef9562c7f52a45ca33aa832d607c6331bd4ca796c5ca4d8f MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-sparc64-bootonly.iso) = e3e10bc7ce2a0377053cb2d7eff22538 MD5 (FreeBSD-9.1-RC3-sparc64-disc1.iso) = ab754ee5361a4c9b8d451b0eee080732 -- Ken Smith - From there to here, from here to | kensmith at buffalo.edu there, funny things are everywhere. | - Theodore Geisel | -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 196 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20121103/c0a583bd/attachment.sig>This post was written by Stephen Messenger on The Dodo.
The latest trend in smartphone holders might seem a bit too cutesy to be practical, but at least this cozy little rodent doesn’t seem to mind. According to RocketNews24, mini mattress-shaped carrying cases are the hot item among iPhone owners in Japan—though given the nation’s obsession with all-things hamsters, it was only a matter of time before the two came together in a collision of cuteness.
Twitter user maimai unleashed an awww-storm this week after uploading a photo of her furry pet napping in the place where her phone normally sleeps.
Within days, more than 30,000 people retweeted and favorited the heavy-lidded hamster photo, but not everyone was so easily won over. After several incredulous online critics blasted maimai for staging the sleeping scene, she was forced to prove that it was indeed the hamster’s idea.
Maimai followed up the original tweet with these shots taken beforehand.
(Twitter/maimai)
Now that the matter is squarely settled, it’s time to go back into sleep mode.
(Twitter/maimai)Image caption Bridget Jones (played by Renee Zellweger) and Sir David Jason's book were released on the same day
A printing mix up led to early copies of the latest Bridget Jones book having a chunk of Sir David Jason's memoirs in the middle.
About 40 pages of Sir David's My Life were printed in Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, both of which came out on the same day.
"The printers have had a Bridget moment," said publishers Vintage.
It said it was recalling the misprinted copies and replacing them with correct versions.
"A printing error has been detected in some of the very early copies of Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy," said a Vintage spokesman.
"Copies printed on one day have given readers an accidental preview of David Jason's autobiography."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Foyles manager: If people are buying books then I'm happy
Both Fielding and Sir David's book were published on what the publishing world has dubbed "Super Thursday", when publishing houses put out some of their highest-priority titles for the Christmas market.
Among other books released are Jennifer Saunders' autobiography Bonkers, My Life in Laughs; Mo Farah's Twin Ambitions and John Bishop's How Did All This Happen?
Mad About the Boy signals the final chapter of hapless "singleton" Bridget Jones's diaries.
Fans may already know one of the significant plotlines after extracts were earlier published in the Sunday Times Magazine.
Although Fielding herself approved the reveal, some fans were shocked to be told of such a major twist before the book had even been published.The release of a video showing the death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald -- whom Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shot 16 times in October 2014, as the teen was walking away from him -- has made the city's police department an object of national scrutiny, with questions arising about its policies, its practices and its troubled history with the city's communities of color.
Here are some facts and statistics that highlight just how bad things are at the Chicago Police Department:
Chicago tops big cities in fatal police shootings.
According to an analysis by the Better Government Association released in July, Chicago police fatally shot 70 people between 2010 and 2014, more than any other police department in a major U.S. city. When adjusted for population size, Chicago ranks fourth behind Phoenix, Philadelphia and Dallas for this grim statistic. (Phoenix police shot and killed 57 people during the years in question. Philadelphia police killed 54 people, and Dallas police killed 34.) The report also found that Chicago police shot a total of 240 people over that five-year period.
Chicago police did not respond to a request for comment on this and other statistics highlighted in this story.
Black people are killed disproportionately.
The Better Government Association study also found that of 46 of the 70 people fatally shot by Chicago police -- 66 percent -- were black. However, according to the 2010 U.S. Census, just one-third of Chicago's population is black.
There are tons of complaints, but police rarely get in trouble.
Data compiled by the Citizens Police Data Project shows that fewer than 2 percent of the 28,567 complaints filed against the department from March 2011 to September 2015 resulted in discipline. Most officers who do face discipline are suspended for a week or less.
Van Dyke, the officer who shot McDonald, is listed on the CPDP website as having 20 complaints filed against him. None of those complaints have resulted in discipline.
White people are more likely to have their complaints validated.
The complaint data also shows that while black people accounted for 61 percent of the misconduct allegations filed against Chicago police, they accounted for only 25 percent of the sustained complaints. Meanwhile, complaints filed by white people made up 21 percent of the total allegations, but accounted for 58 percent of the sustained complaints.
City investigators aren't helping much.
According to WBEZ, the city's Independent Police Review Authority has reviewed more than 400 officer-involved shootings since 2007. As of July, it had found only one shooting unjustified.
IPRA is also known for taking a very long time -- in some cases, over five years -- to investigate shootings. As the Chicago Tribune reported in 2012, these extreme delays can lead to charges being dismissed due to the statute of limitations running out.
IPRA didn't respond to a request for comment.
The city fired an investigator who tried to hold cops accountable.
Lorenzo Davis, a former IPRA supervisor who investigated several police shooting cases, was fired by the city in July. Davis said he was asked to change his findings in three shooting cases where he found officers at fault. (IPRA has denied these claims.)
"The Independent Police Review Authority is being used to deflect protest and criticism from the police department,” Davis told The Huffington Post earlier this year. “What they’re concerned about is the careers of the police officers.”
Murder charges against cops are incredibly rare.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Van Dyke is the first Chicago officer in 35 years to be charged with first-degree murder for an on-duty incident. The last murder charges came in 1980, when three cops were indicted for beating a mentally ill man to death after he was arrested for smoking on a Chicago train. Two of the officers were found guilty of manslaughter, while charges against the third were dropped.
Read more on the case at Chicago Magazine.
The city has a major stop-and-frisk problem.
An American Civil Liberties Union report released earlier this year found that Chicago police are stopping and frisking a "shocking amount of people." In the summer of 2014 alone, police made 250,000 stops that did not lead to arrests. Police also disproportionately stopped African-Americans -- 72 percent of all people stopped were black, even though black people, again, make up just one-third of the city's population.
In the wake of the ACLU report, the Chicago Police Department has agreed to monitor how officers use the technique, and to further train officers to ensure people are not stopped because of their race or gender.
Chicago has paid out hundreds of millions for police misconduct.
According to a Wall Street Journal report published in July, Chicago police spent $249.7 million resolving police misconducted cases between 2010 and 2014. (Only New York City paid more, incurring over $600 million in costs related to misconduct.)
Meanwhile, according to the Better Government Association, the city spent over $500 million from 2004 to 2014 on settlements, legal fees and other costs related to complaints against police officers.
The police department is disproportionately white.
While Chicago is home to black, white and Hispanic people in roughly equal measure (each group accounts for about 32 percent of the city's residents), the police department as of 2010 was 55 percent white, 26 percent black and 18 percent Hispanic, according to data collected by The New York Times.
The city is still dealing with a decades-old police torture scandal.
Jon Burge, a former Chicago police commander, tortured more than 200 suspects into making confessions between 1972 and 1991. Burge was eventually tried and convicted, and was sentenced to prison in 2011.
The scandal, however, continues to loom large over the city. Chicago has paid millions in settlements to some of the individuals Burge tortured. And as NBC reported in August, many of Burge's victims -- most of them black -- still have not had their cases heard.
Also on HuffPost:America has been doing income taxes wrong for more than 50 years.
All Americans, including the rich, would be better off if top tax rates went back to Eisenhower-era levels when the top federal income tax rate was 91 percent, according to a new working paper by Fabian Kindermann from the University of Bonn and Dirk Krueger from the University of Pennsylvania.
The top tax rate that makes all citizens, including the highest 1 percent of earners, the best off is “somewhere between 85 and 90 percent,” Krueger told The Huffington Post. Currently, the top rate of 39.6 percent is paid on income above $406,750 for individuals and $457,600 for couples.
Fewer than 1 percent of Americans, or about 1.3 million people, reach that top bracket.
Here is the conclusion from the report, charted:
What you’re seeing is decades of a more or less strict adherence to the gospel that tax cuts for the highest income earners are good. The trend began with President Kennedy, but his cuts were hardly radical. He lowered rates when the American economy was humming along, no longer paying for World War II and, relative to today, an egalitarian dreamland. To put things in perspective, Kennedy cut rates to around 70 percent, a level we can hardly imagine raising them to today. The huge drops -- from 70 percent to 50 percent to less than 30 percent -- came with the Reagan presidency.
In comparison to decades of cuts, Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama each raised taxes at the top by a historically insignificant amount. Obama also proposed modest tax increases, raising taxes on families making more than $250,000 from 33 to 36 percent, and on individuals making more than $200,000 from 36 to 39.6 percent. These increases failed in the House.
A 90 percent top marginal tax rate doesn’t mean that if you make $450,000, you are going to pay $405,000 in federal income taxes. Americans have a well-documented trouble understanding the notion of marginal tax rates. The marginal tax rate is the amount you pay on your income above a certain amount. Right now, you pay the top marginal tax rate on every dollar you earn over $406,750. So if you make $450,000, you only pay the top rate on your final $43,250 in income.
A very high marginal tax rate isn’t effective if it’s riddled with loopholes, of course. Kindermann and Krueger's paper is also focused solely on income, not wealth, and returns on wealth are how the truly superrich make a living.
Despite these limitations, Kindermann and Krueger say that a top marginal tax rate in the range of 90 percent would decrease both income and wealth inequality, bring in more money for the government and increase everyone’s well-being -- even those subject to the new, much higher income tax rate.
“High marginal tax rates provide social insurance against not making it into the 1 percent,” Krueger told The Huffington Post. Here’s what he means: There’s a small chance of moving up to the top rung of the income ladder, Krueger said. If rates are high for the top earners and low for everyone else, there’s a big chance you will pay a low rate and a small chance you will pay a high rate. Given these odds, it is rational to accept high income tax rates on top earners and low rates for the rest as a form of insurance.
This insurance takes the form of low-income people paying dramatically less in taxes. “Everyone who is below four times median income” -- that’s about $210,000 for households -- “pays less,” Kruger said.
The paper assumes that tax rates won’t stop a future Bill Gates from wanting to start Microsoft. Instead, what it finds is that labor supply among the 1 percent would decline -- translation, they would work a little less -- but it “does not collapse.” That’s because of who the authors assume makes up the top income bracket: celebrities, sports stars, and entrepreneurs -- people with innate talents that are hugely rewarding, but only for a short period of time. They only have a few years to use their skills to make most of the money they will ever make. High tax rates don’t lessen their degree of desire to be productive, the authors said.
Krueger described the phenomenon like this: “How much less hard would LeBron James play basketball if he were taxed at a much higher rate? The answer is not much. “James knows he only has five years,” or so of peak earning potential, Krueger said, and so he will work to make as much as he can during that time. If high income tax rates robbed the would-be 1 percent of their stick-to-itiveness, the paper’s conclusions would change.My Top 6 PC Gaming Mice Suggestions
When it comes to buying a new mouse for your gaming needs, there are 100’s of different mice to consider. How you choose the best gaming mouse for you is a very personal thing and not only depends on the size of your hands, but also on how you grip the mouse, and what type of games you like to play. I’ve been reading various reviews all over the internet so you don’t have to and compiled a list that might help you narrow down your own research.
A gaming mouse needs a high quality sensor, adjustable CPI levels, and more than the basic 3 buttons that office type work requires. However, a first person shooter (FPS) gamer has different requirements from their mouse than a massive multiplayer online (MMO) gamer does, so that will also affect your decision.
Best FPS Mouse – Corsair Vengeance M65
A FPS mouse doesn’t need to have lots of buttons, but it needs accurate tracking, must be comfortable in your hand, and will probably have a definite ‘click’ on the scroll wheel action. The Corsair Vengeance M65 not only has a programmable set of buttons, it also has a ‘sniper button’ which allows for instant change in DPI for more accurate aiming. It comes with removable weights so you can adjust the feel & balance of the mouse in your hand, which is important for your comfort.
Best MMO Gaming Mouse – Razer Naga
An MMO mouse needs a lot of buttons and the Razer Naga seems to be the most highly recommended MMO mouse I’ve seen. It has a 12 button thumb grid with mechanical switches to give a definite click feel and the mouse wheel has sideways movement, as well as the usual scroll motion. Every button is programmable so you can personalize and customize the Razer Naga to perform exactly how you want it to.
Best RTS Gaming Mouse – Razer Deathadder
Simple & ergonomically designed, the Razer Deathadder is highly rated as an RTS mouse. It has only a few extra buttons, has accurate scrolling, and the smooth design should suit most hand sizes and all types of grip. In some reviews, it’s also rated as one of the best all-purpose gaming mice along with the G502 (see below).
Best Gaming Mouse for Small Hands – Kone Pure Optical
As a female gamer, I struggle with some of the larger, heavier mice so the Kone Pure Optical gaming mouse is one that I will be looking at later this year. It’s smaller and lighter than some of the other highly rated Kone mice and it doesn’t have the pretty LED strip either. That means that more of the available surface is grippable and it keeps the price down a bit too.
Best Heavyweight Gaming Mouse – Logitech G502 Proteus Core
Logitech is a very popular and well known brand for gaming mice. This G502 Proteus Core has rave reviews and is one of the heavier mice on the market. It has up to 5 additional weights, which you can use to tune the overall weight and balance for best performance. This heavyweight gaming mouse also features all programmable buttons. It also has 5 DPI settings so you can quickly change the mouse sensitivity depending on what your game situation requires. If you like a larger, heavier gaming mouse then this one is probably your best choice.
Best Budget Gaming Mouse – Anker Gaming Mouse
The one problem with gaming mice in general is their cost – I’ve always just used a basic 3 button $5 mouse, which might help explain why I’m so bad at some of the games I try to play! The Anker Gaming Mouse is currently on sale and is one of the best selling gaming mice on Amazon. If you don’t want to splash out too much cash, then this budget option mouse might be worth a try for you.
Other Top Selling Gaming Mice from Amazon
If you don’t like the look of my top 6 suggestions, you can have a look at Amazon’s top selling PC gaming mice and pick from there. My top 6 PC gaming mice list is just the tip of the iceberg. There are 100’s of other mice available in multiple colors, sizes, and brands.
We all have our favorite style but the best way to choose a mouse is to go to your local gaming or electronics store, and just try them out first. I usually narrow down my choices on Amazon based on reviews and price, then hit the stores to see if my chosen mouse feels comfortable in my small hands.
Are you left handed? Don’t feel left out. There are some Gaming Mice For Left Handed People too!
What is your favorite mouse? Did it make my list?New Tom Cruise Marijuana Really Bugging Out Tom Cruise
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The current article you are reading does not reflect the views of the current editors and contributors of the new Ecorazzi
Continuing our efforts to cover all things green (remember that story about Weeds getting some eco-packaging?), we present to you the latest entertainment news concerning the world’s favorite illegal substance.
This one is hilarious. And you don’t even need to be high to enjoy it.
Apparently, there is a new strain of medical marijuana out there being marketed as “Tom Cruise Purple“. Why the dubious honor? The weed is reportedly so potent that it causes you to see things that aren’t really there. We all know Tom is heavy into the Scientology side of things — so we’re thinking this is probably where the joke is being directed. Of course, the actor isn’t backing the moniker — especially with his past objections to psychotropic drugs — and is getting his legal team into action. From the article,
“Word is that the actor’s lawyers are taking a serious look at the strong brand of bud after we brought it to their attention. One of Cruise’s friends found it ‘outrageous’ that licensed cannabis clubs in Northern California are selling vials of pot featuring a picture of Cruise laughing hysterically.
Staffers at several California clinics we called said they were forbidden to discuss any of the herbal varieties in their ‘inventory.’ But one weed devotee said, ‘I heard it’s the kind of pot that makes you hallucinate.'”
Awesome. We really hope Kevin Nealon’s character gets an opportunity to sample this fine bud on the next season of Weeds. And Tom? Chill out man — it’s all good.
via Celeb|bitchyTempers fray as Baird quizzed on $1bn blunder
Updated
NSW Treasurer Mike Baird has refused to table a document detailing which departments were responsible for $1 billion worth of errors in the state's accounts last financial year.
Mr Baird was grilled at a supplementary budget estimates hearing today about 37 multi-million-dollar mistakes identified by the Auditor-General, which shifted the budget from deficit into surplus.
The Treasurer conceded he has had the list of errors for three weeks but says he will not provide the document until department heads have had a chance to respond.
"We are waiting for the response from agencies and the director-generals. If you don't like it, lump it," he said.
But Labor MP Walt Secord accused Mr Baird of trying to escape scrutiny.
Secord: You've known since October 31 this hearing was going to occur. I ask you, please, table the list of 37 errors. Baird: We are going to release it. Secord: Today, Treasurer. Baird: As I said, Walt. Secord: This committee is no surprise to you, Treasurer - you've known since October 31. Baird: Walt, wait a minute. Walt, can you just wait?
The hearing descended into a shouting match as Mr Secord and Greg Donnelly tried to grill Mr Baird about political donations and revisit the appointment
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and Syria.
In 2013, Matthieu Tardis, of France Terre D'Asile, which provides legal and social services to asylum-seekers and refugees, said the country's government did not consider many of the applications to come from those from "'good' countries, for example countries ravaged by war like Syria or Afghanistan". This, he added, helped to explain the lower rate of approval.
There was a wide variance between acceptance rates for asylum-seekers within the UK. Last year, of Eritrean applicants 87% were granted asylum, but just 20% of Pakistanis.
Detection
"There are no ID cards. They can easily find work outside the formal economy, which is not really controlled."
Natacha Bouchart, Mayor of Calais
It is reported that some illegal migrants want to come to the UK because there is no national system of identity cards and police cannot stop people in the street to ask for their papers. This would make it easier to go about their business, as detection is difficult.
In 2008, the Labour government started to introduce biometric compulsory identity cards for foreign nationals from outside the European Economic Area (EEA). The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010 to 2015 did not scrap this.
UK Immigration Enforcement officers arrested 139 suspected immigration offenders at locations including London, Durham, Manchester, Wales and Somerset in a single day in 2013 following raids.
The 2014 Immigration Act introduced a requirement for private landlords to check whether new tenants have the right to rent in the UK, or face a fine of up to £3,000. A pilot scheme in the West Midlands is due to be extended across England in the autumn.
Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.From RationalWiki
"Creep shaming" is a term used to defend against claims that certain actions/behaviors, often towards women and often sexual in nature, are "creepy" (unacceptable behavior). The term is derived from "slut shaming" and is used predominantly by MRAs and other denizens of the manosphere. The logic in the term's use is that the man in question is made to feel ashamed solely for being male rather than the specific context of how he has behaved, and that the women shaming him are saying that they don't want men to flirt with women at all. Needless to say, this is (almost always) bullshit, since the implication is ultimately that there are few/no acceptable restrictions on seeking sex.
What some call "creep shaming" is actually pointing out a variety of inappropriate behaviors, including, but not limited to: persistent and/or disrespectful sexual propositioning (including cold-propositioning),[2] assuming that women are seeking their attention, failing to read obvious body language that expresses a lack of interest on the part of the targeted woman, and failing to take "no" for an answer. It's possibly rather revealing that, whereas some women are reappropriating the term "slut", MRAs aren't lining up to "own" the designation of "creep".
Making women vulnerable [ edit ]
The "anti-creep shaming campaign" is about discouraging people from protecting themselves from harm. A person sometimes intuitively feels they are not safe with another, but is made to feel guilty about acting on this feeling. Astute readers may recognize that as a tactic often used by anyone seeking to take advantage of another.
“ ” [I]t's a really freaking dangerous idea to twist a woman's open, honest communication about her boundaries/expectations into ‘creep shaming' that victimizes men. —Jessica Wakeman[3]
An example which had some impact in the blogosphere in 2012 occurred when blogger Jessica Wakeman posted an "open letter" about a bad dating experience which had culminated in her being called "mean and bitchy" as well as "crazy."[4] In the comments thread, one reader posted a lengthy comment very much taking the man's side and explaining his behaviour as a response to feeling "creep shamed."[5] Wakemen responded to this comment in her next blog, entitled "Why 'Creep Shaming' Is Total BS", again prompting hostile comments from MRA supporters.[3] Other bloggers picked up on this issue, exploring the phenomenon of creep shaming as well as connotations of the word "creep" itself.[6]
Who complains [ edit ]
According to the men's rights activists who coined the phrase, creep shaming is a weapon that people (feminists in particular) use to "persecute" men, and an example of female "privilege."
An example of this worldview can be seen in this comment posted on Reddit in 2011,[7] which has since become a popular talking point in both MRA and feminist circles:
“ ” Creep shaming is probably one of the most insidious and anti-equality things you can do. The ability to label men as "creepy" is just one privilege that women enjoy, and a constant source of fear of ostracizing that all men must fear in our society.
The people who like to throw the term around tend to be bitter misogynists with a near-total lack of self-awareness, and therefore avoid paying attention to the whole context of what "creepiness" is. The term 'creep' describes effectively when someone has overstepped someone else's boundaries and may make it hard to avoid reflecting on the impact of this behavior. A person can only stop being a creep by genuinely respecting others and their boundaries more.
Lucas Werner claimed that the word "creep" is analogous to racist and homophobic slurs, and that it is ageist because it is often applied to older men who pursue younger women.[8]
Some uses of the creep shaming meme also tie in with other common ideas among misogynists, such as a disdain for women having agency and the pick-up artist view that if your attempts at seducing a chick don't work, there must be something wrong with her and not you. These misogynists also appear to believe that a woman trying to avoid a man she considers a possible threat is worse than the prospect of a guy not being able to pursue a woman. The subtext is that these guys don't want to acknowledge that they may actually have some personality issues to work out before most women will show interest in them, so instead they attack women for, essentially, having standards and an instinct for self-preservation. It's essentially entitled NiceGuyism turned into a debating point.
People who complain about creep-shaming tend to make the common assumption that equality equals fairness. Equality in the dating sphere is a goal both men and women should work towards but fairness has nothing to do with how one feels about someone else and it is entirely a judgement call made by someone else.
Another common criticism by men is that there is no equivalent of "creep" that can be applied to a woman.[9] There are many adjectives and nouns that are used to describe similar behaviour in women, from "bunny boiler" and "stalker" to "needy", "clingy", and "desperate".
Relationship with slut shaming [ edit ]
Practitioners of slut shaming and the anti-creep-shaming crowd are making the same fundamental assumption about human sexuality. Both are essentially arguments from biological determinism. Slut shaming operates under the assumption that women are not supposed to be sexually active and/or have sexual desires. Some versions of decrying creep shaming are taking the related traditionalist argument, that the male sex drive is all-powerful and therefore it is inappropriate to criticize "creeps" for being slaves to their genitalia: a concept which might itself be called creepy.
Creeps and flirting [ edit ]
There's a difference between "creepy" behaviour and flirting. The women who protest against actual creeps do not want to prevent men from ever trying to sexually or romantically pursue women, but draw awareness to the fact that there are respectful and appropriate ways of doing so.
See also [ edit ]Square Enix Giving Away an Island in Just Cause 3 Contest
Square Enix Giving Away an Island in Just Cause 3 Contest
Share. Or take $50,000 in cash. Or take $50,000 in cash.
Just Cause 3 developer Avalanche Studios and Square Enix have announced a contest for Just Cause 3 in which the grand prize is a real-life island.
According to the official website, players must come out on top of the Chaos Points leaderboard 90 days after the release of Just Cause 3 for a chance to win an island valued at $50,000 USD or a cash prize for the same amount. Chaos Points are acquired by creatively destroying anything and everything in Just Cause 3.
Square Enix does specify a location for the island, nor does it guarantee the island to be inhabitable or accessible via means other than a boat.
"Location of Island to be determined by Sponsor," said Square Enix. "All taxes and fees associated with purchasing and obtaining of Island (including but not limited to attorney's fees, escrow, and closing costs) are the responsibility of the Winner. Sponsor does not guarantee the Island to be inhabitable, developed or reachable by any means other than a boat."
Square Enix also notes that the grand prize is subject to change if necessary.
"Sponsor reserves the right to change and/or substitute any components of the Grand Prize at any time, in its sole discretion."
Exit Theatre Mode
To participate in the contest, players will need to purchase the day one edition of Just Cause 3, register an account on the Square Enix site, and link their PlayStation Network or Xbox Live profile to the account. It does not appear PC users will be eligible for the contest. More details on the contest, including official rules, can be found on the contest website.
Recently, IGN went hands-on with Just Cause 3 at Gamescom, and we were given a look at two of the game's outrageous new challenge modes.
Just Cause 3 launches on December 1 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Michael Martin is a full-time freelance writer with way too many pop culture mash-up t-shirts to count. Follow him on Twitter @Bizarro_Mike.The dark houses in West Vancouver are so prevalent on some streets that Mayor Michael Smith worries about how his community is functioning.
He would like to see a heavy tax on houses that are used as investments or secondary residences, just like the $20,000 a year he pays in taxes for his vacation house in Kauai, Hawaii.
"As a society, we need to decide whether homes are for people and families or whether they're investments," Mr. Smith said. "If it's not your principal residence, you should pay more in tax. The best way to stop this is to make it punitive."
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In Coquitlam, residents are also noticing dark condos in the new high-rises around the city centre. But Mayor Richard Stewart said it is not seen as such a bad thing.
"We raise taxes to pay for city services and, if someone is paying taxes but not consuming services, most people don't have a problem with that," he said.
The white-hot issue of housing affordability has been mostly focused on the west side of Vancouver, but the issue of vacant houses and foreign capital is bubbling up in municipalities across the Lower Mainland, and as in Vancouver, few people agree on what, if anything, to do about it.
A map generated by the local company Mountain Math Software using 2011 census data shows pockets around the region with relatively high rates of what are labelled "dwellings not occupied by usual residents."
That means they were vacant or someone other than the owner, but not a long-term renter, occupied them when the census was done in May, 2011.
It was at 24 per cent in central Surrey, where high-rises are being developed around the SkyTrain station.
That is higher than the 22-per-cent rate in Vancouver's Coal Harbour, which was pegged in news reports two years ago as a prime example of a neighbourhood dominated by investor or vacation homes.
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One small area of Port Moody shows up at 20 per cent; the central part of West Vancouver above Highway 1 is at 14 per cent; a few parts of central Burnaby along Kingsway, which has seen a lot of high-rise building in the past decade, are at 11 per cent.
The average rate in other large Canadian cities is around 5 per cent, which accounts for people on vacation or places sitting empty between owners.
A debate on that topic broke out at Metro Vancouver last week as council delegates grappled with their other housing problem: a shortage of places for low-income people, which are not being produced in anywhere near the quantities needed.
Mr. Smith said he would like to see a tax on vacant homes – something the city of West Vancouver's lawyers have told him only the province can create – used to build some of that low-cost housing.
Like everyone in Vancouver, he has no exact count of what is owned by a foreign investor and what is being left vacant by a long-time homeowner, recent immigrant or temporary resident.
Statistics from the Greater Vancouver Real Estate Board say foreign investors account for 0.5 per cent to 2.5 per cent of residential real estate in various Lower Mainland municipalities, a number that is much lower than the census data on unoccupied dwellings.
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Other mayors around the region say they are also hearing stories about vacant homes and residential property being used for only investment purposes, to a greater or lesser degree, but they are not sure a tax would be workable.
In the District of North Vancouver, Mayor Richard Walton said there has been a spate of tear-downs of 1950s houses, and one street near him appears to have few year-round residents.
"We know it's an emerging issue." But he said it would be complicated to charge a tax. He said some wealthy long-time owners in North and West Vancouver leave their houses empty while they travel extensively.
In Surrey, Mayor Linda Hepner said the topic has bubbled up because of people complaining that investor-owners dominate their strata councils (And the debate is over those investors' desire to rent out the units, so dark condos are not the problem.)
But Ms. Hepner sees the investments as an overall positive.
"That just propels the construction of high-rises and helps us build our downtown."
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In Richmond, Mayor Malcolm Brodie has been hearing the complaints about vacant houses for 30 years, since the city was transformed from a largely white community to an immigration hot spot.
"People are feeling the neighbourhoods are eroding to a certain extent," he said. "But I don't know of an effective way to deal with it."If the upcoming projects they announced at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour over the weekend are any indication, AMC is leaning heavy on the horror in 2018 and beyond. And that doesn’t exactly surprise us, as they’ve had great success with both “The Walking Dead” and its spinoff.
In addition to several new fiction series’ that fall into the horror genre, AMC also announced forthcoming non-fiction project “Wicked West.“
Produced by Blumhouse Television, the horror anthology uncovers the most frightening and disturbing tales from the Wild West.
And they’re all true.
“Wicked West” utilizes Blumhouse’s chilling cinematic style on this weekly series, telling stories of sadistic serial killers, murderous black widows, bloodthirsty family clans, and local legends laced with the supernatural. With a tense horror, modern cinematic style, “Wicked West” brings a haunting approach to the untold stories of the bloodbath known as the American West.
Jason Blum, Jeremy Gold and Marci Wiseman will produce for Blumhouse Television.by Darcy Payne
It’s early June. A bright blue dumpster is reflecting the setting sun on a scorching summer evening. Flies are swarming to feast on garbage piled high, thought to be forgotten. This garbage, though, is far from forgotten—for some, it’s a treasure.
Every day at University Gables, a 65-year-old Hispanic man rifles through three dirty dumpsters. His eyes are bright, but his wrinkles make them droop close to the middle of his cheeks. Hoping to find goodies and knickknacks, this dumpster-dig has been Luis’ routine for four years. Today, he made out with a plastic storage bin, a mini-fridge and a few pencils.
After previously being homeless for six years of his life as a Californian, Luis has learned to appreciate the smallest things, even his new pencils. Today he is retired and living off his prior success in the furniture business. He had a shop in California, but he hopes to create a furniture store in Murfreesboro. His vision is to create a store in the building that used to be Rose’s on Mercury Boulevard.
“Oooo-ah!” Luis gasps in fright as I approach him digging through the dump. “In all my years digging through these dumpsters, not one person has come to say hello.”
Minding his own business, Luis ransacks a dumpster full of unloved items. He calls this his hobby. Luis has lived in the University Gables for four years in hopes to keep “under the radar.” He believes attention isn’t the way to live. Although, he says one day we will see his face on television.
“I will give you an autograph,” says Luis, “You better frame it. It’ll be worth something soon.”
Luis is very adamant about appreciating what he has. He has great advice about spending money and life in general.
“There is a difference between loving money and respecting the money you have,” says Luis.
He believes all he needs is pennies. After hearing a story on the radio about a little girl who was satisfied with just 57 cents when she died at a young age, he couldn’t help but be satisfied with the little he has. Luis said he had $100,000 in the bank at one point while living in California, but then he blew it all and became homeless.
One day, after blowing the money, he asked God for just 57 cents. Upon his arrival to a bank, three people gave him money. It all added up to 57 cents, just like he asked. Soon after this circumstance, Luis lost 11 cents.
“When I lost 11 cents,” says Luis, “I felt like I lost a million dollars.”
Now, Luis gets blessed with money often.
“I find at least seven dollars in coins on the ground,” says Luis, “but next, I’m going to ask God for a dollar. Just a paper dollar.”
He’s sure he will be given that dollar. Luis has a jar in his room full of pennies. He believes that if he has 1,000 pennies, they will later be rewarded to him as $1,000 from God. When asked when “later” is, he says God decides the time. Luis believes God provides him with everything he needs.
He is wearing a navy blue sweatshirt and grey sweatpants. It’s 90 degrees outside today. Actually, all the clothes that he is wearing today were acquired from previous dumpster dives. He is also wearing a flat-billed hat featuring a pink Muppet; Luis calls the Muppet “Nemo.”
“A lady told me that’s what this Muppet’s name is,” says Luis: “Nemo!”
His favorite book is The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. The book features secrets from successful people. Luis has a very big heart and a special love for success. Previously, Luis was married to a beautiful blond-haired woman.
“I shouldn’t have ruined that marriage,” says Luis seriously. “I ruined it... I brought a skunk home. She got mad at me, and then she kept the skunk and kicked me out!”
When asked why his past wife didn’t just kick out the skunk instead, Luis merely says, “Women are crazy like that.” Although he is no longer married, he has very successful step-grandchildren who have gone to school and made great lives for themselves. He couldn’t be more proud.
Although he has pride in his family, one of his step-grandchildren messed up. His said his step-grandson was one of the top wrestlers in the state, but he quit high school after hanging around the wrong crowd. He stole $7,000 from Luis’ now ex-wife and got into trouble.
Now, Luis has a new life. He has a car that has been parked in the same spot for over two years. He chooses to ride the bus or walk for exercise, so his car hasn’t moved. He says it’s just easier that way. No insurance to pay, no responsibilities. While Luis was walking alongside a road one day, a car hit him. Luis was in a coma for 30 days. He now has brain damage and a damaged leg, but his spirit is still strong.
He recently started attending church at The Experience Community. At first, Luis seemed puzzled by the offering plate system. Traditionally, a plate is passed around. Not at The Experience. Getting used to the stationary offering jar was a struggle for Luis. Today, he put pennies into the offering jar.
“Wow,” said Sarah Josovitz, the collector of this day’s offering money. “Someone put a lot of pennies in here.”
Luis is still standing near the jar. He confesses, “That was me.” Sarah winks kindly at him. At The Experience Community, connection cards are offered for new attendees. Luis fills out a card and asks Sarah where to put it.
“Oh,” says Sarah, “You can put it in this.”
She holds the pouch of money towards Luis so he can put the card in. She had already collected the offering jar that he was supposed to store it in. Luis slides the card into the pouch and pretends to take the pouch out of Sarah’s hands. Sarah was worried for a few seconds that he was trying to steal the money, but Luis let it go with a chuckle. Hopefully Sarah has a good sense of humor....
“I like to make people laugh,” says Luis, “If I can make one person laugh every day, I’ve done my job.”
Although he dumpster-dives, Luis is content. Every day, Luis says to himself, “I will find a penny.” This morning he found 26 cents. He still has a goal to find a dollar bill. Luis writes down all the goals he has set for himself to reach. He accomplishes every goal he writes down and sticks them onto the bulletin board in his office.
“For the rest of your life, you might not be broke,” says Luis, “but you can be broken in spirit. Broken in drive. Right now, I am happy. I am content.”
Sometimes, pennies are all you’ve got. Luis gave all he had to the Lord today in church, even if it was just a lot of pennies. If you or someone you know is in need of some money today, it could be enough to give them a lucky penny.
“I want to give people 100 times more than what God gave me,” says Luis, “and I’m rich. Not with money, but in love.”
Luis waddles along the road with his cane, heading back to his apartment, one step closer to his next goal. One step closer to his next penny.In 1937, the world-famous African American performer and activist Paul Robeson was holidaying in the Soviet Union when he received a plea to support an anti-fascist fundraiser in London’s Royal Albert Hall. By then, much of the British intelligentsia was backing the Spanish Republic’s struggle, so that the event was endorsed not only by the labour movement but also by writers, artists and musicians: WH Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Rebecca West, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf and many, many others.
Everyone recognised why Spain mattered. Franco’s fascists relied on Hitler and Mussolini for supplies and modern equipment. While the Soviet Union aided (to some extent) the Republic, the neutrality of Western powers signified, for progressives, flagrant appeasement. After all, the Nazi support for the Nationalists represented more than mere ideological affinity: Spain possessed resources crucial for German rearmament, and the fight against the Republic allowed Hitler to perfect new weapons and new tactics. The war was thus an obvious precursor to something much worse.
Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers … The battlefront is everywhere
For that reason, it also offered a last chance to halt fascism’s advance. Much to the surprise of the Spanish generals, popular resistance had pushed back the coup in Barcelona and Madrid, forcing the Nationalist armies to regroup in the provinces. And when Dolores Ibárruri, the Republic’s famous La Pasionaria (“the Passionflower”), shouted, “No pasarán!” (“They shall not pass!”), she was understood as urging a stand against fascism not just on behalf of the Spanish but also for everyone threatened by Hitler and Mussolini and all the imitative fascist movements across Europe.
In fact, Paul Robeson flew from Moscow to speak in person at the fundraising event
The most dramatic response came in the shape of the International Brigades. In 1936, the Comintern, the Moscow-based leadership of the communist movement, proposed an anti-fascist volunteer army. Eventually, more than 40,000 people enlisted in the Brigades: soldiers drawn from some 50 nations, in the most diverse army in history. The vast majority were ordinary workers – usually, but not always, communists.
For progressives, the Spanish Civil War represented almost a generational test: a chance to fight not for the “old lie” of 1914 but for democracy, freedom, and fraternity. As the Irish poet Louis MacNeice explained, Spain was where “our blunt ideals would find their whetstone”. That was Paul’s sense, too. His discovery of the working class rekindled his optimism after his illusions in respectable Britain had been shattered. But Spain, where revolution and reaction contested openly, raised the stakes higher. In Spain, the battle had been joined; in Spain, Europe’s fate would be settled.
Here was a cause worthy of Paul’s mighty talents.
For the Albert Hall rally, he had at first intended to record in a Moscow studio and broadcast the message to London via radio. But Nazi Germany threatened to jam the transmission, while the Albert Hall management expressed a disinclination to receive communications from Red Russia. That joint opposition – so redolent of the tacit alliance between fascism and liberal democracy – infuriated him. He made the recording anyway, conscious of the huge audience the airwaves could reach – and then caught a special flight back to England. “Nothing,” he said later, “was going to stop me from sending or giving my message to the British public on the subject of Spain.”
That evening, the stage was studded with celebrities. For the British artist William Townsend, sitting in the audience, there was no question as to who left the biggest impression. Robeson, he said, “was the great man of the evening … his personality eclipsed all others as his speech overwhelmed theirs”.
Fascism fights to destroy the culture which society has created; created through pain and suffering, through desperate toil, but with unconquerable will and lofty vision
By then, Paul’s formal study of oratory had been honed by years of theatrical and concert stages. When he spoke, people listened. “Fascism,” he told the massive crowd, “fights to destroy the culture which society has created; created through pain and suffering, through desperate toil, but with unconquerable will and lofty vision.” The argument possessed particular force because of the man making it. Paul’s people knew about desperate toil, yes, and they knew about pain and suffering. If anyone had the right to scoff at the civilising pretensions of European culture, it was the son of a slave, a man denied basic rights in the most advanced of democracies. Yet here was Paul urging a defence of those achievements, not so much for what they were but for what they might become.
“Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers … The battlefront is everywhere.”
It was another of the moments that Paul produced so regularly, an occasion that the men and women in attendance remembered for the rest of their lives. His speech, delivered with characteristic sincerity, embodied what they took to be at stake in Spain: all that was good and decent and honest pitched against all that was barbaric and cruel and backward.
The applause went on and on and on.
This is an extract from No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson by Jeff Sparrow ( Scribe), which Peter Murphy reviews in The Irish Times on August 19thWith Windows Phone 8, Microsoft has found a firm foothold in the mobile space, the likes of which it hasn’t had in recent memory.
This is no small feat, given blistering competition from innovative and quality market leaders. Microsoft was late. And yet, from the first taste of Windows Phone, through its 7.1 upgrade issues, Nokia’s entrance, the much awaited 7.5 firmware bump, and most recently the relaunch of the platform as Windows Phone 8 sporting a shared core with Windows itself, the slope for the mobile platform has been inexorably up and to the right.
The grind appears to be over, in the initial sense, for Microsoft however, as its recent mix of new software – Windows Phone 8 itself – new hardware – the Nokia Lumia 920, 820, and the HTC 8X – and new developer tools have come together to propel Windows Phone forward from junior status and into the big leagues.
Several key statistics point to a single conclusion: Windows Phone cannot match iOS or Android in terms of scale, but the platform is no longer a piece of potential, and is instead a full, mature player in the modern smartphone game.
Certainly, that claim requires evidence. There are three elements that we need discuss.
SDK
The Windows Phone 8 software development kit has been a hit for Microsoft, demonstrating new, and larger developer interest in the platform. As TNW reported previously, slightly more than a week after the most recent BUILD event, at which the SDK was generally released:
Windows Phone 8′s developer SDK, made available at BUILD, is Microsoft’s most “rapidly downloaded” SDK that the firm has released this year. [I]it has seen twice the number of downloads in the last eight days – PB – that the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK received in its first week and a day of life. [T]he total number of developers registered to build for Windows Phone has risen a total of 17% in the last 8 days. […] Microsoft is averaging around 1,500 new developers registrations daily since BUILD, for Windows Phone.
All told, the new tools that Microsoft provided have found wide interest, as the company made it simpler to create applications that can run both on Windows and Windows 8. This means that a key pillar of any mobile platform, developer support, is something that Windows Phone is currently enjoying as never before.
Hardware Sales
We now turn to hardware. Microsoft claims that its new set of devices – the best yet, in TNW’s view, which we have yet to see any real disagreement with – is selling at four times the rate of last year’s crop. That fact was true as of the very end of November, making it a fresh statistic.
According to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the new phones are “off to a great start,” and are “getting rave reviews and have initially sold out in many countries.” We have made much progress since the days of the Samsung Focus, in other words.
Critically, HTC has staked claim to a fair chunk of Windows Phone market share, meaning that Nokia has meaningful competition in its selected platform niche. This will only lead to better phones and lower prices, not to mention increased sales.
Now, if we are seeing improved developer interest, and greatly increased sales, that would naturally lead to better app download figures, correct? Let’s take a look.
App Downloads
According to Tod Brix, Senior Director of the Windows Phone Apps Team, things are looking quite strong for the Windows Phone Store:
That fact caps the former two data sets in that it is their natural conclusion. Call it corroboration, if you want.
With rising developer interest, greatly improved sales, and doubled app downloads and revenues, we can graduate Windows Phone from the minors to the majors.
Now what, Microsoft? How about some hard sales numbers? Only Amazon likes to report in ratios.
Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan
Read next: Apple finally brings its iTunes Store to Indonesia and India, and 54 other countries(Newser) – President Obama told the chief executives of America's biggest companies today that the US has to end its "endless cycles of bubbles and busts," Bloomberg reports. "Instead, we must build this recovery on a foundation that lasts," Obama said in an address to the Business Roundtable. That's why his administration's focus isn't solely on the economy, he said, but also on health care, energy, and education.
“I’m not choosing to address these additional challenges just because I feel like it, or because I’m a glutton for punishment,” he said. “I’m doing so because they are fundamental to our economic growth and to ensuring that we don’t have more crises like this in the future.” Still, he said his team's "top" priorities are dealing with banks' toxic assets and unfreezing the credit markets. (Read more President Obama stories.)Share this...
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In a sign that David Cameron, and his fellow Europhiles of the various “remain” campaigns, are having their feathers ruffled by the so-called “Norway option” that some campaigners – including me – advocate as means of transitioning out of the European Union, he has sought to warn against it.
Backed up by his slippery allies such as Espen Barth Eide, and on the back of a smear campaign by Stronger In, the PM has trotted out the usual lies about Norway having “no say” on “EU rules” but still having to pay. One just needs to scratch the surface for a moment to break through the deceit.
The European Free Trade Association makes a financial contribution of behalf of its members for their participation in the single market. In 2014 Norway’s 55% share of that contribution amounted to approximately £8.1 million. Accounting for its rebate, the United Kingdom transfers £12 billion a year or around £33 million a day to the European Union for the dubious privileges of subjugation.
This may strike you as odd, as you will be used to the Europhile argument that Norway pays “almost as much as us” but has “no say”. This is because the dishonest Europhile figure is grossly inflated by the inclusion of voluntary contributions Norway makes that have nothing to do with the single market, most of which does not go to the EU.
They include voluntary grants made to post-Communist countries, a form of aid for economic rehabilitation, amounting to around €804 million, and money paid into the EEA grant system – again nothing to do with the single market, and it does not go to the EU – which, totalled with the grants, comes to a total €1.7 billion from 2009-2014.
To top the lie off, they include voluntary contributions to EU programmes from Erasmus+ to Copernicus, which again are nothing to do with the single market, with countries who do not participate in the market also contributing. An independent Britain would likely choose to voluntarily contribute to the programmes where there are mutual benefits in cooperation.
Why do Europhiles have to lie? Because they are shaken and they have no proper, robust and honest arguments. Coming from the mouth of the prime minister, with all the prestige that lends to the dishonesty, their guff is polished like a turd and believed by the uninformed.
As for having no “say” or influence on the “EU rules”. Well, it’s another lie. For a start, we should be suspicious of Europhile absolutes; the Norwegian government – as an EEA member – is very much involved in the complex process of consultation before “EU rules” are implemented. More significantly, Norway has an independent trade policy and not only can it pursue and sign its own trade agreements, it is involved at an international level influencing the standards of trade and industry.
This is the point. The majority of EU law does not originate from the EU, but from global bodies – a staggering array of them that are not exactly household names – from UNECE, to Codex, and WP.29, these are what you might pithily call the “top tables” if you like, where Britain can be compelled to adopt the common EU position, and the EU seeks to steadily marginalise and eventually replace nation states – a severe risk we will take if we choose to remain.
Norway meanwhile – and its related industry and corporate interests, NGO’s, and numerous non-state actors – are influencing the development and design of these so-called “rules” directly before they are drafted and handed down to the EU. They pay far less than us, and they have their say.
The regulation of trade and industry is becoming globalised and we mustn’t get left behind and become irrelevant. Governance and regulation has moved on from the 50’s, but the EU hasn’t. We need agility, the ability to form dynamic coalitions and alliances according to the situation, the independence to protect our interests, and we need to take our seat at the “top tables”.
Norway does.
Crucially, this “option” is not a permanent alternative, but a pragmatic transitional arrangement that can be negotiated in the two year period stipulated by Article 50. Advocates of this method – such as I and the Referendum Planning Group – acknowledge its imperfection, but Brexit will necessarily have to work in stages, and this will be stage one. Brexit is a process not a one off event.
As it allays economic fears and neutralises so much Europhile fear mongering at once, it’s obvious why they are making a concerted effort to smear it in lies.
While Cameron smears the so-called “Norway option”, he is preparing to offer us second class status as an “associate member”. This, I contend, is a poorer offer and considering the changing nature of the EU, and its lust for power, more uncertain and a far greater risk.
Ben is a writer, editor and Brexit campaigner. He advocates a counter-revolution to achieve the restoration of constitutional liberty and national independence. He blogs at The Sceptic Isle. Follow him on Twitter: @TheScepticIsle
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guards, right up there with the signature shoe gang that he's not a member of... yet. The attention he has been getting is for his play, not a marketing campaign.
The Wizards are currently third in the East with John Wall leading the way on a career-high 54.4 percent true shooting and 23.75 player efficiency rating. Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports
Over the past two months the Wizards have been the East's best team, going 24-7. They've won 11 of their past 12 and are riding a 17-game home winning streak. Monday they host one of the biggest regular-season games in recent memory when the Cavs and James visit, which was added to TNT's broadcast schedule a couple of weeks ago.
Wall is trying not to focus on the exposure he has long felt he deserved. Instead he drives his thoughts to be about his health and his team. He's both proud and aware -- two things that don't always go well together.
In November, he was ejected from two games in a three-day span. He was hit with a $25,000 fine for bumping an official. Then he was ejected when he drilled Celtics guard Marcus Smart with a flagrant foul because he was incensed with the referees. Two weeks ago he got fined another $15,000 after he traded menacing gestures with the Celtics' Jae Crowder.
"They'll find time to respect me," Wall said after the second ejection.
Wall got chippy with fans in his own arena last week after Lakers fans had filled Verizon Center to support the Lakers. After hitting a late 3-pointer to help clinch the win, he screamed "This is my city" to the crowd. Last season when the Lakers visited and the crowd cooed over Kobe Bryant, who'd just announced his retirement, Wall was heckled as he left the floor in his own building. Last fall, he was ripped locally because he wore a Cowboys jersey when he attended a Dallas-Washington game.
Those who know Wall well say he sometimes seethes as he lays in bed at night, upset at things both big and small. They also say it's because of his taste for competition, whether it's baskets, shoes or national television appearances. With healthy knees, the baskets are coming now. So are the national TV games.
"I do feel sometimes like I'm always trying to recover from something," Wall says. "Some things that have happened to me are rare and I've tried to learn to handle them the right way. At the end of the day, you are true to who you are."
"They'll find time to respect me."
Wall is convinced he's going to get the last laugh on all of it. The salary, the shoe deal, the doubters. His play this season is backing it up. And he's not alone in believing in the future after a roller-coaster ride in the first part of his career.
"What you have to know is John is stubborn as hell," says Sacramento Kings star DeMarcus Cousins, who is one of Wall's closest friends and a former teammate at the University of Kentucky. "You know what, John's going to be just fine. Everything is going to come full circle for him, I truly believe that. Something great is in store for him."Sen. John McCain of Arizona on Capitol Hill on July 27. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein
Sen. John McCain called out President Donald Trump as "poorly informed" and "impulsive" in a rallying cry for Congress a week before the legislative body returns to work.
In a blistering op-ed article for The Washington Post published Thursday night, the Arizona Republican called on Americans to focus on "shared values" rather than differences. McCain denounced the "repugnant spectacle of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville" and lauded Heather Heyer, the counterprotester killed at the rally by a man thought to be a white supremacist.
But McCain also railed against partisanship in Congress.
"We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important," McCain wrote of recent congressional deadlock.
Central to McCain's diagnosis of paralyzing partisanship seemed to be Trump.
"Congress must govern with a president who has no experience of public office, is often poorly informed and can be impulsive in his speech and conduct," McCain wrote. "We must respect his authority and constitutional responsibilities. We must, where we can, cooperate with him. But we are not his subordinates. We don't answer to him. We answer to the American people."
McCain, who dealt the deathblow to Trump-backed healthcare legislation in the Senate, has ultimately supported much of the president's agenda. The senator, who represents a border state, said a "literal wall" may not be the best solution for border security but urged Congress to compromise on security-boosting measures.
McCain also expressed support for tax reform and infrastructure spending, key tenets of Trump's platform, while bashing "threats of a government shutdown and continuing resolutions that underfund national security" that had often come from the president's desk.
Read McCain's full op-ed article here >>Todd Akin’s video apology for his comments about “legitimate rape.”
Photo courtesy of Todd Akin for U.S. Senate
Todd Akin wants to be forgiven. Two days after his catastrophic interview on KTVI-TV in St. Louis—in which he claimed that pregnancy from rape was “really rare” because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”—Akin has issued a video apology. “I used the wrong words in the wrong way, and for that I apologize,” he tells the camera. “The mistake I made was in the words I said, not in the heart I hold.”
Really? Was Akin’s gaffe just a poor choice of words? Or does it reflect a deeper problem?
Akin’s track record on this issue goes back to 1991, when he was a state legislator in Missouri. At the time, Missouri was one of four states in which husbands, by definition, couldn’t be prosecuted for raping their wives. A bill came to the floor of the Missouri House that would abolish this exemption, making spousal rape a crime. Akin joined 118 of 134 state representatives in voting for the bill. But during the debate, according to a contemporaneous report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (flagged two weeks ago by Sahil Kapur in Talking Points Memo), Akin warned that a law against marital rape might be abused ”in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband.”
Akin was elected to Congress in 2000. A decade later, in January 2011, he co-sponsored the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which, among other things, would have tightened the definition of rape in U.S. abortion law. At the time, federal laws against abortion funding exempted pregnancies caused by rape. The “No Taxpayer” bill altered this formulation, exempting only “forcible” rapes. The change of language (first reported by Nick Baumann in Mother Jones) was widely condemned for excluding statutory rape and for supposedly implying that date rape wasn’t really rape. Eventually, the bill’s sponsor removed the word “forcible.”
Today, this episode is being depicted on liberal blogs as a conspiracy by Akin and Paul Ryan to change the definition of rape. That’s a stretch: Akin and Ryan were among more than 160 co-sponsors of the bill. Nothing in the record suggests Akin had anything to do with the rape language, which was peripheral to the bill. But yesterday on Mike Huckabee’s radio show, Akin pleaded that when he referred in the KTVI interview to “legitimate” rape, “I was talking about forcible rape.” So he affirms the distinction drawn in the 2011 bill.
When you look at the three episodes side by side—the 1991 comment about marital rape, the 2011 specification of “forcible rape,” the 2012 reference to “legitimate rape”—it’s hard to explain away the pattern. Nobody uses the wrong words accidentally three times in a row. But if you watch Akin’s whole interview on KTVI, you’ll see that the pattern is actually larger. He trusts some people more than others. Women who report rape are among the people he doesn’t quite trust.
Five minutes before the abortion exchange, Akin’s interviewer, Charles Jaco, brought up conservative proposals to revise the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. He asked Akin whether we no longer need those laws. Akin answered that everyone has a right to vote, but only once, and only if you’re alive. He said states can be trusted to manage their own voting laws. Jaco asked whether voter identification cards are necessary, since only one case of voter fraud has been documented in Missouri, and that was in 1936. Akin replied that voter ID is important to keep elections clean. He even made a case for indirect election: letting state lawmakers rather than citizens choose U.S. senators. He trusts states more than voters.
Go back through Akin’s years in the House, and you’ll see whom he trusts. He opposed “bureaucratic red-tape” and “regulatory burdens” on business. He voted to loosen restrictions on small-business loans, limit obesity lawsuits against the food industry, and repeal “ergonomic regulations” that “would hamstring American businesses.” He fought to “protect physicians” from malpractice liability and to “safeguard the privacy of taxpayers” from IRS snooping. He opposed saddling Internet vendors with the “compliance burdens” of “responsibility to collect state sales and use taxes.” He opposed trigger locks, expanded the right to carry concealed firearms, and co-sponsored legislation to relax restrictions on interstate gun sales.
You’ll also see whom Akin doesn’t trust. While opposing campaign finance laws, he insisted that “first-time voters must provide proof of identity.” He demanded “proof of citizenship” from anyone in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, plus “a citizenship check before receiving benefits” such as Medicare and Social Security. He introduced legislation requiring “written notice … to parents before contraceptive drugs and devices are distributed to their minor child.” He voted to tighten policing of media indecency and to subject Terri Schiavo’s husband to an extra court hearing before her feeding tube could be withdrawn.
That doesn’t mean Akin hates Hispanics, paupers, or minority voters, or that he’s blind to tax fraud, corporate malfeasance, or firearms abuse. But it does tell you which way he leans. He aims his scrutiny at some people rather than others. And that’s the key to understanding his remarks about rape. A man who talks repeatedly about “legitimate” rape, “forcible” rape, and spousal rape laws as a “legal weapon to beat up on the husband” isn’t worrying that that too many rapes go unreported. He’s worrying that rape is defined too broadly and asserted too often.
That’s why Akin’s apology doesn’t cut it. He didn’t just “misspeak” in a thoughtless moment. He exposed a longstanding streak of suspicion, aimed not at accused rapists but at rape accusers. Todd Akin is a rape skeptic. If he won’t face that fact, the voters of Missouri will face it for him.
William Saletan’s latest short takes on the news, via Twitter:On June 16, Thompson-Sylvester lost her husband, John "Sly" Sylvester, who'd battled ALS (aka Lou Gherig's Disease) for years.
The tragic loss should've shifted Tessie's focus from caring for John to providing for their two boys, six-year-old Gus and five-year-old Freddy. Instead, she was forced to worry about herself.
Thompson-Sylvester was diagnosed with an aggressive gland-based cancer just days before her husband's death. By the time it was discovered, the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and liver; doctors declared the cancer inoperable.
Thompson-Sylvester started chemotherapy immediately, and the widowed single mother will be unable to work as she seeks treatment. The stark realities of the situation facing Tessie and her sons is laid out in a GoFundMe account launched earlier this week, where founders are hoping to raise up to $500,000.
That lofty goal seems suddenly reachable, given the outpouring of support they've received: As of Thursday morning, friends, acquaintances, and strangers had already donated more than $61,000.
The GoFundMe page fills in the couple's backstory. John played with the Minnesota Thunder, a precursor to the Minnesota Stars (now Minnesota United). After his playing days, he coached youth soccer and worked for Minneapolis Public Schools.
Last fall, Washburn High School in Minneapolis (Sylvester, a high school "star," graduated in 1990, and later coached the girl's soccer team) held the fourth annual "John Sylvester Cup," which "celebrates John and his immeasurable contributions to the Minneapolis soccer community."
Tessie (born Teresa Thompson) attended dental school at the University of Minnesota, and worked first at a free clinic based in St. Paul, and more recently at the West St. Paul office of Family Dentistry. Her staff biography there describes her as "an avid soccer player" who "enjoys being outdoors."
"Together, John and Tessie could light up a room with their smiles," reads the GoFundMe. "Help Tessie continue to light up the world with her smile, her kindness and her warmth. Gus and Freddy, John and Tessie’s joy and sunshine, need their mama. Please help. Donate now. And make it possible for Tessie to get the treatment she needs and to spend as much time as possible with her beloved sons."
Click here to donate to the GoFundMe account.WASHINGTON — For 16 years, advocates for legalizing young immigrants brought here illegally by their parents have tried to pass legislation to shield them from deportation. The bill was called the Dream Act, and in Congresses Democratic and Republican, and in the Bush and Obama administrations, whether by stand-alone bill or comprehensive immigration legislation, it failed again and again.
Now, with 800,000 lives in the balance and a fiercely anti-immigration current running through the Republican Party, lawmakers are being asked to try again — with a six-month deadline, to boot. The prospects for success after more than a decade of false starts would already be daunting, but President Trump may have made the odds even longer after he promised voters last year that Republicans would take a hard line on immigration, then punted the issue to Congress.
His invitation to lawmakers on Tuesday to “do something and do it right” for the so-called dreamers will run into the headwinds of his own politics. On the other hand, lawmakers who for 16 years have been unwilling to grant legal status to a sympathetic group of unauthorized immigrants may find that taking their legal status away is even harder than conferring it.
“I’m hoping that this is a moment where we are forced to finally do something,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and an original author of the Dream Act — the letters stand for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors. “We want to call this bill for a vote on the floor of the House and the floor of the Senate. I am hoping that we will have enough votes to pass it.”Every day, 22 people in America die while waiting for an organ transplant. But when scientists can grow replacement livers or kidneys or pancreases inside of animal hosts, medicine's organ shortage may end. That’s the hope anyway—and this week there’s more reason to hope than ever that it might become reality.
The key to producing human organs in other animals is the chimera, a mixture of cells from more than one species growing together as a single animal. For decades, researchers have struggled to coax Petri dishes of stem cells into functional, three-dimensional tissues and organs, hampered by technical challenges and political stonewalling. Now, two milestone papers have taken two big steps toward solving the chimeric riddle. Will you be ordering up a homo-porcine gallbladder on Amazon this time next year? No. No, definitely not. But researchers have done two things they’ve never done before: 1. Combine two large, distantly-related species into one embryo. And 2. Use organs from one species grown in another to actually treat disease.
At the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, biologists Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte and Jun Wu spent four years injecting different forms of adult human stem cells—derived from skin or blood cells and reprogrammed to act like naive, stem cells—into 1,500 pig embryos. They wanted to figure out which ones could survive into the first few weeks of life. The cells that worked the best, they report today in Cell, were “intermediate” pluripotent stem cells, somewhere between a blank slate and a stem cell primed to start developing into different tissues. These cells became the first human colonizers of the pig body: Around 20 days in, fluorescent tagging showed one living human cell nestled within every 100,000 or so pig cells.
“This was a real tour de force,” says Daniel Garry, a cardiologist who leads a chimera project at the University of Minnesota. “What separates them from all the rest of us who do this work is the large number of animals they showed this in.” Izpisua Belmonte and Wu also successfully created human/cow chimeras at the blastocyst stage—a few days following fertilization, but before the ball of about 250 cells implants in the uterine wall—but only pursued pigs because of the animal’s long history in human medicine. Pig valves are still used in heart transplants, and before recombinant DNA technology, that’s where artificial insulin came from.
A 4-week-old pig embryo injected with human induced pluripotent stem cells. Salk Institute
With other advances, scientists are hoping to do away with artificial insulin altogether. About 30 million Americans have diabetes; more than 3 million of them rely on artificial insulin to stay alive. Chimeras could potentially help those patients make their own insulin—and Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a stem-cell biologist at the University of Tokyo and Stanford, showed you can do just that in a paper published yesterday in Nature. At least, you can in rats. His team used genetic tweaks to prevent rats from making their own pancreases. Then they injected mouse stem cells (complete with all the necessary pancreas-making genes) into the developing pancreas-less rat embryos. The rats grew normally. The only thing different was their pancreases were made almost entirely of mouse cells.
Then they went a step further. From those rat-mouse chimeras, Nakauchi’s team took out tiny clusters of pancreatic cells that make insulin (called islets) and transplanted them into diabetic mice. The islets settled in and made enough insulin to keep the host mice’s blood glucose levels in a normal range for more than a year. In layman’s terms? The mice were cured. It’s the first time a chimera-created organ has ever treated a medical condition.
“What’s really significant here is that a rat pancreas, generated in a mouse background, responded to typical events the way you’d want it to,” says Garry. That’s great news for diabetics. You want your inter-species transplant organ to work inside you like you were born with it, even if it was grown in a pig.
Organic Improvisation
Now, things can get a little bit complicated if your donor animal starts growing organs they aren’t supposed to. Before Izpisua Belmonte and Wu got around to making man-pigs and man-cows, they too worked with mouse-rats. Using Crispr to delete different critical tissue genes, they created mice without the ability to make a heart, a pancreas, or eyes. Then they introduced rat stem cells to see if they would fill those vacant organ niches. They did. Mice grew rat eyes and rat hearts and even a rat pancreas. But some of those rat cells also went on to form gallbladders in the mouse. Why is this weird? Because rats stopped developing this organ about 18 million years ago.
This suggests that rats don’t have gallbladders not because they can’t, but because their rat-specific set of developmental instructions overrides that ability. Change the environment, and those hidden traits come out. Wu says there’s no reason we shouldn’t believe the same might hold true for humans. “We generate organs and tissues now that we see as human, but maybe we have the ability to do something more,” he says. “Those abilities, that have been suppressed during evolution because we don’t need them anymore could be unlocked. You just need a different environment.”
To find out, scientists will have to improve human stem cells' colonization of their animal hosts. The Salk team’s next hurdle is trying to embed one human cell in 1,000, or even 100 pig cells. “That’s when we can start thinking about practical applications,” says Wu. But that’s also when ethical questions start to become more urgent. How many cells do you need for a chimera to be considered more human than pig? Does it matter what kind of cells, what kind of tissues?
“It’s a Goldilocks kind of situation,” says stem cell researcher Paul Knoepfler. “You need the right amount plus the right location.” But Knoepfler says, scientists and policymakers shouldn’t be waiting for that “just right” moment to have these conversations. In August, the National Institutes of Health announced that it was proposing to lift its 2015 moratorium on public funding for human chimera research. Since then, the institute has reviewed 22,000 public comments on the issue. And while neither of these studies were NIH-funded, the excitement over their results has many wondering if more research dollars might accelerate the field. For those waiting on organ donor lists, that money can't come soon enough.Abstract Do people think that scientists are bad people? Although surveys find that science is a highly respected profession, a growing discourse has emerged regarding how science is often judged negatively. We report ten studies (N = 2328) that investigated morality judgments of scientists and compared those with judgments of various control groups, including atheists. A persistent intuitive association between scientists and disturbing immoral conduct emerged for violations of the binding moral foundations, particularly when this pertained to violations of purity. However, there was no association in the context of the individualizing moral foundations related to fairness and care. Other evidence found that scientists were perceived as similar to others in their concerns with the individualizing moral foundations of fairness and care, yet as departing for all of the binding foundations of loyalty, authority, and purity. Furthermore, participants stereotyped scientists particularly as robot-like and lacking emotions, as well as valuing knowledge over morality and being potentially dangerous. The observed intuitive immorality associations are partially due to these explicit stereotypes but do not correlate with any perceived atheism. We conclude that scientists are perceived not as inherently immoral, but as capable of immoral conduct.
Citation: Rutjens BT, Heine SJ (2016) The Immoral Landscape? Scientists Are Associated with Violations of Morality. PLoS ONE 11(4): e0152798. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152798 Editor: Jelte M. Wicherts, Tilburg University, NETHERLANDS Received: August 25, 2015; Accepted: March 18, 2016; Published: April 5, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Rutjens, Heine. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: All data will be made available on BTR's website (www.bastiaanrutjens.com), as well as on Figshare (https://figshare.com/s/f29f4c654bbc0ab90ab3). Funding: This research was funded by an AXA Research Grant awarded to BT Rutjens. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: Funding does not alter the authors adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
Introduction “They were mad, of course. Or evil. Or godless, amoral, arrogant, impersonal, and inhuman. They were Faust and Frankenstein, Jekyll and Moreau, Caligari and Strangelove.” –Accompanying text to Haynes (1994) From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the scientist in western literature. The above quote captures a fear and distrust of scientists that may seem all too familiar. Yet these anxieties are puzzling, especially to scientists, who hold their profession in such high esteem. The results of several surveys are consistent with the notion that science is a highly respected profession [1–3]. So why would scientists be perceived in such negative terms? One reason that people might distrust scientists is that their attitudes towards science in general are often motivated by ideology. For example, when considering phenomena such as climate change [4–6], nanotechnology [7], or genetically modified food [8], people’s perceptions seem to be more influenced by whether they agree with the scientists’ conclusions. But another reason that science may be feared is that it can seem at odds with people’s notion of morality. On the one hand, science and religion are often seen as incompatible explanatory frameworks that each aim to provide ultimate answers to the big questions in life [9–12]. The tension between science and morality is likely because religion and morality are viewed as intimately intertwined [13–15], while science often provides support for explanations at odds with religious faith. On the other hand, some have argued that science can provide the modern bedrock of morality: it shouldn’t just describe why people act in certain ways but should prescribe what is right and wrong [16–17]. The idea that both religion and science can be integral to morality has sparked much controversy and debate [14, 18–22]. Some recent research supports the parallels between science and religion in guiding moral behavior. For example, when people were primed with science-related concepts they showed greater adherence to moral norms and acted more morally, particularly pertaining to fairness and care [14, 23]. The idea behind this research is that people associate science with progress [24], which is to the benefit of everyone, and therefore offers a moral vision of society. Interestingly, these results mirror previous work reporting findings obtained with activating religious concepts [25–27]. However, the notion that science might offer a basis for morality is likely a minority view; for many, perhaps most, lay people, the strongest associations with morality are with religiosity. For example, recent research found an intuitive association between religious disbelief (i.e., atheism) and immorality [13,28]. This research utilized a classic experimental paradigm by Tversky and Kahneman [29], the conjunction fallacy or representativeness heuristic, which is based on the idea that people easily form intuitive representations of a person based on only little information. In this research [13], it was found that participants judged a variety of immoral acts (from serial murder to necrobestiality) as more representative of atheists than of various other religious, ethnic, or cultural groups, highlighting people’s perceptions that morality is built upon religious beliefs. The current research investigates whether scientists are similarly perceived in immoral terms. Despite that scientists are among one of the more respected professions [1–3], there are a few reasons to suspect that their morality might be sometimes called into question: In addition to the potential problem that science is viewed as incompatible with religion, science may also arouse suspicions because scientific progress is frequently associated with moral decline, societal pessimism, and technological disaster [30,31]. For example, it is not uncommon to hear that the general public is anxious about the role that science plays in such feared topics as atomic energy, genetic engineering, or superbugs. Likewise, pervasive cultural archetypes of the evil and deranged scientist (e.g., Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Strangelove, or real life examples like Josef Mengele or Ted Kaczynski) may have damaged scientists’ reputations. Moreover, there are several widely publicized cases of fraud and retractions throughout the sciences [32–34]. Yet, thus far, we know relatively little about the kinds of associations that people actually have about scientists. This is problematic because we live in a world that relies heavily on science and technology, yet in which science is also regularly critiqued and distrusted [5,6,35]. In the present research we sought to address this lacuna by testing intuitive associations between scientists and various kinds of immoral conduct, and subsequently gauging more explicit stereotypes of scientists. Overview of experiments The current paper reports 10 experiments (N = 2328) organized around 2 sets of studies. In the first 7 studies we investigated intuitive immorality judgments of scientists, atheists, and various control targets. The final 3 studies target explicit evaluations of scientists versus other groups in an effort to shed light on people’s intuitive associations between scientists and different kinds of immoral behaviors. All research was approved by the Faculty Ethics Review Board at the University of Amsterdam (2014-SP-3818, 2014-SP-3888, 2015-SP-4027). All participants provided written informed consent before participating in the research.
Studies 1–7 Method Participants. We approached American adults on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and asked them to participate in a short survey on choices and values. A total of 1917 participants participated in the first 7 studies. Nine participants failed to correctly answer an instructional manipulation check [36] and 15 participants did not complete the study. The remaining 1893 participants were run across the 7 studies as follows: Study 1 (N = 266), Study 2 (N = 267), Study 3 (N = 265), Study 4 (N = 281), Study 5 (N = 281), Study 6 (N = 268), and Study 7 (N = 265). In each study, participants were randomly assigned to one of 7 conditions. The mean age was 30.04 (SD = 9.26, range 18–65 years), and 38% were female. Due to an oversight, in Studies 1–3 and 6–7 we did not record gender and age. See S1 Participant Demographics. Procedure and materials. Participants read a description of a moral transgression committed by a man [13,37–39]. We employed a wide variety of different kinds of moral transgressions, using scenarios that have been used in past research on morality [13, 38,]). In Studies 1 and 4, the scenario depicted a man who killed 5 homeless people and buried them in his basement; Study 2’s scenario described a man who engages in consensual incest with his sister; the scenario in Studies 3 and 5 depicted a man who engages in an act of necrobestiality; Study 6 portrayed a man cheating in a card game; and Study 7 described a man ridiculing an obese woman and then kicking a dog; see S1 Scenarios). Next, participants were asked to indicate which option was more probable: A) Robert (or Jack, depending on the study) is a sports fan or B) Robert is a sports fan and {condition}. Depending on the condition (which was a between-groups variable), and the particular study, option B) was always one of 7 options which included—depending on the study—two or three scientist targets (a scientist, a cell biologist, an experimental psychologist), an atheist target, and—depending on the study—3 or 4 of the following control targets (a Muslim, Hispanic, a Native American, a Christian, gay, a psychologist, a teacher, or a lawyer). Since it is impossible for a subset of a category to be more probable than the entire category, choosing option B indicates a reasoning error. However, as has been well-documented ever since Tversky and Kahneman’s seminal “Linda Problem” [29], people will commit the conjunction fallacy when the added target category in option B is deemed representative of the description (i.e., “active in the feminist movement”), while the original target category (i.e., “bank teller”) is not. The conjunction of both descriptions was ranked as more probable than the less representative constituent “bank teller”. In the current research, the likelihood that people will commit such an error is based on any intuitive associations between the description of the person (e.g., a serial killer) and the category (e.g., a scientist) that is selected [29]. Next, participants completed an instructional manipulation check to determine whether they were paying attention. Then, they completed demographic questions regarding their religious beliefs, ethnicity, profession, and political orientation (see S1 Participant Demographics for an overview of participant demographics across studies). Finally, participants were asked to indicate whether they believe a scientist can believe in God on a 100-point slider scale from certainly not (0) to of course (100). (This last question will be discussed under the Scientists and Religious Belief heading after Study 10). Results Chi2 analyses were conducted in all studies to compare conjunction fallacies. In each study, we pooled the 3 scientist conditions (scientist, cell biologist, experimental psychologist), and the 4 control conditions (see S1 Conjunction Error Results for analyses with individual targets). An analysis comparing the scientist conditions with the control and atheist conditions revealed overall significant effects of target in Study 1 χ2(2) = 30.73, p <.001, Cramer’s V =.34, Study 2 χ2(2) = 46.36, p <.001, V =.42, Study 3 χ2(2) = 37.68, p <.001, V =.42, Study 4 χ2(2) = 11.90, p <.01, V =.21, Study 5 χ2(2) = 20.09, p <.001, V =.27, Study 6 χ2(2) = 40.44, p <.001, V =.39, and in Study 7 χ2(2) = 33.45, p <.001, V =.36 (see Fig 1). Subsequent analyses in Study 1 (serial murder) revealed that participants committed more errors in the scientist conditions (34.8%) than in the control conditions (17.3%; χ2(1) = 8.52, p <.01). Also, the atheist condition (62.0%) differed from both the scientist (χ2(1) = 10.41) and the control conditions (χ2(1) = 14.85), p’s <.01. In Study 2 (consensual incest), participants committed more errors in the scientist conditions (25.4%) than in the control conditions (6.1%; χ2(1) = 14.85, p <.001). Also, the atheist condition (60.5%) differed from both the scientist (χ2(1) = 16.34) and the control conditions (χ2(1) = 48.82), p’s <.001. In Study 3 (necrobestiality), participants committed more conjunction errors in the scientist conditions (64.2%) than in the control conditions (18.0%; χ2(1) = 37.75, p <.001). Necrobestiality was perceived as more representative of scientists than of atheists (42.9%, χ2(1) = 5.65, p =.019). The difference between the atheist and control conditions was also significant, χ2(1) = 9.97, p <.01. In Study 4 (serial murder—replication), participants committed more conjunction errors in the scientist conditions (30.4%) than in the control conditions (14.4%; χ2(1) = 8.57 p <.01). The scientist conditions did not differ from the atheist condition (33.3%, p =.74); the latter differed from the control conditions (χ2(1) = 7.99, p <.01). In Study 5 (necrobestiality—replication), participants committed more conjunction errors in the scientist conditions (47.4%) than in the control conditions (23.2%; χ2(1) = 14.55, p <.001). The scientist conditions did not differ from the atheist condition (51.3%, p =.70); the latter differed from the control conditions (χ2(1) = 12.20, p <.01). A strikingly different pattern emerged in Studies 6 and 7. In Study 6 (cheating), compared to the atheist condition (34.1%), hardly any participant committed an error in the scientist conditions (3.4%; χ2(1) = 29.95, p <.001). A similar difference was found when comparing the atheist condition to the control conditions (4.6%; χ2(1) = 23.27, p <.001). The scientist conditions did not differ from the control conditions, p =.74. Study 7 (abuse) revealed a similar pattern, where participants committed more errors in the atheist condition (51.4%) than in the scientist conditions (6.1%; χ2(1) = 28.04, p <.001) and the control conditions (9.6%; χ2(1) = 21.66, p <.001). Scientist and control conditions did not differ, p =.14. PPT PowerPoint slide
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larger image TIFF original image Download: Fig 1. Conjunction error rates (percentages) in Studies 1–7 for each category of targets. All target groups differ at p <.01, except for scientist and atheist targets in Studies 4–5, and scientists and control targets in Studies 6–7. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152798.g001 Discussion These results provide a number of insights. First, replicating recent work (13), we observed an intuitive association between acts of both harmful and harmless (i.e., victimless) immorality and atheism; across all violations, atheists were more likely than controls to be intuitively associated with immorality. Second, we also found that people hold similar associations between some of the morality violations and scientists. Scientists were perceived as more likely than control targets to engage in disturbing violations of purity (i.e., serial murder, incest, and necrobestiality), however, they were not more likely to be perceived as being more likely to cheat or to engage in abuse. The latter finding
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drone collided with a C-130 cargo plane. The cargo plane had to make an emergency landing at a base in eastern Afghanistan, but nobody was injured.
A drone occasionally goes awry here, too. In August 2010, the military considered shooting down a Navy Fire Scout drone that wandered close to restricted airspace near Washington, D.C., after controllers lost their link to the drone. But controllers regained contact.
Smaller drones need rules
The legislation calls for the FAA to set up six experimental locations where drones can fly. Competition for them and the high-paying jobs among researchers and manufacturers they're expected to attract has already begun.
"Members are already jockeying for their particular area," says Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, co-chairman of a House caucus of 49 members who advocate using drones.
The legislation also calls on the FAA to establish rules for smaller drones weighing up to 55 pounds within 27 months. The schedule for all drones is Sept. 30, 2015.
A key unresolved question is how to avoid collisions. The philosophy since the Wright brothers has been for pilots to "see and avoid" other aircraft. Without a pilot on board, the strategy for drones is "sense and avoid," perhaps giving off a signal that other planes receive.
"You've got to find a way to apply today's technology to regulations that were written many years ago," says Bobby Sturgell, a former FAA head and now a senior vice president for Rockwell Collins, which makes navigational and other equipment for drones. "The message behind the legislation is, 'Let's make this happen.' "Get the biggest politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe says she has cancelled her TV licence in disgust over claims an BBC Question Time producer expressed support for a far-right group.
An audience producer for the flagship political discussion programme shared a series of posts by Britain First on Facebook.
But the BBC insist she did so "unwittingly" and does not share the group's views.
The corporation say they have "reminded" the programme's staff of the need to be impartial at work and on social media.
But writing on Twitter last night, Ms Monroe had little time for the BBC's argument.
She said the producer "claims she did this 'unwittingly'. Nah, mate. Her JOB is to conduct POLITICAL BACKGROUND CHECKS on up to 4k people a week.
"You cannot be responsible for researching 4,000 political character profiles a week, & claim to be 'unaware of the context of Britain First'"
Among the posts shared by the producer was a picture of a poppy, posted in the weeks before Armistice Day in 2014.
The post, which was shared by more than 133,000 people, read "Press SHARE to pin a poppy to your wall and show your respect."
At the time, the group was criticised for using the post to "trick" people into giving them publicity.
A spokesperson for the group Exposing Britain First told the Independent many Facebook users shared poppy posts without realising who it comes from or what they stand for.
They added: "They share these images to trick people into liking and sharing and therefore increasing their reach on Facebook."
The producer also posted to a Facebook event for an anti-immigration demonstration, backed by the EDL, in Boston.
She invited the 56 people who expressed interest in the march to apply to be in the audience of an upcoming episode in the town.
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She wrote: "BBC Question Time is in Boston on Thursday evening, 22nd September. To apply go to the BBC Question Time website and click on audience application."
Mentorn, the production company who make Question Time for the BBC, employ a team of audience producers to select members of the public to take part.
A BBC spokesperson said: “The Question Time audience is always chosen by a team to ensure broad political balance and each application goes through the same rigorous background checks.
"Any suggestion to the contrary is misleading. The BBC has clear impartiality guidelines covering the use of personal social media - this freelance producer and the rest of the programme team have been reminded of their responsibilities.”
“It would be misleading to suggest unwittingly sharing social media posts reflect someone’s political views.”NEW DELHI: A Uniform Civil Code is necessary for national integration but any decision to bring it can be taken only after wider consultations, Law Minister D V Sadananda Gowda said today, a day after the Supreme Court asked the Centre whether it is willing to bring in a common code.The Minister also said that he would consult the Prime Minister, his Cabinet colleagues and top law officers before government files its affidavit in the apex court.Gowda said "wider consultations" will be held with various personal law boards and other stakeholders to evolve a consensus and the process may take "some time"."...Even the Preamble of our Constitution and Article 44 of the Constitution do say that there should be a Uniform Civil Code. For the interest of national integration, certainly a common civil code is necessary. But it is a very sensitive issue. It needs very wider consultation. Even communities, even across the party line, even various organisations...it need to have a wider consultation," Gowda said.He said a decision "cannot be done in a day or two. It will take its own time.""But the concept of the Preamble of the Constitution and Article 44 and today in the national interest, certainly a step further need to be taken in this direction," he said.The minister said he had made a similar statement in the Lok Sabha in April when the issue came up for discussion.He said the high courts of Kerala and Karnataka have already given their judgment when they were dealing with some marriage laws saying a common code is the "need of the country.""But a decision has to be taken after due consultation with various stakeholders," he said.He said the contents of the proposed affidavit will be finalised after his consultations with the PM, his cabinet colleagues, the Attorney General and the Solicitor General.He said while the affidavit's contents will be decided after government's internal consultations, a decision on when to implement a common code can only be taken after "wider consultations" with chairpersons of personal law boards and other stakeholders.Terming it as a "national issue", he said if tomorrow a small discussion is left out, then it will become a big issue."There are several issues across the country today wherein people are finding something, so it will take some time."Jesuit priest, activist, and writer Father Daniel Berrigan died in New York City on April 30. He was 94.
Berrigan was perhaps best known for taking draft files from a U.S. Selective Service Office in Catonsville, Maryland, with eight other Catholic activists in 1968. The group, which became known as the “Catonsville Nine,” then burned the paperwork with homemade napalm to protest the Vietnam War. Berrigan was later sentenced to three years in federal prison for the act.
In recent years, Berrigan protested the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and joined Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. In 2001, Berrigan said he’d stop protesting “the day after I’m embalmed,” the New York Times reported.
Berrigan was named Fordham University’s Poet in Residence in 2000 and held that title until his death, the university said in a statement. Berrigan’s wake is set for Thursday and his funeral on Friday at the Church of Saint Francis Xavier on 46 W. 16th Street in New York.
Below, Tricycle Features Editor Andrew Cooper recalls shepherding Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh—who were friends and co-authored The Raft Is Not the Shore: Conversations Toward a Buddhist-Christian Awareness—around New York City.
My parents were dubious, when I was in my 20s and 30s, about my career as a professional Buddhist. Still, they were good sports during my annual visits when I brought to their apartment on the Upper East Side the occasional roshi or bhikkhu—and even one radical-pacifist Catholic priest—in need of respite from New York City busyness.
In 1983 I accompanied Thich Nhat Hanh for six weeks as he visited a number of North American Buddhist centers and gave a series of public talks along the way. The final event on the trip’s schedule was a talk somewhere in Midtown Manhattan, at which he was to be introduced by Father Daniel Berrigan. Thich Nhat Hanh and I made the long drive down from a Zen center in upstate New York and, before going to the venue, we stayed at my folks’ place for a couple of hours. As arranged, Father Berrigan joined us there. The two peace activists had not seen each other in a long time, but it was immediately apparent the bond between them was still strong.
Based on Father Berrigan’s famous and dramatic anti-war actions, I somehow expected a correspondingly larger-than-life personality, maybe even something of a firebrand. Here, though, he was most soft-spoken, gentle, and very, very kind. Kind of like Thich Nhat Hanh. In fact, there was something twin-like about them—both of them poets, activists, intellectuals, and religious contemplatives steeped in their traditions even as they endeavored to reform them. It was as though each was the Buddhist or Catholic version of the other. They spoke not of matters large or deep; rather, they asked after each other and shared news, of a personal sort, of old friends. I suppose you could call it small talk, but there was something terribly moving about it as well. Maybe it was that very smallness that made it so.
We eventually headed out for the talk and I hailed a cab in front of the apartment building near East 83rd Street and Lexington Avenue. The driver grew visibly impatient as I tried to round up my drifting cargo of bodhisattvas and get them into the taxi. A car behind us honked loudly. I was about to follow them into the cab when I looked up and happened to see a large man standing about 20 feet away, looking on with a wide and delightful smile. He looked familiar, and after a moment, I realized it was the actor Peter Boyle. I gestured with my thumb back to Thich Nhat Hanh and Father Berrigan, now, finally, seated in the cab, and then, as New Yorkers do, I threw my arms up in the air and let them flop down to my thighs in the instantly recognizable gesture of “Whaddayagonnado?” Mr. Boyle nodded in understanding, and I smiled and nodded back. Later, as the talk was about to begin, I noticed him sitting in the audience, way in the back, not wishing to draw attention but only there to listen and see.
People who spend a lot of time in the public eye often get in the habit of filling up the space in the room, but that was not Father Daniel Berrigan at all. But of course he was as fearless and determined and, in his way, as dynamic as they come. He never gave up on us. He really did help us to be better people.Science by press conference: a modern scourge
In 2004, I started a Wikipedia article on science by press conference, one of the most irresponsible abuses of science. In it, I mentioned the canonical example: Pons and Fleischmann's press conference to announce their discovery of cold fusion, and the clueless journalists who uncritically published their sensationalistic claims. More recent examples include the Felisa Wolfe-Simon/NASA Astrobiology Institute announcement about the "GFAJ-1" arsenic-loving bacteria strain, and the announcement about the Gliese 581 g extrasolar planet. These stories got a lot of traction in our "First Post!" world, where everyone clamors to be the earliest reporter of this or that scientific claim, whether it's true or not. This was never more evident than in the December 2010 Twitter trending topic "HIV cured," where the media was complicit in dumbing down a complicated news story about Timothy Ray Brown, aka the "Berlin patient," to the point that average people ran with a grossly inaccurate version of the medical facts. This week, it's the "elaborate fraud" perpetrated by Andrew Wakefield for nearly a decade regarding vaccinations and autism. In 2001, the media were falling all over themselves to report Wakefield's claims: he was heralded as the "MMR Warrior" (MMR=measles, mumps, rubella, three potentially deadly childhood diseases that can be prevented through vaccination). Wakefield found an audience in people looking for something to blame for autism, and he sparked an anti-vaccination movement that got further traction through celebrities with access to the media. While journalists have a responsibility to report new findings, they also have a responsibility to make sure that these new findings are reported accurately and in a manner that is not sensationalistic. PROTIP: If someone is convening a press conference to announce their scientific discovery, whether it's a perpetual motion device or the first human clone, it's advisable to ask why they seem more focused on publicity than science. In the meantime, thanks to the media, "vaccination rates have hit record lows here in America, and measles rates have skyrocketed accordingly."
Vaccine-Autism Link Not Only Wrong, But an "Elaborate Fraud"It’s a measure of Kieran Marmion’s importance to Connacht, and his consistency, that the 24-year-old scrumhalf reached a landmark 100th game for the province, within four seasons of making his debut, in last Saturday’s win over Glasgow Warriors.
An injury crisis at scrumhalf at the start of the 2012-13 season saw Marmion, then still in the Connacht academy, make his debut in the seasonal opener against Cardiff Blues at the Sportsground. Such stories have been a feature of Connacht’s remarkable campaign this season. Many recent graduates or members of their academy – who previously would have been largely unknown outside the province – have broken into the senior team. But Marmion was a trailblazer.
Bottom side
“When I came here, Connacht were bottom side in the table,” said Marmion of their last place finish in 2009-10. “They always talked about the ambition of where they wanted to go... I think there’s a different type of belief about the place at the moment. You can see out there on the pitch what it means to people. It’s great to be involved with.”
Securing the win which rounded off their regular season campaign to earn a home semi-final was a fitting way to mark his, and Tiernan O’Halloran’s, century.
“We set out before the game to get the home semi, we backed ourselves and that’s what we got,” said Marmion.
Connacht have won 13 of 14 competitive games at the Sportsground this season, only Ulster escaping with a win secured in the 78th minute.
“Our results show we’ve lost just one game at home all season, so obviously teams coming here, it’s not a great place for them to come. You could hear how loud the support was out there today, especially in a tight game like that, it really helps us round off the game.”
Pat Lam’s team go into the play-offs as the outsiders of the four, albeit at only 11/2, and with the task of beating the defending champions for a second time in a row after ending the Warriors’ nine-match winning run last Saturday.
“Well, we’ve proved we can beat them. We’ll take huge confidence from that. They’re the ones under pressure coming here, and we’ll go into that game fully believing we can win that game too,” said Marmion.
“We trained in the sun all week, but we knew it was going to be raining [Saturday], so we played the way we do in the rain all week, even though it was dry. It was great to round that game off and win it, there’s been a few games where we’ve let it slip.”
The Sportsground is assured of another 7,700-plus sell-out in this ground-breaking season, and the demand for tickets will be unlike anything Marmion or the other players will ever have known.
But they wouldn’t want it any other way.
“The last two games have been sold out and it makes such a difference... it’s just great to be able to play in front of such a large crowd.
“In tight games like this one against Glasgow, you can hear them and it lifts the lads when they’re tired to get off the line and keep pushing forward.”The current imbalance between supply and demand in the labor force should be good news for American workers still waiting to see a few extra bucks in their pockets after decades of income stagnation. Unfortunately, the nation’s 4.3 percent unemployment rate is not translating into fatter paychecks. Wages for most U.S. workers are still stagnant. In a tightening labor market, people are essentially working for less money than they did in the 1970s, at least when inflation is taken into account. What is going wrong?
According to some economists, part of the downward pressure on wages comes from the vast reserve of workers who, despite that low official rate of unemployment, remain on the sidelines of the formal economy. These discouraged workers are no longer tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics because of their long absence from the labor force, but many are still competing for full-time jobs. At the same time, mismatches between skills and job openings, as well as less direct effects on employment capacity (like the nation’s opioid epidemic), are keeping many U.S. workers from jobs with good wages.
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Labor’s decline just about matches up to the swan dive of middle-class income in the United States since the 1970s.
But there are deeper issues that contribute to the withering of worker income and to destructive inequities in wealth distribution. The long-term decline of organized labor surely has had an impact. (See infographics on page 14.) In the not-too-distant past, organized labor could produce sizable ripple effects beyond its membership. Even nonunion workers benefited when organized labor pushed wages higher or scored improved job benefits or working conditions. Labor’s decline, in fact, just about matches up to the swan dive of middle-class income in the United States since the 1970s.
Worker productivity has steadily increased, but wages (and, not coincidentally, union membership) have been stagnant.
In the public sector, with 34.4 percent of workers represented by a union, organized labor is an embattled, if stubborn presence. But in the private sector, unions have essentially been eradicated. Nationally, organized labor represents just 6.4 percent of the workforce.
Without organized labor on the watch, upper management has claimed an increasing share of national income. In 1965, corporate C.E.O.s could anticipate earning 20 times more than one of their line workers; now, after peaking at 376 to 1 in 2000, that ratio is an astonishing 271 to 1. From 1978 to 2014, top management compensation increased by just under 1,000 percent—double the stock market’s growth and about 10 times the compensation growth experienced by workers over the same period. Class warfare indeed.
Union membership is now common only among public-sector workers.
Catholic social teaching has wrestled with such inequities in a number of ways, among them by calling for a just wage and a preferential option for the poor as mechanisms for mitigating imbalances, and even challenging the notion of private wealth itself with the concept of the universal destination of goods—under which, as St. John Paul II said, property “must always serve the needs of peoples.” But rarely has economic inequity been challenged as directly as it has been by Pope Francis. In “The Joy of the Gospel” he wrote: “Inequality is the root of social ills” (No. 202). In a 2013 speech at the Vatican, the pope targeted disparity as a “new, invisible...tyranny...which unilaterally and irremediably imposes its own laws and rules.”
He is right to be concerned.
Concentration of wealth is quickly followed by outsized political clout, closing a circuit that only exacerbates economic inequities. Because of this confluence of wealth and power, tax, spending and labor policies that favor the already wealthy become codified in Washington and state capitals around the nation. Among them has been so-called right-to-work legislation.
In right-to-work states, workers may still form unions, but employees are not required to pay the dues that support them. That means “free riders” can enjoy whatever wage or benefit improvements unions are able to negotiate without joining their locals. In practice, right-to-work legislation has been a union killer. And once the unions and the power of collective bargaining they represent are out, no civic entity represents workers when the rewards of a robust economy are divvied up.
That legislative model is now being applied at the federal level. The National Right-to-Work Act, introduced most recently in Congress in February, has been gaining co-sponsors.
The president’s signature on a national right-to-work law could be the coup de grace for organized labor in the United States, a loss that will accelerate the wealth inequity that is already proving economically and socially ruinous.Minnesota, North Dakota lawmakers renew sex trafficking bill
Democratic U.S. senators from Minnesota and North Dakota are reintroducing bipartisan legislation in an effort to crack down on sex trafficking across the country.
The Stop Exploitation Through Trafficking Act is modeled after Minnesota's "Safe Harbor" law, which protects sex trafficking victims from being prosecuted as defendants. Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota say the bill would allow prosecutors to better handle minor sex trafficking cases and provide support to victims.
The bill seeks to establish a national strategy to combat human trafficking.
The legislation also was introduced by Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Mark Kirk of Illinois.
It's supported by at least six national organizations, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Fraternal Order of Police.The Pirate member of the Althing( the Icelandic national parliament), Birgitta Jónsdottir, is going to visit Prague on 24 January 2015 to deliver a message about freedom of the press and freedom on the Internet: The event is being organized by the Czech Pirate Party. We are therefore are very pleased to welcome Birgitta Jónsdóttir to Prague.
Who is Birgitta anyway?
She is a skilled activist that said no to the unhappy situation in Iceland in the last decade. Chairperson of various grassroot movements in Iceland. A person, that unveiled various failures of the US Army in both Iraq and Afghanistan. An experienced politician devoting her efforts to improve legal situation in Iceland. One of three Pirate Members of the Icelandic Parliament – Althing. So, having such a guest in Prague is clearly a great thing for us. Both the Pirate Group in the Prague Council and the International department of the Czech Pirate Party are trying to prepare the visit the best we can. There is already a working schedule that we will bring closer to reality as more and more people are involved. This will also involve various discussions and workshops and a nice post-event party lasting the entire evening. And besides all that – next day there will be a panel debate with Birgitta about the Icelandic constitution.
Still, one question remains: Why Prague? Well, it is perhaps a bit boastful to point out, but the Czech Pirates proved to be really successful in the recent elections. Having reached the best result in the European Parliament elections in May last year and by entering the Prague City Council, Czech Pirates proved to be an actual political force. Besides that, Prague is an antique city; a true heart of Europe, influenced by many cultures and many nations in its past. A city with a multicultural tradition backed by past eras of great empires, turbulent periods as well as times when the Czech Capital used to be one of the major cities in Europe.
Coming to Prague itself is a great idea. Many people from all around Europe already do, and that is why our capital belongs to the most visited cities on the continent. But meeting Czech Pirates as well as an Icelandic MP brings added interest to such an idea. If Prague is not far from you, consider visiting the event. All of you will be welcome. And besides – you do not get a lot of opportunities to have a beer with an Icelandic MP.
Wanna come as well? Contact Jan Loužek – [email protected]
This is a guest post by Jan Loužek
Jan Loužek (* 1986) is currently the secretary of the Pirate Group in Prague City Hall. In the past he was also an intern in the office of Amelia Andersdotter; where he provided international communicatoin with the rest of the Pirate community all over Europe. He also participated on various Pirate-related events like the election campaigns in Croatia, anti-ACTA demonstrations in Prague or Belgrade. He is also an active Wikimedian, an enthusiast of Slavic linguistics and an amateur photographer.
Featured Image: composite CC BY-NC-SA from works by Js and Pedro SzekelyIntroduction to AFI's Master Class - The Art of Collaboration: Robert Zemeckis and Don Burgess
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and the American Film Institute (AFI) continue their series of specials exploring some of the greatest artistic collaborations in film. In the series' third installment, TCM Presents AFI's Master Class - The Art of Collaboration: Robert Zemeckis and Don Burgess, the two men discuss their work together in front of an audience comprised of AFI Fellows studying filmmaking at the world-renowned AFI Conservatory. The special will premiere Monday, Jan. 14, 2013, at 8 p.m. (ET), only on TCM.
Oscar®-winning director Robert Zemeckis and Oscar®-nominated cinematographer Don Burgess began working together more than two decades ago and, since then, their collaborations have been nothing short of remarkable. Together they have created such acclaimed films as Forrest Gump (1994), the Academy Award®-winning story of a simple man's life through decades of U.S. history; the Oscar®-nominated sci-fi thriller Contact (1997), adapted from Carl Sagan's book about an astronomer's discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence; the Oscar®-nominated Cast Away (2000), a tale of a man's journey home after being stranded on a deserted island; and their latest film, Flight (2012), an action-packed mystery thriller about a seasoned airline pilot's struggles after his miraculous crash landing.
In the new AFI special, the two men discuss their many collaborations and how the art of visual storytelling plays into each film. They also discuss films that have inspired them, including Carnal Knowledge (1971), The French Connection (1971), The Godfather (1972) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). AFI's Master Class is packed with clips from these films, as well as memorable scenes from the artists' own movies.
TCM will follow this latest edition of AFI's Master Class with a TCM premiere presentation of the Zemeckis and Burgess film, What Lies Beneath (2000), starring Harrison Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer and Katharine Towne, at 9 p.m. (ET) and an encore of the special at 11:30 p.m. (ET).
Master classes are a core part of the curriculum at the AFI Conservatory, which offers a Master of Fine Arts degree in six filmmaking disciplines and is consistently recognized as one of the world's top film schools. With an audience comprised solely of AFI Fellows, two artists discuss films that inspired them and present clips from classic films. They also present and discuss their own collaborative work to illustrate different aspects of filmmaking. Each program concludes with a Q&A session with AFI Fellows.New Delhi: Power generation machinery maker BHEL has bagged its largest order amounting to Rs 17,950 crore from Telangana State Power Generation Corp (TSGENCO) to set up a 4,000 MW plant at Yadadri.
"BHEL has achieved a new landmark by securing the single largest order in its history for setting up a 4,000 MW (5x800 MW) supercritical thermal power project from TSGENCO," BHEL said in a statement.
The project valued at Rs 17,950 crore is one of the highest orders ever placed in the capital goods sector in India, the statement added.
"TSGENCO has entrusted BHEL with this order for setting up the 5x800 MW thermal power plant, on engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) basis, at Damaracherla in Nalgonda District of Telangana, named as Yadadri Thermal Power Project," it said.
In December 2014, TSGENCO had placed an order with BHEL for setting up Telangana's first Supercritical Thermal Power Plant of 800 MW rating, also on EPC basis, at Kothagudem followed by an order for the 4x270 MW Bhadradari TPS at Manuguru in Khammam district in March this year.
The statement further said, BHEL has been a long standing partner in the development of the erstwhile combined state of Andhra Pradesh with 78 per cent of the coal-based power stations having been commissioned by the company.
In 2014-15, these plants operated at a high Plant Load Factor (PLF) of 83.5 per cent against the national average of 65.5 per cent.
Earlier this year, TSGENCO has entered into an MoU with BHEL for construction of new thermal power plants totalling to 6,000 MW in the state.
BHEL said that all these power plants are expected to commence generation on fast-track basis to meet the state's increasing demand for power, with power being identified as a crucial factor for the development of the state.
To overcome the current uncertainty of coal supply, BHEL shall be supplying its in-house developed fuel flexible boiler, which is capable of firing the entire range, from 100 per cent Indian to 100 per cent imported mix of coal, BHEL said.2016 MLG Anaheim Open - CoD BO3 - Rules & Format
Major League Gaming Corp. (“Major League Gaming” or “MLG” or “Sponsor”), will be hosting the MLG Anaheim Open tournament (the “Tournament”), in accordance with: (i) the Call of Duty World League (“CWL”) Pro Division Handbook (the “Handbook”); (ii) these official rules (“Official Rules”); and (iii) the attached Conduct Rules (“Conduct Rules”) which are incorporated into these Official Rules, unless otherwise indicated. If there is an inconsistency between the Handbook and these Official Rules, these Official Rules shall control. By participating in the Tournament, each participant agrees to abide by the Handbook, these Official Rules, the decisions of MLG (which shall be final and binding in all respects) and to be contacted by MLG or their agents by email, mail and/or telephone regarding the Tournament.
1.Anaheim Open
a.Registration
i.Online Registrations for the Tournament will open at 8 PM EDT on Tuesday, April 26th.
ii.Online Registration for the Tournament will close at 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, June 5th.
iii.Team Passes will not be sold at Check-Iin. Teams need a Team Pass must email [email protected] by 5 PM EDT on Tuesday, June 7th.
iv.The Tournament Team Pass Price is $299.
v.All Team Pass sales are final. No refunds, transfers, or resales will be granted.
vi.All Players must use Team Builder (http://team-builder.majorleaguegaming.com) in order to complete their Registrations.
b.Open Bracket
i.Format
1. The Open Bracket will allow for up to 96 teams.
2. The Open Bracket will be Double Elimination. After losing a Match in the Winners Bracket, Teams will enter the Losers Bracket. A Match loss in the Losers result in elimination from the Tournament.
3. All Matches will be Best of 3 Games. All Best of 3 Matches will use Hardpoint Game Mode for Game 1, Uplink OR Capture the Flag Game Mode for Game 2, and Search and Destroy Game Mode for Game 3.
4. When 4 Teams remain in the Open Winners Bracket, they will be placed into Pool Play.
5. When 4 Teams remain in the Open Losers Bracket, they will be placed in Championship Bracket Losers Round 1.
ii.Seeding
1. Registered Teams will be seeded for the Open Bracket by their total CWL Pro Points for PlayStation 4 Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 as of 9 AM EDT on Wednesday, June 8th.
2. EU CWL Stage 2 teams will be seeded at the top of the Open Bracket as of 9 AM EDT on Wednesday, June 8th.
3. Incomplete Teams will be seeded last.
4. Teams that are completed after the Open Bracket is seeded will be seeded last, regardless of their Pro Points.
c.Pool Play
i.Format
1. Pool Play will have 4 Pools of 4 Teams.
2. All Matches will be Best of 5 Games. All Best of 5 Matches will use Hardpoint Game Mode for Game 1, Search and Destroy Game Mode for Games 2 and 5, Uplink Game Mode for Game 3, and Capture the Flag Game Mode for Game 4.
3. Teams will play one Match against each of the other Teams in their Pool.
4. Teams finishing their Pool in 1st and 2nd place will be placed in the Championship Winner Bracket Round 1. Teams finishing their Pool in 3rd will be placed in Championship Bracket Losers Round 2. Teams finishing their Pool in 4th Place will be placed in Championship Bracket Losers Round 1.
ii.Seeding
1. NA CWL teams will be seeded for Pool Play by their current rank in CWL as of 9 AM EDT on Friday, June 3rd.
2. The #1 NA CWL Team will be placed in Pool A. The #2 NA CWL Team will be placed in Pool B. The #3 NA CWL Team will be placed in Pool C. The #4 CWL Team will be placed in Pool D. The #5-8 NA CWL Teams will be randomly drawn, one into each Pool. The #9-12 NA CWL Teams will be randomly drawn, one into each Pool.
3. Pool Play Seeds will be determined after Teams have already been assigned to a Pool.
4. A Pool Play Team’s Seed is used to govern Side Choices and Main Stage Seating.
5. The final 4 Open Winners Bracket Teams will be seeded #13-16 for Pool Play based on their Open Bracket Seed.
6. The #13 Seed will be added to Pool D, #14 Seed will be added to Pool C, #15 Seed will be added to Pool B, and #16 seed will be added to Pool A.
iii.Ranking & Tiebreakers
1. Pool Play Ranking (1st-4th) will be determined using each Team’s Record of Matches won and lost.
2. Pool Play Standings ties will be broken using Head to Head Match Winning Percentage (Pool Play Matches Won vs. Tied Teams / Pool Play Matches Played vs. Tied Teams).
3. If Head to Head Match Winning Percentage can’t break a tie, Head to Head Gaming Winner Percentage (Pool Play Games Won vs. Ties Teams / Pool Play Games Played vs. Tied Teams) will be used to break the tie.
4. If Head to Head Game Winning Percentage can’t break a tie, Overall Game Winning Percentage (Pool Play Games Won / Pool Play Games Played) will be used to break the tie.
5. The higher number will win all of the aforementioned tiebreakers.
6. If the aforementioned Tiebreakers can’t break a tie for 3rd place, the tie will be broken by Pool Play Seed with the higher seed winning the Tiebreaker. The highest seed is 1.
7. If the aforementioned Tiebreakers can’t break a tie for 1st place or 2nd place, the tied Teams will be scheduled to play a Best of 1 Game Round Robin tiebreaker. The Tiebreaker Game Mode will be Search and Destroy. For the Map, see MLG Anaheim Open – CoD BO3 – Game Types in Rounds. After each Team has played all other tied Teams in the Tiebreaker Game Type, their records of Games Won and Games Lost will be used to break the tie. If there is still a tie that can’t be broken by the aforementioned tiebreakers, an additional Best of 1 Game Round Robin Tiebreaker(s) will be played until the tie can be broken.
8. If there is a tie involving more than two teams and a Tiebreaker resolved the tie for a Team(s), but leaves at least two Teams tied, the tie(s) that remains will be broken by starting over with the Head to Head Match Winning Percentage Tiebreaker.
iv. Replacement Teams
1. If a Pool Play Team chooses not to participate in the Tournament and notifies MLG prior to the start of the Tournament, MLG reserves the right to replace the Team with a Team of their choice.
2. If a Pool Play Team chooses not to participate in the Tournament and notifies MLG after the start of the Tournament, a Replacement Team will not be selected to take their place.
3. If a Replacement Team is needed for Pool Play and all Pools have been set, the Replacement Team will be given the #16 Seed and will be assigned to the same Pool as the Team they have replaced. As a result, other Pool Play Teams may see their Seed change. However, all other Pool Play Teams will keep their Pool assignment.
d.Championship Bracket
i.Format
1. Championship Bracket will be Double Elimination.
2. All Matches will be Best of 5 Games. All Best of 5 Matches will use Hardpoint Game Mode for Game 1, Search and Destroy Game Mode for Games 2 and 5, Uplink Game Mode for Game 3, and Capture the Flag Game Mode for Game 4.
3. Championship Bracket Winners Bracket will be conducted as follows:
a. Round 1 Match #1 = Pool A 1st Place vs Pool C 2nd Place
b. Round 1 Match #2 = Pool D 1st Place vs Pool B 2nd Place
c. Round 1 Match #3 = Pool C 1st Place vs Pool A 2nd Place
d. Round 1 Match #4 = Pool B 1st Place vs Pool D
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your health and the organization.
Don’t be the reason for your team’s delay. Too many meetings = less real work. And less real work = delay in delivery. See who’s the problem?
What you can do as a participant:
Decline the meeting request if you genuinely feel that you can make a better progress by doing the “real work” instead of wasting the time by attending it.
Speak up! You are there to contribute to the discussions in some way or the other. If you can’t do that, just don’t attend the meetings.
Talk to the organizer before the meeting. Check if it is really required for the team. You might be the lead who can provide the update to the organizer. By doing this, you don’t just save $1,000, but also spare your fellow developers from attending boring meetings!
If there is a dire need of your team to know updates from the organizer, but you can’t afford the other 9 developers take their time off the “real work”, attend it on their behalf and share the Minutes of Meetings (MoM) with them.
Having said that, we all need meetings. There is no escape. They are essential to the overall success of a team and the organization. The cost of having no meetings at all could be far more expensive. It is just that we need find a sweet-spot by optimizing the time spent in meetings for efficient communication and enhanced productivity.
HBR has a Meeting Cost Calculator tool that you can use while setting the budget for your upcoming project.
Putting these into practice would save a large amount of money to your organization and help your team get more productive. Be considerate before clicking on the meeting request send button.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced at a fundraiser Thursday night that Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter would donate $1 million US to his charitable foundation, and comic book fans took to Twitter in reaction.
Trump held what his team called a "special event to benefit veterans' organizations" at Drake University in Iowa, near where the rest of the Republican front-runners held a debate hosted by Fox News.
Trump had boycotted the debate as a result of his escalating feud with the news channel.
In announcing the donation, Trump called Perlmutter, "one of the great, great men of our country in terms of business and talent."
A representative for Perlumtter said, "The Perlmutters are thrilled to support their friend Donald Trump in his efforts to help veterans," reported The Hollywood Reporter.
The New York Times reported that Perlmutter's wife, Laura, donated $2 million to Marco Rubio's campaign.
On Twitter, reaction to the announcement came quickly. The donation had its detractors, like filmmaker Michael Moore.
Trump announces head of Marvel Comics has written a million-dollar check for tonight's event. Will think about that next time I buy a ticket —@MMFlint
Marvel CEO Supports <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Trump?src=hash">#Trump</a> Campaign Event as <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Marvel?src=hash">#Marvel</a> Editor Discourages Criticism <a href="https://t.co/hAidhNrMNL">https://t.co/hAidhNrMNL</a> <a href="https://t.co/5l4Mk2OTKK">pic.twitter.com/5l4Mk2OTKK</a> —@TheOuthousers
Oh, Marvel. Bad move. You could have given it to them w/o Trump. Stop playing. Nope. Nope. <a href="https://t.co/paFDpdv0Bv">https://t.co/paFDpdv0Bv</a> —@StilettoRoyalty
But Trump supporters applauded the donation
Isaac Perlmutter, CEO of Marvel Entertainment donated $1,000,000 to Trump's Vet Event <a href="https://t.co/SaJGENRs1E">pic.twitter.com/SaJGENRs1E</a> —@MargaretsBelly
Still more reaction came Friday morning
So Marvel comics is on a big diversity push but their CEO just gave a million dollars to Trump......................... —@peridotmatrix
The comics are all "hey here's diverse characters and some political commentary" but the CEO supports the mass deportation candidate?! —@peridotmatrix
So Marvel's CEO donates a million to Trump. Tell me again how there's no money in comics. —@Blackmudpuppy
Why is the CEO of Marvel supporting a super-villain? —@docfreeride
The CEO of Marvel just gave Trump a million dollars. Excuse me while I go burn everything I own of theirs. —@aurosan
You wonder why <a href="https://twitter.com/Marvel">@Marvel</a> is bad with representation? Their CEO donated a million to Trump. End of story. Resign. —@petercoffin
As a Mexican American whose parents immigrated to the US from Mexico, I am very hurt to see Marvel's CEO donate $1,000,000 to Trump. —@iglvzx
Jordan White, a writer for Marvel, replied to Michael Moore's tweet saying that a Marvel boycott would jeopardize the livelihoods of a lot of people
<a href="https://twitter.com/MMFlint">@MMFlint</a> Awww, that's not fair. A lot of people work for Marvel. —@cracksh0t
<a href="https://twitter.com/Thesixler">@Thesixler</a> Not buying a movie ticket because a CEO donated money to a veterans charity is not "heroic", it's pointless. —@cracksh0t
Supporters of Trump correctly pointed out that Perlmutter's donation was to the Donald Trump for Veterans cause, not to Trump's campaign
Leave it to liberals + <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Trump?src=hash">#Trump</a> haters to be upset because <a href="https://twitter.com/Marvel">@Marvel</a> CEO donated $1M to <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Trump4Vets?src=hash">#Trump4Vets</a>. I guess we know who supports our <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/vets?src=hash">#vets</a>. —@Fit_Magnolia
However, the website donaldtrumpforvets.com, set up for the event, accepts donations not to a veterans' charity but to the Donald J. Trump Foundation, Trump's personal non-profit organization
A report in Forbes magazine in December found that about 1% of the foundation's contributions were to organizations that directly benefit military veterans.A draft of a potential Uniform Civil Code, termed the ‘Progressive Uniform Civil Code’ (PUCC) was presented to the Chairman of the Law Commission, Justice (retd) BS Chauhan by a group of eminent citizens from various walks of life.
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Last year, Justice Chauhan was tasked with helping formulate a draft on Uniform Civil Code, that the government could consider later. The Law Commission sent out a questionnaire to several faith groups, leading to some hostility and concerns over ensuring that Constitutional values apply to all personal laws. Sources close to the Commission said that the Draft UCC is a work in progress.
Soli Sorabjee, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court, who was the Attorney General under the previous NDA government, wrote a letter to Justice Chauhan in support of the initiative. He said that “the Law Commission should obviate any apprehension that anything uniform, would be majoritarian. Besides its recommendations need to be far-sighted and progressive.”
Eight eminent citizens, including scholars, a retired senior army officer, Magsasay award winning activist and a classical singer, writers and a legal luminary have lent their weight to a draft that purports to provide “equal rights in marriage, divorce, child custody, guardianship, inheritance and succession”, that too “irrespective of their gender, sex and sexuality, religious or cultural traditions or beliefs.” It sets out at the onset to bring about progressive uniform laws, “in line with globally accepted values of human rights”.
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The signatories include TM Krishna (singer and artiste), S Irfan Habib (historian), Mukul Kesavan (writer), Dushyant (lawyer), Maj Gen S Vombetkere (retd), Nilanjana Roy (writer), Gul Panag (actor) and Bezwada Wilson (Safai Karamchari Andolan).
Krishna said; “The idea of a UCC has been floated by people for sometime now. But under the present political dispensation there has been a conscious attempt to use it to create a Hindu majoritarian country. The targets of such an agenda are the minorities, which include religious, sexual and socially marginalised citizens of India whom they want to homogenise as per upper-caste Hindu norms. This needs to be challenged with robustness. We have therefore proposed a UCC that is progressive, forward thinking and creative. It looks at the wonderful possibilities that exist in such an idea.”
Magsaysay Award winners, TM Krishna, Bezwada Wilson and lawyer Dushyant met the Chairman of the Law Commission on Wednesday to submit a draft proposal to him for his perusal.This draft, defines marriage as “a legal union” between straight and gay couples. On many matters, like divorce, it aims to provide perfect equality between both partners, irrespective of gender.
“I have been grappling with the question of personal laws of various religions, and the need for an UCC which is not only uniform but more importantly progressive. Inequities caused by one set of laws should not be replaced by inequities and discrimination of another type in the garb of UCC. The group came together on that fundamental premise,” said Dushyant who drafted the proposal.
If brought into force, Triple Talaq, unequal rights of men and women to parental property, polygamy, and unequal privileges like the Hindu Undivided Family (HUF), which allows for special tax concessions to Hindus would go.
“We need a UCC that rejoices in humanity, a law that attempts to equalise the inequalities inherent in our society, a code that celebrates and protects every individual, their rights, faiths, sexualities and choices. This draft is such an attempt, which is open to discussion and debate,” Krishna added.
Article 44 of the Constitution (Directive Principle of State Policy) states that ‘The State shall endeavour to secure for citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India’. UCC has been an article of faith with the ruling BJP and a core issue with them since the 1980s, ever since the Congress government under Rajiv Gandhi was seen to have sided with the Muslim orthodoxy on the question of maintenance given to divorced women and reversed the Supreme Court order in the Shah Bano case in 1987.
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More recently, the instantaneous Triple Talaq case in the Supreme Court in August and the task given to the Law Commission to formulate a draft Uniform Civil Code has led to a lot of talk on this issue. While Indians can currently opt for secular laws, most go by the Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi Laws which the Constitution allows all believers to abide by.The Green Bay Packers have appeared lost at times this season, particularly on offense. Injuries have certainly played a role, but it’s also possible that the team is not doing enough to prepare for games.
During the third quarter of Green Bay’s loss to the Chicago Bears Thursday night, NBC’s Cris Collinsworth said the Packers recently held a players-only meeting, and younger guys on the team spending too much time playing video games was apparently a topic that was addressed.
Article continues below...
“They had a little players-only meeting this past couple weeks ago before that Minnesota game,” Collinsworth said, according to Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk. “I don’t think Aaron Rodgers was too happy with the preparation schedule of some of the young players on this team. A few too many video games being played and not enough homework.”
Rodgers said after the game that he has not been on the same page with his receivers, and that has been evident for several weeks now. Packers coach Mike McCarthy singled out one particular player, though it’s unclear if he is one of the players Collinsworth was referring to.
What is clear is that Rodgers might be hurt, and the Packers are trending in the wrong direction. If they haven’t figured out by now how to throw the ball without Jordy Nelson, they might never figure it out.
More from Larry Brown Sports:Travis is a Scottish rock band formed in Glasgow in 1990, composed of Fran Healy (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Dougie Payne (bass guitar, backing vocals), Andy Dunlop (lead guitar, banjo, backing vocals) and Neil Primrose (drums, percussion). The band's name comes from the Harry Dean Stanton character Travis Henderson from the film Paris, Texas. The band is widely claimed by the media as having paved the way for other bands such as Keane and Coldplay to go onto achieve worldwide success throughout the 2000s, particularly through the band's The Man Who (1999) album.[7]
The band released their debut album, Good Feeling (1997) to moderate success where it debuted at number nine on the UK Albums Chart[8] and went onto achieve a silver certification from the BPI in January 2000.[9] The band went on to achieve greater international success with their second album, The Man Who (1999) which spent nine weeks at number one on the UK Albums Charts, totaling one-hundred and thirty-four weeks in the top 100 of the chart.[8] In 2003, The Man Who was certified 9x platinum by the BPI, representing sales of over 2.68 million in the UK alone.[9] Following this success, the band released their third effort through The Invisible Band (2001) album. The Invisible Band went on to match the success found with their previous album, where it debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and spent a total of four weeks at the top spot, fifteen weeks in the top ten and altogether a total of fifty-five weeks in the top one-hundred chart,[8] as well as peaking at thirty-nine on the US Billboard 200 album chart, spending a duration of seven weeks in the Billboard 200 chart.[10] A year following the release of The Invisible Band, the BPI awarded Travis with a 4x platinum certification for the album.[9]
In recent years, the band's discography has included studio albums 12 Memories (2003), The Boy with No Name (2007), Ode to J. Smith (2008), Where You Stand (2013) and recently Everything at Once (2016), which debuted at number five on the UK Albums Chart.[8] In 2004, the band released their first greatest hits album, Singles, which spent nineteen weeks in the top 100 of the UK albums chart.[8]
Travis have twice been awarded best band at the BRIT Awards and were awarded the NME Artist of the Year award at their 2000 ceremony,[11] and in 2016 were honoured at the Scottish Music Awards for their outstanding contribution to music.[12]
History [ edit ]
Formation and early years (1990–1993) [ edit ]
Good Feeling and Ode to J. Smith The Travis logo used from the band's formation in 1990. It has been used on all releases with the exception ofand
The band that would become Travis was formed by brothers Chris Martyn (bass) and Geoff Martyn (keyboards) along with Simon Jarvis (drums). Andy Dunlop, a school friend at Lenzie Academy, was drafted in on guitar. The line-up was completed by a female vocalist, Catherine Maxwell, and the band's name became "Glass Onion", after the Beatles song of the same name. Neil Primrose joined to replace Jarvis. Parting company with their singer in the spring of 1991, they auditioned for a new vocalist. Having met each other through Primrose pouring him a pint, an untrained art student, Fran Healy, then joined after being invited to audition by Primrose. Healy joined the band on the day he enrolled at The Glasgow School of Art, in the autumn of 1991. Two years later, with the option of music holding more appeal, Healy dropped out of art school, and inspired by songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, assumed songwriting responsibilities. With brothers Chris and Geoff Martyn on bass and keyboards, in 1993, the fivesome released a privately made CD, The Glass Onion EP, featuring the tracks "Dream On", "The Day Before", "Free Soul" and "Whenever She Comes Round". 500 copies of the EP were made and were recently valued at £1000 each. Other songs they recorded but were left off are "She's So Strange" and "Not About to Change".
The band won a talent contest organised by the Music in Scotland Trust, who promised £2,000 so that Travis could deal-hunt at a new music seminar in New York. Two weeks before they were due to leave, however, the prize was instead given to the Music in Scotland Trust Directory. When sent a copy of the directory, the band noticed that it seemed to feature every single band in Scotland—except for them.
The band showed promise but had yet to evolve into a decent line-up capable of fulfilling it and spent several years treading water. According to their publisher Charlie Pinder: "They were a band that everyone in the A&R community knew about and would go and see every now and then. But they weren’t very good. They had quite good songs; Fran always did write good songs."[13] While on a visit to Scotland, American engineer and producer Niko Bolas, a long-time Neil Young and Rolling Stones associate, tuned into a Travis session on Radio Scotland, and heard something in the band's music which instantly made him travel to Perth to see them. Healy: "He told us we were shit, took us in the studio for four days, and taught us how to play properly, like a band. He was ballsy, rude, and New York pushy. He didn't believe my lyrics and told me to write what I believed in and not tell lies. He was Mary Poppins, he sorted us out." The band recorded a five-song demo, which included the song "All I Want to Do Is Rock".
Changes and debut album (1994–1997) [ edit ]
Travis, 1997 performing live
With the sudden death of his grandfather, a grief-stricken Healy shut himself away, refusing to talk to anyone. Emerging a week later, and with a clear vision of where he now wanted Travis and their music to go, Healy dispensed with the band's management and publicity agent. Having been repeatedly knocked back by the British record industry, the band couldn't afford to stay around the country for another few years and so decided to move to New York, feeling that the U.S. might be more suited to their style of music.[13] However, before leaving Healy told the band that they should send the demo to Charlie Pinder of Sony Music Publishing, who they had known for a few years and regularly sent songs to, saying: "If he's not into it, then we'll go."[13] Pinder was immediately impressed by the song "All I Want to Do is Rock", which he felt was a dramatic change for the band: "It was harder, more exciting, sexy; all things that they never really were. They turned a corner."[13] After performing a secret gig for Pinder and his boss at Sony, Blair McDonald, they were signed to Sony Music Publishing. The immediate impact of what was a very secret deal was that the line-up was changed—keyboard player Geoff Martyn was removed, and the bassist, Geoff's brother Chris, was replaced with Healy's best friend Dougie Payne—and the band was moved to London, where they were given a rehearsal room and a house.[13]
Payne, a fellow art student who worked as a Levi's shop assistant, had not played bass guitar previously and initially proved reluctant to take up the new instrument. After having completed a crash course of a couple of weeks, Payne played with the new line-up for the first time in a free space above the Horse Shoe Bar in Glasgow.[14]
Once set up in London the band spent between nine months and a year recording new songs.[13] The band played their first London show at the Dublin Castle in Camden. With around twenty good songs ready they then approached managers Colin Lester and Ian McAndrew of Wildlife Entertainment who then introduced the band to Andy MacDonald, owner of Go! Discs Records and founder of Independiente Records. Sensing greatness, he negotiated with Wildlife Entertainment and signed Travis for a reputed £100,000 of his own money.[citation needed] The band is signed to MacDonald personally, not to the label—if MacDonald ever leaves the Sony-financed label Independiente Records, the band goes with him (commonly referred to in the industry as a "golden handcuffs" clause).
Produced by Steve Lillywhite of U2 fame, Travis' first studio album, 1997's Good Feeling, is a rockier, more upbeat record than the band's others to date. Recorded at the legendary Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York, the place where Travis favourite The Band recorded, the album contained singles such as "All I Want to Do Is Rock", "U16 Girls", the Beatle'esque "Tied to the 90s", "Happy" and "More Than Us". Guest musicians include Page McConnell of Phish playing keyboards on the title track "Good Feeling". The album reached No. 9 on the UK Albums Chart, but with little radio play, it slipped from the chart relatively quickly. Although it heralded Travis' arrival on the British music scene, received extremely positive reviews, and substantially broadened Travis' fan base, it sold just 40,000 copies. Following the release, Travis toured extensively, their live performances further enhancing their reputation. This included support slots in the UK for Oasis, after Noel Gallagher became an outspoken fan.
Mainstream success (1998–2001) [ edit ]
Travis performing live on stage together as a group
Travis' second album, 1999's The Man Who, was produced by Nigel Godrich and recorded at producer Mike Hedges' chateau in France. The band continued recording at, among other studios, Abbey Road Studios in London. Shortly after release, The Man Who initially looked as though it would mirror the release of Good Feeling. Although it entered the UK Albums Chart at No. 7, with little radio play of its singles, it quickly slipped down. Worse, many critics who had raved about the rocky Good Feeling rubbished the album for the band's move into more melodic, melancholic material (for example, "Travis will be best when they stop trying to make sad, classic records"—NME). However, when the album slipped as far as No. 19, it stopped. Word of mouth and increasing radio play of the single "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" increased awareness of the band and the album began to rise back up the chart. Then, when Travis took the stage to perform this song at the 1999 Glastonbury Festival, after being dry for several hours, it began to rain as soon as the first line was sung. The following day the story was all over the papers and television, and with word of mouth and increased radio play of this and the album's other singles, The Man Who rose to No. 1 on the UK chart. It also eventually took Best Album at the 2000 BRIT Awards, with Travis being named Best Band. Music industry magazine Music Week awarded them the same honours, while at the Ivor Novello Awards, Travis took the Best Songwriter(s) and Best Contemporary Song Awards.
Travis followed the release of The Man Who with an extensive 237-gig world tour, including headlining the 2000 Glastonbury, T in the Park and V Festivals, and a US tour leg with Oasis. In Los Angeles, an appearance of the band at an in-store signing forced police to close Sunset Strip. The gentle, melodic approach of The Man Who became a hallmark of the latter-day Britpop sound, and inspired a new wave of UK-based rock bands, with acts such as Coldplay and Starsailor soon joining Travis in challenging the chart dominance of urban and dance acts. The title "The Man Who" comes from the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by neurologist Oliver Sacks. The majority of songs for this album were written before Good Feeling was even released. "Writing to Reach You", "The Fear" and "Luv" being penned around 1995/96, with "As You Are", "Turn" and "She's So Strange" dating back as far as 1993 and the early Glass Onion EP.
The title of Travis' following album, 2001's The Invisible Band, again produced by Nigel Godrich, reflects the band's genuine belief that their music is more important than the group behind it. Featuring such songs as "Sing" (the most played song on British radio that summer), "Side", the McCartneyesque "Flowers in the Window", "Indefinitely", "Pipe Dream" and "The Cage", and recorded at Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles, the album again made No. 1 on the UK chart, generally received widespread critical acclaim, with the band again taking Best British Band at the annual BRIT Awards. It also received Top of the Pops Album of the Year. The album also had an impact across the Atlantic, the popularity in the US of the single "Coming Around", a non-album track with Byrdsesque harmonies and 12-string guitar, enhancing this. Travis again followed the release of The Invisible Band with an extensive world tour.
Primrose's accident and change in direction (2002–2006) [ edit ]
Travis performing live at an HMV store in Toronto, 2003
In 2002, however, things came to a halt for Travis, with the band almost calling it quits, after drummer Neil Primrose went head-first into a shallow swimming pool while on tour in France, just after a concert at Eurockéennes festival. Breaking his neck, he almost died due to spinal damage. If not for his road crew, he also would have drowned.[15] Despite the severity of the accident, Primrose has since made a full recovery.
With Primrose having recovered, Travis regrouped and re-evaluated. Moving into a cottage in Crear, Argyll and Bute, they set up a small studio, and over two weeks, came up with nine new songs that would form the basis of their fourth studio album, 2003's 12 Memories. Produced by Travis themselves, Tchad Blake, and Steve Orchard, the album marked a move into more organic, moody and political territory for the band. Although this seems to have alienated some fans, the album generally received very positive reviews (for example, "Then, of course, there's Travis and their album 12 Memories [Epic]. You just have to sit there and listen to it all the way through, and it will take you on a real journey. It's like an old album. It's like the Beatles' Revolver [1966]. Fran Healy's voice and lyrics are mesmerizing and beautiful"—Elton John), singles such as "Re-Offender" did very well on the UK chart, and the album itself reached No. 3. Yet it also saw them lose ground in the U.S., where Coldplay had usurped Travis during their 2002 absence. Much later, Fran Healy spoke about the album as a whole being about him working through his own clinical depression, and the 12 memories being 12 reasons for him reaching his depressed state. At the time this wasn't mentioned, but the revelation that Healy was depressed ties in with the band's decision to take longer writing and releasing their next work.
In 2004, Travis embarked on a highly successful tour of Canada, the US, and Europe (supported by Keane in the UK), and on November 2004, the band released a successful compilation of their singles, Singles, as well as the new tracks, "Walking in the Sun" and "The Distance" (written by Dougie Payne). This was followed by a series of small, intimate gigs at UK venues such as Liverpool's Cavern Club, London's Mean Fiddler, and Glasgow's Barrowlands. While on tour, the band also made a series of impromptu acoustic "busks", raising money for the charity The Big Issue. In addition to other performances, they also headlined the 2005 Isle of Wight Festival and T in the Park.
On 2 July 2005, Travis performed at Live 8's London concert, and four days later, at the Edinburgh 50,000 – The Final Push concert. Travis also participated in Band Aid 20's re-recording of "Do They Know It's Christmas?"—Healy and friend Nigel Godrich playing leading roles in its organisation. Healy is a part of the Make Poverty History movement, having recently made two trips to Sudan with the Save the Children organisation. On 13 July 2006, the members of Travis stuck a giant post-it sticker on the front door of the Downing Street home of British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. It read: "Tony Blair—Some steps forward, much to do at the G8, make poverty history."
Artistic re-evaluation (2007–2009) [ edit ]
Travis performing live on stage at the SECC, 2007
Travis released a fifth studio album, The Boy with No Name, on 7 May 2007. Nigel Godrich was the album's executive producer, while Mike Hedges and Brian Eno were also involved. The album is named after Healy's son, Clay, whom Healy and his partner Nora were unable to name until four weeks after his birth. Healy has described the process of making the album as "like coming out of the forest",[16] and that the band is now "in a good place", contrasting with the dark mood surrounding 12 Memories. Travis played at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival on 28 April 2007. At the Virgin Megastore tent in the festival, The Boy With No Name was available to purchase over a week early. Reviews of the album were mixed. The album's first single, "Closer", was released on 23 April 2007 and peaked at No. 10 in the UK Singles Chart. The music video for the single features a cameo role from actor and friend of the band, Ben Stiller. Stiller plays the role of a supermarket manager. The follow-up singles to "Closer" were "Selfish Jean" and "My Eyes".
For the promotional tour for the album (which started just before its release), Travis included a new touring pianist, Claes Björklund from Sweden. Björklund's first appearance with the band was when they played at the Oxford Brookes Union on 19 March 2007, prior to the album's release. The band dedicated their performance at the Vic Theater in Chicago to their producer Nigel Godrich. The album's tour lasted until December 2007 ending in a home-coming gig in Glasgow. The band visited for the first time places including Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile (playing as part of a festival co-headlined with The Killers and Starsailor) during this tour.
Following a short UK tour, where the band tested some new material, Travis recorded their sixth album in two weeks in February/March 2008, having been inspired by the speed and simplicity of their recent recording session with Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick while participating in a BBC programme celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.[17] It was announced around this time that the band and long term record label Independiente had split amicably.
In early June 2008, a vinyl EP of the song "J. Smith" was announced online as the first release from Ode to J. Smith for 30 June.[18] It was an EP limited to 1000 copies and not an 'official' single, instead more of a taster of the album for fans.
Fran Healy said, "The album is called Ode to J. Smith partly giving a heads up to the key song and partly because all the songs are written about nameless characters or to nameless characters." He has also described the album as a novel with 12 chapters, with each chapter being a song. In live shows promoting the album in spring 2009, Healy said the song Friends was written from the perspective of the girlfriend of the book's protagonist (J.Smith), about friends who are only there to ask for favours. The album would be released through their own record label Red Telephone Box, with the lead single "Something Anything" being released on 15 September.[19] Two weeks later on 29 September, Ode to J. Smith was released.[20] The band also headlined a 12-gig UK tour to coincide with the releases between 22 September and 8 October. Early reviews were very positive, with some calling it Travis' best record ever.[21] [22] The second single released from Ode To J. Smith was "Song to Self", on 5 January 2009. In the December 2008 issue of Q Magazine, Ode To J Smith appeared at number 28 on a list of the Readers' Best Albums Of 2008.
Hiatus, return and Where You Stand (2010–2013) [ edit ]
Three members of Travis, with Healy in the centre, performing in Singapore, 2014
A live acoustic album featuring Healy and Dunlop was released on 19 January 2010.[23]
In 2011 Travis returned to live performances. They played at the Maxidrom Festival in Moscow, in May; at G! festival, Faroe Island and the Rock’n Coke Festival in Istanbul, Turkey in July. On 31 October, Fran Healy performed a concert in Berlin along with Keane's Tim Rice-Oxley. They performed several Keane songs. Travis recorded some songs for their next album at the end of September 2011 and they continued writing new songs on February 2012 with Keane. Fran Healy confirmed on his Twitter account that the new Travis album will be released in the first half of 2013. Travis played together on 4 May 2012 at the Sandance Festival in Dubai. They also played at the Porto Student Festival in Portugal on 9 May. The band performed in the Norwegian Festival on July 2012 and Belladrum Festival on August 2012.
A pre single teaser track called "Another Guy" from the band's forthcoming seventh album was released as a free download from the band's official website on 20 March 2013.[24] On 25 April 2013, they revealed that the new album Where You Stand would be released on 19 August 2013 via Kobalt Label Services, and that the first eponymous single "Where You Stand" was released on 30 April.
Everything at Once and outstanding music contribution (2013–present) [ edit ]
A post from Travis on their Instagram page confirmed that recording had commenced on the band's eighth album at Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin in January 2015.[25] On 25 November 2015, Travis shared a free download single 'Everything at Once' and announced two UK live shows in January 2016.[26] A new album, also titled Everything at Once, was released on 29 April 2016.
In 2016 at the 18th annual Scottish Music Awards, Travis were presented with the award for their outstanding contribution to music.[12]
Collaborations and solo work [ edit ]
The band have also played with a number of other artists, including Paul McCartney, Graham Nash, Noel Gallagher, and Jason Falkner. Travis also guest starred on Feeder's "Tumble and Fall", performing backing vocals at the end of the song. This was because at the time that Feeder were recording their album Pushing the Senses, Travis were in the next studio and they ended up recording together.
An adaptation of the Oasis song "Half the World Away", as performed by Healy, was used as the intro music for a sketch in The Adam and Joe Show entitled "The Imperial Family", which itself was a parody of The Royle Family (to which the Oasis song lends itself as the theme music).
In June 2007, Travis participated in BBC Radio 2's project to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. All the album's tracks were re-recorded by contemporary artists, supervised by the original engineer, Geoff Emerick, using the same 4-track studio equipment. Travis contributed a rendition of "Lovely Rita". The band wanted to be as faithful to the original as possible, even to the extent of recording the guitars in the stairwell of Abbey Road Studios in order to recreate the acoustics.[27]
In 2010, Travis contributed a live version of their song "Before You Were Young" to the Enough Project and Downtown Records' Raise Hope for Congo compilation. Proceeds from the compilation fund efforts to make the protection and empowerment of Congo’s women a priority, as well as inspire individuals around the world to raise their voice for peace in Congo.
Healy released his first solo album entitled Wreckorder in October 2010. Recorded in Berlin, New York and Vermont, and produced by Emery Dobyns (Patti Smith, Noah and the Whale) the album features Paul McCartney, Neko Case and Noah and the Whale's Tom Hobden.[28][29]
Band members [ edit ]
Former members
Geoff Martyn – keyboards (1990–1996)
Chris Martyn – bass guitar (1990–1996)
Simon Jarvis – drums, perussion (1990)
Catherine Maxwell – lead vocals (1990– 1991)
Discography [ edit ]
Studio albums
Compilation albums
List of awards and nominations received by Travis [ edit ]
Brit Awards
The Brit Awards are the British Phonographic Industry's annual pop music awards.
Q Awards
The Q Awards are the United Kingdom's annual music awards run by the music magazine Q.
Year Nominee / work Award Result 1999 Travis Best New Act Nominated The Man Who Best Album Nominated "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?" Best Single Won 2000 Travis Best Act in the World Today Won Best Live Act Nominated "Coming Around" Best Video Nominated 2001 Travis Best Act in the World Today Nominated The Invisible Band Best Album Won#include <Wire.h> #include <RTClib.h
|
Server Team about Windows Nano, their future, much smaller server product. As a result, we started a new.NET project, which we codenamed 'Project K,' to target these new platforms. We changed the name, shape and experience of the product a few times along the way, at every turn trying to make it better and applicable to more scenarios and a broader base of developers. It's great to see this project finally available as.NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0."
The RTM release includes the following items:
As is the Microsoft tradition, a bunch of teams working on related products shipped updates to coincide with today's release:
What is.NET Core?
In this video, Richard Lander does a great job of providing an overview of.NET Core—what it is, how it works and why you should care about it:
Representing a significant change from the.NET Framework you've worked with previously,.NET Core was designed to address the challenges expressed by developers when building.NET applications. For a detailed summary of the historical context behind.NET Core, I would recommend reading this article by Immo Landwerth, "Introducing.NET Core."
The development platform includes workloads for targeting Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and ASP.NET Core—both are underpinned by a set of foundational libraries called CoreFX:
Currently,.NET Core 1.0 ships with the ASP.NET Core app model, which provides a new implementation of ASP.NET MVC. It does not include ASP.NET Web Forms or ASP.NET AJAX.
These libraries contain common building blocks used across applications, including classes for collections, file system access, console I/O, XML processing and more. Additionally,.NET Core includes the ability to build native executables that operate across Windows, OS X, and Linux.
What.NET Core Means to Our Customers
So, where does this leave us for customers wanting to use.NET Core 1.0 with Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC?
Recently, we added support for ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC2 in the latest release of Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC. However, the changes introduced in.NET Core 1.0 means that we'll have to update it to ensure compatibility. At the time of blog post, there are a few breaking changes that remain open for ASP.NET Core that we're following closely.
Our plan is to deliver Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC R2 2016 SP2 with official support for ASP.NET Core 1.0.0 RTM by mid-July 2016. We also plan to launch the latest internal build of UI for ASP.NET MVC this week, which you can test under ASP.NET Core. Feel free to share any feedback on the latest build.
As a reminder, there's a lot to look forward to in the next release. For example, we included a set of tag helpers for widgets like the NumericTextBox, Button, Window, DatePicker and TimePicker. Tag Helpers provide an HTML-like development experience for server-side code, all while preserving tooling features like IntelliSense.
Here's an example using the DateTimePicker:
< kendo-datetimepicker name = "dateTimePicker" value = "DateTime.Today" min = "DateTime.Today" on-change = "onChange" > </ kendo-datetimepicker >
By way of comparison, here's the same control using our HTML Helpers within a Razor view:
@(Html.Kendo().DateTimePicker().Name( "dateTimePicker" ).Value(DateTime.Today).Min(DateTime.Today).Events(e => { e.Change( "onChange" ); }) )
Both code snippets will create a date-time picker widget on the page:
Making Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC available as a service is done through the ConfigureServices() method of the startup class. This method is used to load all of the services you may wish to use through ASP.NET Core via dependency injection (DI):
public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services) { services.AddMvc(); services.AddKendo(); }
The final step is to register the Tag Helpers for Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC via _ViewImports.cshtml:
@ using HelloAspNetCore @addTagHelper *, Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.TagHelpers @addTagHelper *, Kendo.Mvc
We have detailed instructions on how to use these Tag Helpers in our documentation.
Wrapping Up
It's an incredibly exciting time to be a.NET developer. The release of.NET Core 1.0 brings with it a whole bunch of changes that will transform the way we build cross-platform apps for web, mobile and desktop.
Starting now, you can build full production applications that target.NET Core 1.0, ASP.NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework Core 1.0. It is our commitment to have an update out by mid-July so you can also start using it. In the meantime, I'd encourage you to check out a few of the following resources, which will help you get ready to use.NET Core 1.0:CLEVELAND, Ohio – Police confiscated smoke grenades, semi-automatic rifles, a sword, a bulletproof vest and more than 2,500 rounds of ammunition from the home of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Lance Mason's home, according to a police report.
Mason, 46, entered no plea Monday during his initial appearance in Shaker Heights Municipal Court. He's charged with felonious assault, a second-degree felony. He's accused of punching his wife in the face several times along with biting and choking her.
A member of Mason's family called Cleveland police and said she was afraid he was going to use weapons inside his home near the Shaker Heights border to commit suicide, the report said.
Police arrived and Mason surrendered. Once inside a police car, he admitted to having weapons in his bedroom and the attic of his home.
Officers searched the home and, according to the report, found:
About 2,300 live rounds of various calibers
Nearly 500 shotgun slugs
A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun
A Winchester shotgun
A 50-shell shotgun belt
A FNH P90 semi-automatic rifle still in the box
A JLD Enterprises Inc. PTR-91 semi-automatic rifle with a scope
A Smith & Wesson handgun
A Springfield Armory.40 caliber-handgun
A sword
Four canisters of smoke grenades
A KDH bulletproof vest
A Jaguar knife
The weapons were confiscated for "safe-keeping," according to the report.The Boston lockdown and the Bill of Rights
By Tom Carter
25 April 2013
With the implementation of a state of military siege against the population of Boston last week, the American ruling class has crossed a historical, legal and political Rubicon. The die is cast and the sun is setting on the democratic forms of rule that have existed in the United States for the past two centuries.
What history will remember as most significant about the events in Boston will not be the bombing near the marathon’s finish line or the perpetrators or their motives. What will be remembered instead will be the unprecedented military lockdown of an entire major American city, with military vehicles in the streets and heavily armed soldiers going house to house—tromping through living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens, staring down their assault rifles at terrified, barefoot families in their pajamas.
The Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791 in the wake of the American Revolution, has provided the basic framework for bourgeois democracy as it has developed in the United States over the past 200 years. A simple comparison of the words of the Bill of Rights with the recent events in Boston—the cradle of the American Revolution—underscores the advanced stage of the historical process that is shattering centuries-old democratic forms of rule.
SWAT team doing house-to-house searches in the Boston area [Photo: rilymoskal7]
The fourth of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights reads as follows: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
The Fourth Amendment prohibits the entry of homes without a warrant, and further instructs that warrants shall be issued only upon a showing of “probable cause” to believe that criminal activity is involved.
The requirement that warrants be specific and “particularly” describe the contemplated search or seizure reflects the American revolutionaries’ resentment towards the practice of the colonial authorities of issuing “general warrants,” or blank checks for the arbitrary invasion of homes, arrest of their inhabitants, and confiscation of their property. In other words, the Fourth Amendment requires that to obtain a warrant to search a house, specific criminal activity has to be connected with that specific house.
The Fourth Amendment echoes the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, which explicitly forbade the use of general warrants: “That general warrants, whereby any officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offense is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive and ought not to be granted.”
The Fourth Amendment warrant requirement, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson famously declared in 1948, ranks among the “fundamental distinctions between our form of government, where officers are under the law, and the police-state where they are the law.”
It goes without saying that the military-police “house-to-house” searches in Boston last week were not conducted pursuant to any warrant at all, general or otherwise.
Two justifications for the warrantless house-to-house searches have been offered in the media. The first is that the house-to-house searches were “consensual,” such that no warrant was required. In other words, according to this theory, when families were confronted with dozens of heavily-armed commandos banging on their doors in the middle of the night, they were entirely free to say, “No, you can’t come in.”
The second justification offered in the media is that the house-to-house searches were justified by “exigent circumstances.” This doctrine is yet another example of a recent judge-made exception that threatens to swallow the rule.
The “exigent circumstances” exception originally allowed for the warrantless entry of houses in true emergencies—to put out fires, provide medical attention, or rescue occupants from harm’s way. Over the past three decades, and in particular under doctrines advanced by the Bush and Obama administrations in the course of the “war on terror,” this exception—which has no basis in the text of the Fourth Amendment—has been massively expanded.
The “exigent circumstances” exception more and more resembles the “state of exception” doctrine propounded by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, pursuant to which a “national emergency” may override all existing democratic legal protections.
The Fourth Amendment was not the only amendment in the Bill of Rights trampled in the course of the Boston lockdown.
The Fifth Amendment provides that a person shall not be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” In other words, a person cannot be bullied into making a confession or otherwise incriminating himself. This is known as “the right to remain silent.” The Sixth Amendment provides that a person has a right to an attorney. The Obama administration flatly announced that both of these would not be respected in the case of alleged bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev so that he could be “extensively” interrogated. (See “Obama administration denies Miranda rights to marathon bombing suspect”)
Among other rights, the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” The Fifth Amendment also provides that a person cannot be deprived of “liberty… without due process of law.”
These rights were nowhere to be seen when Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick ordered nearly one million people to “shelter in place.” Businesses, schools and courthouses were shut down. Public transportation was halted, and roads were closed in and out of Watertown.
The Third Amendment prohibits the quartering of troops in homes, further evidencing the hostility of the American revolutionaries towards arbitrary military intrusions into homes. According to ancient doctrines inherited from English law, it has always been a maxim of American law that “a man’s home is his castle,” such that a citizen is entitled to use force—even lethal force—to resist unlawful or warrantless attempts to enter.
Contrast these historic doctrines, once considered fundamental to the American form of government, with the images that surfaced from Boston last week. SWAT teams with assault rifles and covered in high-tech military equipment storm from armored cars into homes and hold families at gunpoint. There is not even the pretense of legality.
An ABC news correspondent covering the house-to-house searches was forced onto the ground and searched. “I was walking with my camera trying to get a better sense of where the SWAT teams were all congregating when all of a sudden, three officers… with their guns drawn, forced me to the ground and told me that they were suspicious of my backpack and thought I might be the suspect,” Megan Chuchmach explained. “Time stood still.”
While the Bill of Rights has not been abrogated formally, it is in many respects no longer in effect. It survives as a “Bill of Suggestions,” to be honored when the ruling establishment approves of its invocation. When the Obama administration announced that, after denying bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights, ordinary criminal procedure would be followed in the prosecution going forward, it was presented as the government’s option whether or not to do so. The government, we are led to assume, could have decided instead try him before a military commission, or to lock him up without a trial at all as an “enemy combatant.”
The abrogation in practice of the Bill of Rights is driven first and foremost by the crisis of the world capitalist system and the historic levels of social inequality it has generated. Democracy cannot long endure in a society in which the great mass of the population struggles to stay afloat, and a tiny number of billionaires gorge themselves on greater and greater portions of society’s wealth.
The ruling class, beset with fears of social upheavals arising from the further disintegration of the US and world economy, turns to methods of mass repression to preserve its power and wealth.
Discussing the Boston lockdown at a press conference on Monday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg quipped: “[W]e live in a complex world where you’re going to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution I think have to change.”
With these clumsy and condescending words, Bloomberg, worth $27 billion, gave expression to the real attitudes that predominate within the narrow and ultra-rich aristocracy that rules America. Democracy was fine “back in the olden days,” but going forward this will need to change.
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American democracy in shambles
[22 April 2013]Tearful victims came face to face with a man nicknamed the "'Hello Kitty' rapist" at his sentencing hearing Friday.Edgar Collazo is heading to prison for life, but his lawyers had asked for a more lenient sentence. They said they would not dispute the facts which convicted Collazo in July, but they hoped that some day he could come home to his family. The judge did not agree.Collazo was convicted in large part based on DNA evidence. But on Friday, it was emotional evidence the state presented as it argued for a life sentence. Victims read letters about the lasting damage after they said Collazo broke into apartments and attacked women.One woman who said Collazo attacked her -- in a case where he was never charged -- testified about how only enlisting in the military got her to this point."I wanted to be an engineer, I wanted to be a model, (and) do so many things differently than what I'm doing now. I depend on sleeping pills," she said.Collazo's attorney tried to remind the court that his client has his own family."We want to focus on him as a father, a father of two young daughters," said attorney Jamie Halscott. "We're here simply to ask for the court's mercy, to allow Mr. Collazo at some point to come back to his family."The judge instead went with the sentence the state had requested."Mr. Collazo will be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole," said Judge Robert Egan.Collazo was nicknamed the "'Hello Kitty' rapist" because investigators identified him through a tattoo of the cartoon character on his arm.14277264
Tearful victims came face to face with a man nicknamed the "'Hello Kitty' rapist" at his sentencing hearing Friday.
Edgar Collazo is heading to prison for life, but his lawyers had asked for a more lenient sentence. They said they would not dispute the facts which convicted Collazo in July, but they hoped that some day he could come home to his family. The judge did not agree.
Advertisement Related Content Jury finds accused 'Hello Kitty' rapist guilty on all counts
Collazo was convicted in large part based on DNA evidence. But on Friday, it was emotional evidence the state presented as it argued for a life sentence. Victims read letters about the lasting damage after they said Collazo broke into apartments and attacked women.
One woman who said Collazo attacked her -- in a case where he was never charged -- testified about how only enlisting in the military got her to this point.
"I wanted to be an engineer, I wanted to be a model, (and) do so many things differently than what I'm doing now. I depend on sleeping pills," she said.
Collazo's attorney tried to remind the court that his client has his own family.
"We want to focus on him as a father, a father of two young daughters," said attorney Jamie Halscott. "We're here simply to ask for the court's mercy, to allow Mr. Collazo at some point to come back to his family."
The judge instead went with the sentence the state had requested.
"Mr. Collazo will be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole," said Judge Robert Egan.
Collazo was nicknamed the "'Hello Kitty' rapist" because investigators identified him through a tattoo of the cartoon character on his arm.
AlertMeThe bill failed, but with the recession prompting bulging budget deficits, some legislators in California and Massachusetts have gone further, suggesting that the drug could be legalized and taxed, a concept that has intrigued even such ideologically opposed pundits as Glenn Beck of Fox News and Jack Cafferty of CNN.
“Look, I’m a libertarian,” Mr. Beck said on his Feb. 26 program. “You want to legalize marijuana, you want to legalize drugs — that’s fine.”
All of which has longtime proponents of the drug feeling oddly optimistic and even overexposed.
“We’ve been on national cable news more in the first three months than we typically are in an entire year,” said Bruce Mirken, the director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, a reform group based in Washington. “And any time you’ve got Glenn Beck and Barney Frank agreeing on something, it’s either a sign that change is impending or that the end times are here.”
Beneficiaries of the moment include Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which advocates legalization, and other groups like it. Norml says that its Web traffic and donations (sometimes in $4.20 increments) have surged, and that it will begin a television advertising campaign on Monday, which concludes with a plea, and an homage, to President Obama.
“Legalization,” the advertisement says, “yes we can!”
That seems unlikely anytime soon. In a visit last week to Mexico, where drug violence has claimed thousands of lives and threatened to spill across the border, Mr. Obama said the United States must work to curb demand for drugs.
Photo
Still, pro-marijuana groups have applauded recent remarks by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who suggested that federal law enforcement resources would not be used to pursue legitimate medical marijuana users and outlets in California and a dozen other states that allow medical use of the drug. Court battles are also percolating. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard arguments last Tuesday in San Francisco in a 2007 lawsuit challenging the government’s official skepticism about medical uses of the drug.
But Allen F. St. Pierre, the executive director of Norml, said he had cautioned supporters that any legal changes that might occur would probably be incremental.
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“The balancing act this year is trying to get our most active, most vocal supporters to be more realistic in their expectations in what the Obama administration is going to do,” Mr. St. Pierre said.
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For fans of the drug, perhaps the biggest indicator of changing attitudes is how widespread the observance of April 20 has become, including its use in marketing campaigns for stoner-movie openings (like last year’s “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay”) and as a peg for marijuana-related television programming (like the G4 network’s prime-time double bill Monday of “Super High Me” and “Half Baked”).
Events tied to April 20 have “reached the tipping point in the last few years after being a completely underground phenomenon for a long time,” said Steven Hager, the creative director and former editor of High Times. “And I think that’s symptomatic of the fact that people’s perception of marijuana is reaching a tipping point.”
Mr. Hager said the significance of April 20 dates to a ritual begun in the early 1970s in which a group of Northern California teenagers smoked marijuana every day at 4:20 p.m. Word of the ritual spread and expanded to a yearly event in various places. Soon, marijuana aficionados were using “420” as a code for smoking and using it as a sign-off on fliers for concerts where the drug would be plentiful.
In recent years, the April 20 events have become so widespread that several colleges have urged students to just say no. At the University of Colorado, Boulder, where thousands of students regularly use the day to light up in the quad, administrators sent an e-mail message this month pleading with students not to “participate in unlawful activity that debases the reputation of your university and degree.”
A similar warning was sent to students at the University of California, Santa Cruz — home of the Grateful Dead archives — which banned overnight guests at residence halls leading up to April 20.
None of which, of course, is expected to discourage the dozens of parties — large and small — planned for Monday, including the top-secret crowning of Ms. High Times.
In San Francisco, meanwhile, where a city supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi, suggested last week that the city should consider getting into the medical marijuana business as a provider, big crowds are expected to turn out at places like Hippie Hill, a drum-happy glade in Golden Gate Park.
A cloud of pungent smoke is also expected to be thick at concerts like one planned at the Fillmore rock club, where the outspoken pro-marijuana hip-hop group Cypress Hill is expected to take the stage at 4:20 p.m.
“You can see twice the amount of smoke as you do at a regular show,” said B-Real, a rapper in the group. “And it’s a great fragrance.”Whether it’s for senior suicides, toddler suicides or the worst photoshop in human history, Anhui province has a habit of getting into the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
This Tuesday, however, a 37-year-old teacher, surnamed Zhu, in Tianchang proved that Anhui has its heroes too. When a student of his at Jinji Middle School suddenly went missing and left a note for him saying she was giving up on school and leaving home, Zhu went searching high and low for her. He finally found her at a classmate’s home that night and tried to console her, but she suddenly made a dash for the window. Zhu ran to grab her but was too late: by the he got a hold of her the two were already plunging three stories down to the ground.
As they fell, Zhu held onto his student tightly and turned himself into “meat cushion” for her, breaking her fall and saving her life. Unfortunately, however, he died saving his troubled student. We also wish Anhui cops had been as brave as Teacher Zhu.
By Ryan Kilpatrick
[Image via hk.apple.nextmedia.com]
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Many groups representing communities of color say they are concerned about what Donald Trump’s presidency will mean for them. While some are protesting in the streets, others are working behind the scenes to bring about change at the local level.
Jo Ann Hardesty is the president of the Portland chapter of the NAACP.
“In this last week, hate crimes have gone up against Muslims and people of color all across the country because people feel that it’s OK now because Donald Trump is going to make America white again,” Hardesty said on OPB’s “Think Out Loud.”
Hardesty is not alone in her concerns. Juan Rogel launched a new nonprofit organization in October called Milenio. He says the group’s goal is to galvanize young Latinos.
One of the biggest issues for Latino millennials is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. The program provides temporary relief from deportation and a two-year work permit for minors whose parents brought them to the U.S. illegally.
“DACA is an executive order from President Obama. I think Donald Trump is going to try to revoke or remove this order and it’s when we are going to see a lot of millennials, a lot of young Latinos, fighting and they will be getting politically activated and that’s our mission,” Rogel said.
Milenio is just one of many new organizations that have formed in response to Donald Trump. Two days after the election, several activists announced they were forming a new coalition called Portland’s Resistance. Black Lives Matter, Don’t Shoot PDX and Portland Tenants United are just some of the groups working together under this new heading. Gregory McKelvey is one of the organizers of Portland’s Resistance. He told OPB’s “Think Out Loud” about the motivation behind the group.
Bradley W. Parks/OPB
“Well, we have to start here locally and our whole movement is about building a beacon of light here in what’s going to be a dark Donald Trump presidency,” McKelvey said.
Portland’s Resistance has been involved in several protests since the election. While many of the marchers were peaceful, there was some violence and vandalism during the protests, leading to dozens of arrests over the weekend. On Saturday, Portland Mayor Charlie Hales urged activists not to continue protesting.
“We want people who want to protest the election to find other ways and means to express their views, put their energy, and make the change they want, and going to the streets for another night isn’t going to keep Donald Trump from taking office and isn’t going to change anything,” Hales said.
Latino activists face an additional issue when choosing whether to protest publicly. If they are undocumented, they are especially vulnerable and could face deportation if arrested. Francisco Lopez is the political director of “Voz Hispana cambio Comunitario,” an organization co-founded by documented and undocumented Latinos. He says people have to come out of the shadows.
“The worst thing that we can do is hide, because that is where they find you,” Lopez said. “You need to get organized, be public, and challenge that, confront this. You know, we can have fear but not to be fearful, because if we are fearful, then we already lost.”
Lopez says his group is joining other like-minded organizations, and that they intend to go beyond post-election protests, focusing on change at the local and state level.
“On Feb. 1, Black Lives Matter, Don’t Shoot PDX, Voz Hispana and Milenio will go to the State Capitol, we will occupy the Oregon State Capitol and say, we want driver license restoration, we want judicial reform, we want sentencing guidelines to be revised,” he said.A Sacramento City firefighter was arrested Saturday on charges of burglary and elder abuse.Citrus Heights police responded to 6525 Sunrise Blvd., in the Sunrise Vista mobile home park in response to a person who said he was a firefighter and needed to perform smoke and carbon monoxide detector inspections inside their home.Watch report: Firefighter accused of stealing from homesAuthorities later determined the person had allegedly stolen items from at least two homes.On Saturday, additional victims came forward with information that led investigators to identify and arrest 30-year-old Craig White in connection with the burglaries.White is a firefighter and paramedic with the Sacramento City Fire Department.He was booked into the Sacramento County Jail and charged with five counts of burglary and three counts of elder abuse.Citrus Heights police detectives continue to investigate the burglaries.“We want to remind the public to be mindful of public safety impersonators,” fire officials said in a press release. “If there is any question as to the true identity of any public safety officer, citizens are encouraged to call the police. Remember, public safety officials will arrive in official government vehicles and be clearly marked in uniforms and identification.”The Sacramento City Fire Department said White is currently on paid administrative leave.
A Sacramento City firefighter was arrested Saturday on charges of burglary and elder abuse.
Citrus Heights police responded to 6525 Sunrise Blvd., in the Sunrise Vista mobile home park in response to a person who said he was a firefighter and needed to perform smoke and carbon monoxide detector inspections inside their home.
Advertisement Related Content Cops: Arrested firefighter was looking for prescription meds
Watch report: Firefighter accused of stealing from homes
Authorities later determined the person had allegedly stolen items from at least two homes.
On Saturday, additional victims came forward with information that led investigators to identify and arrest 30-year-old Craig White in connection with the burglaries.
White is a firefighter and paramedic with the Sacramento City Fire Department.
He was booked into the Sacramento County Jail and charged with five counts of burglary and three counts of elder abuse.
Citrus Heights police detectives continue to investigate the burglaries.
“We want to remind the public to be mindful of public safety impersonators,” fire officials said in a press release. “If there is any question as to the true identity of any public safety officer, citizens are encouraged to call the police. Remember, public safety officials will arrive in official government vehicles and be clearly marked in uniforms and identification.”
The Sacramento City Fire Department said White is currently on paid administrative leave.
AlertMeWe have put together a recap of some of the most memorable images and moments of 2016 from over 20 events as captured by our photographers.
Without a doubt 2016 has been the busiest in CS:GO history, and with plenty of events to show for it, we have put together a compendium of some of the stories that transpired throughout the year with some slices of life added in for airiness.
We have seen teams go up and down the ladder. Starting with fnatic's dominance at the beginning of the year all the way to the parity era at the end, and with SK's reign sandwiched in between just to name a few, many plots and subplots have been sown and have flourished within and throughout events on a weekly basis. With no sign of it slowing down in 2017, here's something to get us all ready for the new year.
(January 13th, SL i-League StarSeries XIV Finals, Lucas Aznar Miles)
FalleN and fox hug after their teams, Luminosity and G2, played their opening match at the first international event of the year, the SL i-League StarSeries XIV finals, which the Brazilian side took 2-0.
(January 16th, SL i-League StarSeries XIV Finals, Lucas Aznar Miles)
olofmeister looks at the Minsk Arena crowd through the booth before fnatic's semifinal match against Luminosity, which the Swedish team won in three maps.
(January 16th, SL i-League StarSeries XIV Finals, Lucas Aznar Miles)
TACO walks into Minsk Arena, where his team made a run to the semifinals before falling to the dominant force of the time, fnatic. After their miracle run at DreamHack Winter in late 2015 where they reached the final, this second top 4 finish started to establish Luminosity as a team to be reckoned with.
(January 17th, SL i-League StarSeries XIV Finals, Lucas Aznar Miles)
dennis raises the SL i-League StarSeries XIV trophy in Minsk, one of six consecutive trophies this lineup won between late 2015 and early 2016.
(January 23rd, DreamHack ZOWIE Open Leipzig 2016, Radosław Makuch)
DreamHack Leipzig was the first event for the Astralis organization. The Danish team had recently parted ways with TSM and decided to create a player owned organization backed by venture capital, the first of its kind in CS.
(January 29th, PGL Regional Minor Championship Europe, Lucas Aznar Miles)
Sadokist and HenryG casted the first EU Minor at the PGL studios in Bucharest. The Romanian capital has been a second home to the duo, where the casters gained notoriety working together through late 2015 and early 2016.
(January 30th, PGL Regional Minor Championship Europe, Lucas Aznar Miles)
Berg's keyboard smashed after his team, DenDD, lost 38-41 to PixelFire in the longest LAN match in CS:GO history. DenDD gave up 18 match points before being defeated in a map that was played out over three hours.
(January 29th, PGL Regional Minor Championship Europe, Lucas Aznar Miles)
REZ, playing for Cringe Gods during the first EU Minor, shakes hands with bodyy, who played in LDLC at the time before being transferred to G2. CG earned the tag of poster children for Valve's new Minor system as the Nordic team came out of nowhere to qualify for the tournament and have, after several changes and under the banner of Epsilon, become a solid contestant at the Minor level.
(January 31st, PGL Regional Minor Championship Europe, Lucas Aznar Miles)
HellRaisers won the first European Minor, earning them a spot to their first Main Qualifier—of the three they played in 2016—at the MLG Arena ahead of the MLG Columbus Major.
(February 6th, Game Show Global eSports Cup 2016 Finals, Josip Brtan)
dignitas started to show they had potential to play against top opposition at the beginning of the year after making it to their first final at the Global eSports Cup in Vilnius, despite eventually losing to EnVyUs.
(February 19th, ESL Barcelona CS:GO Invitational, Lucas Aznar Miles)
The ESL Barcelona Expo gave two Spanish teams an opportunity to play against the best in the world. This opportunity changed two local players' lives as Mixwell and loWel, both playing for gBots at the time, stood out enough to be noticed and get signed by top-flight teams. Read more about that team and its players at the time, here.
(February 27th, MLG Columbus 2016 Main Qualifier, Lucas Aznar Miles)
hooch celebrates as he qualifies for his first Major, MLG Columbus, which was also the first Major Gambit qualified for. The CIS team then went on to become Legends in their second Major, ESL One Cologne.
(February 27th, MLG Columbus 2016 Main Qualifier, Lucas Aznar Miles)
STYKO laments his team's disqualification from the MLG Columbus Main Qualifier after HellRaisers gave up a 12-6 lead in the decider map of a best-of-three against Liquid.
(March 4th, IEM Katowice 2016, Michał Paradowski)
The ex-Golden Five player and current Kinguin coach, Loord, was given the honor of walking out the trophy at IEM Katowice during the first day of play at the Spodek Arena.
(March 5th, IEM Katowice 2016, Radosław Makuch)
olofmeister, considered the best player in the world at the time, high fives the crowd after winning IEM Katowice for the second year in a row. This was the last event this fnatic lineup won together.
(March 17th, Counter Pit League Season 2 Finals, Josip Brtan)
Counter Pit League Season 2 was DEVIL's first event with EnVyUs. The French side went out in quarterfinals having played a single best-of-three, which they lost to NRG.
(March 29th, MLG Columbus 2016, Lucas Aznar Miles)
THREAT had to stand-in for Pyth at MLG Columbus due to the Swedish player having been denied entry to the United States of America. NiP were able to hold on to their Legend status despite playing with their coach as a fifth.
(March 30th, MLG Columbus 2016, Lucas Aznar Miles)
NiKo's stellar performances got him much praise at the beginning of the year, but despite the Bosnian player's best efforts mousesports repeatedly failed to make their mark amongst the top of the top.
(March 30th, MLG Columbus 2016, Lucas Aznar Miles)
Hiko got s1mple on board to go live in the USA and play for Liquid after the two players hit it off when Hiko stood-in for FlipSid3 at ESWC 2015. Together, they made it to the semifinals of the first Major they played side-by-side, MLG Columbus.
(March 30th, MLG Columbus 2016, Lucas Aznar Miles)
MLG Columbus was Ex6TenZ's last event at the helm of G2. The Belgian leader, who went on to play in LDLC, was replaced by the 19-year-old prospect bodyy.
coldzera's father celebrating Luminosity's quarterfinal win over Virtus.pro
(April 2nd, MLG Columbus 2016, Lucas Aznar Miles)
coldzera's father cheers at the Nationwide Arena after LG beat Virtus.pro in the quarterfinals.
(April 3rd, MLG Columbus 2016, Lucas Aznar Miles)
fer kisses the MLG Columbus Major trophy at the Nationwide Arena where the Brazilian squad, then playing under the Luminosity banner, won an international event for the first time.
bodyy's unconventional mouse grip
(April 12th, DreamHack Masters Malmö 2016, Lucas Aznar Miles)
bodyy's mouse grip
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thousand and making almost one thousand three-pointers in his career.
Several NBA players have placed Pippen on their all-time starting lineups, some of which include Jason Kidd,[89] Michael Jordan,[90] and Karl Malone.[91]
Personal life
Pippen and his wife Larsa attending a Chicago Bulls game in December 2006
Although his given name is spelled Scotty on his birth certificate, Pippen usually goes by Scottie.[1] He stated that people usually shorten the name to Scott if it ends in y.[2]
Pippen has been married twice: to Karen McCollum (married 1988; divorced 1990) with whom he has a son, Antron Pippen (born 1987),[92] and to Larsa Younan (married 1997), with whom he has four children, Scotty Pippen Jr. (born 2001), Preston Pippen (born 2002), Justin Pippen (born 2007), and Sophia Pippen (born 2008). Larsa starred in the TV show The Real Housewives of Miami. Scotty Jr. is committed to play basketball at Vanderbilt University.[93] Sophia appeared on the first season of Dancing with the Stars: Juniors.[94] Pippen also has a daughter, Sierra Pippen (born 1995), with his former fiancée Yvette De Leon[95] and a daughter, Taylor Pippen (born 1994), with former girlfriend and model Sonya Roby.[96] Taylor's twin sister Tyler died nine days after birth.[97] Taylor played volleyball at Southern Illinois University.[98]
A 1997 article in Sports Illustrated named him one of the three biggest "skinflints" in the NBA, along with Kevin Garnett and Shawn Kemp, and noted that restaurant workers had given him the nickname "No Tippin' Pippen".[99]
Shortly after retiring, Pippen learned that a financial adviser, whom Pippen claimed had been recommended by his team, was under investigation for bank fraud. Pippen had invested over $20 million through the adviser, Robert Lunn. In March 2016, Lunn was sentenced to three years in prison on multiple fraud counts, including forging Pippen's signature on a $1.4 million loan that Lunn used to pay off personal debts.[100]
On July 11, 2013, Camran Shafighi filed a $4 million lawsuit against Pippen in Los Angeles Superior Court over an incident that occurred on June 23, 2013, at the Malibu restaurant Nobu. Shafighi said that he was physically attacked by Pippen after taking pictures of Pippen inside and outside the restaurant. Shafighi was then taken to a hospital.[101] On August 27, 2013, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office announced that charges would not be filed against Pippen.[102]
Pippen is a supporter of the Research for Child Cancer.
Pippen's nephew, Kavion Pippen, plays college basketball for Southern Illinois.[103]
In popular culture
Career statistics
NBA statistics
Legend GP Games played GS Games started MPG Minutes per game FG% Field goal percentage 3P% 3-point field goal percentage FT% Free throw percentage RPG Rebounds per game APG Assists per game SPG Steals per game BPG Blocks per game PPG Points per game Bold Career high
† Denotes seasons in which Pippen won an NBA championship Led the league
Regular season
Year Team GP GS MPG FG% 3P% FT% RPG APG SPG BPG PPG 1987–88 Chicago 79 0 20.9.463.174.576 3.8 2.1 1.2 0.7 7.9 1988–89 Chicago 73 56 33.1.476.273.668 6.1 3.5 1.9 0.8 14.4 1989–90 Chicago 82 82 38.4.489.250.675 6.7 5.4 2.6 1.2 16.5 1990–91† Chicago 82 82 36.8.520.309.706 7.3 6.2 2.4 1.1 17.8 1991–92† Chicago 82 82 38.6.506.200.760 7.7 7.0 1.9 1.1 21.0 1992–93† Chicago 81 81 38.6.473.237.663 7.7 6.3 2.1 0.9 18.6 1993–94 Chicago 72 72 38.3.491.320.660 8.7 5.6 2.9 0.8 22.0 1994–95 Chicago 79 79 38.2.480.345.716 8.1 5.2 2.9 1.1 21.4 1995–96† Chicago 77 77 36.7.463.374.679 6.4 5.9 1.7 0.7 19.4 1996–97† Chicago 82 82 37.7.474.368.701 6.5 5.7 1.9 0.6 20.2 1997–98† Chicago 44 44 37.5.447.318.777 5.2 5.8 1.8 1.0 19.1 1998–99 Houston 50 50 40.2.432.340.721 6.5 5.9 2.0 0.7 14.5 1999–00 Portland 82 82 33.5.451.327.717 6.3 5.0 1.4 0.5 12.5 2000–01 Portland 64 60 33.3.451.344.739 5.2 4.6 1.5 0.6 11.3 2001–02 Portland 62 60 32.2.411.305.774 5.2 5.9 1.6 0.6 10.6 2002–03 Portland 64 58 29.9.444.286.818 4.3 4.5 1.6 0.4 10.8 2003–04 Chicago 23 6 17.9.379.271.630 3.0 2.2 0.9 0.4 5.9 Career 1,178 1,053 34.9.473.326.704 6.4 5.2 2.0 0.8 16.1 All-Star 7 6 24.7.442.318.625 5.6 2.4 2.4 0.9 12.1
Playoffs
Year Team GP GS MPG FG% 3P% FT% RPG APG SPG BPG PPG 1988 Chicago 10 6 29.4.465.500.714 5.2 2.4 0.8 0.8 10.0 1989 Chicago 17 17 36.4.462.393.640 7.6 3.9 1.4 0.9 13.1 1990 Chicago 15 14 40.8.495.323.710 7.2 5.5 2.1 1.3 19.3 1991† Chicago 17 17 41.4.504.235.792 8.9 5.8 2.5 1.1 21.6 1992† Chicago 22 22 40.9.468.250.761 8.8 6.7 1.9 1.1 19.5 1993† Chicago 19 19 41.5.465.176.638 6.9 5.6 2.2 0.7 20.1 1994 Chicago 10 10 38.4.434.267.885 8.3 4.6 2.4 0.7 22.8 1995 Chicago 10 10 39.6.443.368.676 8.6 5.8 1.4 1.0 17.8 1996† Chicago 18 18 41.2.390.286.638 8.5 5.9 2.6 0.9 16.9 1997† Chicago 19 19 39.6.417.345.791 6.8 3.8 1.5 0.9 19.2 1998† Chicago 21 21 39.8.415.228.679 7.1 5.2 2.1 1.0 16.8 1999 Houston 4 4 43.0.329.273.808 11.8 5.5 1.8 0.8 18.3 2000 Portland 16 16 38.4.419.300.743 7.1 4.3 2.0 0.4 14.9 2001 Portland 3 3 39.0.421.176.667 5.7 2.3 2.7 0.7 13.7 2002 Portland 3 3 33.0.409.545.875 9.3 5.7 1.3 0.7 16.3 2003 Portland 4 1 18.8.409.333 1.000 2.8 3.3 0.0 0.0 5.8 Career 208 200 39.0.444.303.724 7.6 5.0 1.9 0.9 17.5
College statistics
Year Team GP GS MPG FG% 3P% FT% RPG APG SPG BPG PPG 1983–84 Central Arkansas 20.456.684 3.0 0.7 0.5 4.3 1984–85 Central Arkansas 19.564.676 9.2 1.6 1.5 18.5 1985–86 Central Arkansas 29.556.686 9.2 3.5 2.4 19.8 1986–87 Central Arkansas 25.592.575.719 10.0 4.3 4.2 23.6 Career 93.563.575.695 8.1 2.7 2.1 17.2
Career achievements
Career highs
Stat High Opponent Date Points 47 vs. Denver Nuggets February 18, 1997 Field goal percentage 16–17 (.941) vs. Charlotte Hornets February 23, 1991 Field goals made 19 vs. Denver Nuggets February 18, 1997 Field goal attempts (Playoffs) 35 (3 OT) vs. Phoenix Suns June 13, 1993 Free throws made, none missed 11–11 vs. Detroit Pistons March 31, 1998 Free throws made 13 at Los Angeles Clippers April 23, 1999 Free throw attempts 21 at Charlotte Hornets November 5, 1993 3-point field goals made (Playoffs) 7 at Utah Jazz June 6, 1997 3-point field goal attempts 13 at Toronto Raptors December 8, 1996 Rebounds 18 at New York Knicks March 31, 1992 Rebounds (Playoffs) 18 at Miami Heat May 1, 1996 Offensive rebounds (Playoffs) 9 vs. Los Angeles Lakers May 15, 1999 Defensive rebounds 16 (OT) vs. New York Knicks December 25, 1994 Assists 15 vs. Indiana Pacers November 30, 1990 Assists 15 vs. Washington Wizards March 16, 2002 Steals 9 vs. Atlanta Hawks March 8, 1994 Turnovers 12 (OT) at New Jersey Nets February 25, 1990 Turnovers 12 at Houston Rockets January 30, 1996 Minutes played (Playoffs) 56 (3 OT) vs. Phoenix Suns June 13, 1993
Achievements
21 career triple-doubles (17 regular season, 4 playoffs)
Led the league in steals (232) and steals per game (2.94) in 1994–95.
His 10 NBA All-Defensive honors and 8 NBA All-Defensive First Team honors are one shy of the NBA record.
Six-time NBA Champion
Member of the Olympic gold medal winning USA Men's National Basketball Teams in 1992 ("Dream Team I", Barcelona, Spain) and 1996 ("Dream Team III", Atlanta, USA)
Selected in 1996 as one of the "50 Greatest Players in NBA History"
Elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010. The 1992 Olympic Basketball "Dream Team", of which he was a member, was also elected to the Hall of Fame in 2010.
Pippen is one of two NBA players known to have recorded 5 steals and 5 blocks in a playoff game, which he did against the Detroit Pistons on May 19, 1991. Hakeem Olajuwon performed the feat twice.
NBA records
Set with Michael Jordan
Ninth pair of teammates in NBA history to score 40 or more points in the same game: Chicago Bulls (110) at Indiana Pacers (102), February 18, 1996
Pippen: 40 points, 10 rebounds, 2 assists, 5 steals in 44 minutes
Jordan: 44 points, 5 rebounds, 7 assists, 3 steals, 2 blocks in 42 minutes
One of at least two pairs of teammates in NBA history to record triple-doubles in the same game: Chicago Bulls (126) vs. Los Angeles Clippers (121), January 3, 1989 (OT)
Pippen: 15 points, 10 rebounds, 12 assists (and 2 steals) in 42 minutes
Jordan: 41 points, 10 rebounds, 11 assists (and 6 steals) in 47 minutes
Jason Kidd and Vince Carter achieved this feat as well on April 7, 2007
Playoffs
Steals, career: 395
Steals, quarter: 4, third quarter, vs. Milwaukee Bucks, April 29, 1990
Tied with many other
Other records
One of three players in NBA history to record 200 steals and 100 blocked shots in a season: 211 steals, 101 blocks (1989–90)
Second player in NBA history to lead his team in all 5 major statistics: 1,692 points, 639 rebounds, 409 assists, 232 steals and 89 blocks (1994–95)
Only player in history to win an NBA championship and Olympic gold medal in the same year twice (1992 and 1996)
Chicago Bulls franchise records
Note: Pippen is second in most career totals for the Bulls, both in the regular season and playoffs, trailing only Michael Jordan.
Regular season
Highest field goal percentage, game:.941 (16–17), vs. Charlotte Hornets, February 23, 1991
Three-point field goal attempts, career: 2,031
Personal fouls, career: 2,534
Turnovers, game: 12, twice
12, at New Jersey Nets, February 25, 1990 (OT)
12, at Houston Rockets, January 30, 1996
Playoffs
Three-point field goals made, career: 161
Three-point field goals made, game: 7, at Utah Jazz, June 6, 1997
Three-point field goals made, quarter: 4, second quarter, at Utah Jazz, June 6, 1997
Three-point field goals made, overtime: 1, at New York Knicks, May 11, 1996
Three-point field goal attempts, career: 531
Three-point field goal attempts, overtime: 3, at New York Knicks, May 11, 1996
Rebounds, career: 1,366
Rebounds, overtime: 3, vs. New Jersey Nets, April 24, 1998
Offensive rebounds, overtime: 2, vs. Cleveland Cavaliers, May 5, 1989
Tied with Derrick Rose
Defensive rebounds, overtime: 2, vs. New Jersey Nets, April 24, 1998
Tied with other players
Assists, overtime: 2, at New York Knicks, May 9, 1989
Tied with Derrick Rose
Steals, quarter: 4, third quarter, vs. Milwaukee Bucks, April 29, 1990
Tied with Horace Grant
Blocked shots, career: 171
See also
Notes
a [3] and 6 ft 8 in (2.03 m).[12]Photo
Days before Massachusetts votes in its Super Tuesday primary, a poll in the state shows Hillary Clinton with a slight edge over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, but one that is within the margin of error.
On the Republican side, the poll shows Donald J. Trump way ahead of the rest of the pack.
The poll, conducted by the MassINC Polling Group for WBUR, an NPR station in Boston, showed Mrs. Clinton with 47 percent of the vote to 43 percent for Mr. Sanders. The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.
“It’s very close,” said Steve Koczela, president of MassINC. “But Sanders would like to see Massachusetts go his way comfortably, since it should be a relatively friendly state for him. A struggle here is not a good sign for him.”
Mr. Trump was leading the Republican race in Massachusetts with 39 percent of the vote, compared with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who drew 18 percent, and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, with 17 percent. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas came in at 9 percent.
The Republican poll also had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points. The poll questioned 386 Republicans likely to vote on Tuesday and 418 Democrats likely to vote. The polls were conducted from Feb. 21 to 23.Python 2, or is it 3?
Unicode Support
NPM vs PIP
Efficiency = more beer money!
Team Familiarity
MongoDB and JSON
Its just Javascript
Conclusion
Old news right? Who isn’t switching to Node these days? It seems like the new kid on the block is converting devs by the masses. I’m one of them, and here’s why.The lack of focus and movement between Python versions is a massive pain the ass. Yes, I know lots of libraries are being converted or have been already. However, the lack of focus and clear direction of one over the other has my confidence in it at an all time low. I know this has more to do with the community not wanting to move, than the devs, but community is what drives a project.Have you ever tried working with Unicode in Python? Holy shit its painful. Yes there are lots of docs on the subject, but it shouldn’t be that convoluted. Python 3 is a move in the right direction, however. I’m not saying Node or Javascript are the gems in this category, but they definitely have better options.Python has PIP, which is great. However, I frequently find more up-to-date and modern modules on NPM. With the ease of sharing on NPM comes the crap too, so you need to watch out for that. I always thought sharing on PIP was annoying, but found NPM to be easy peasy. I shared my first module in all of 5 minutes.Theres no doubt about it. Node is leaner than Python when it comes to hardware (if written properly). Being able to actually utilize lower end hardware and produce acceptable results is a major plus. A lot of that comes down to Nodes async nature. Yes I’m aware of Twisted and similar libraries. Have you ever actually written an async app in one of those? When building a product, speed of development is important but so is keeping overhead low. We can run the same Node project on half the hardware Python required.This one is always up for debate, but I like the fact the entire team usually knows Javascript at a basic level. This means they can look over Node code and get an understanding of whats going on. If they're a front-end dev, that means hooking up to API endpoints or handling views is a lot easier. Which also means less interruptions for me to help them. Yay!We love MongoDB and JSON. Node uses these two without even thinking about it. Obviously this can be done with other languages, but the ease of it is just so damn appealing I had to mention it.If you love Javascript like I do, this is a plus. If you hate it, not so much. I think Javascript is fun because its so expressive. There are so many ways to do something, which is great for applying specific strategies to key problems. I suppose this also spawns stupid debates like “adding semicolons vs no semicolons". For the record, I’m pro semicolons.To be clear, I still love Python. Its been good to me over the years and I’ve written several production apps in it and regularly use it for quick server scripts. Node.js wasn’t actually my first choice, but I wanted something modern and designed for the new web. PHP, Python and Ruby are definitely not it (they can be when shoehorned with new libraries). My first choice was to learn Go (golang) but time restrictions and the team skill-set didn’t line up with that route. A startups gotta hustle you know! Node was a happy medium that we could get hacking on right away.What are your thoughts on modern day languages? Do you still prefer Python or others? Why? Any Node “gotchas" you can share?---------------------------------------------------------------is written by Gavin Vivkery @ (www.geekforbrains.com).For more than a decade, import enthusiasts have been mourning the loss of the Supra, and rumors make it obvious that they’re not willing to give up hope of a comeback. Fueling these rumors is a revelation that the new CEO of Toyota wants to have three sports coupes in the automaker’s lineup – the GT-86 (aka Scion FR-S) plus two more…could one of these two be a Supra?
Let’s Get Up to Speed on the Rumors
Ahead of nearly every automotive industry show, some publication or another gets the discussion going again about the Supra. It always starts out as speculation and somehow turns into “fact” amongst enthusiasts – and then disappointment is felt across the automotive community when expectations are proven to be nothing more than gossip.
While rumors should always be regarded with suspicion, current rumors of a comeback actually do have more credibility than years before. It’s well known now that Toyota has teamed up with BMW to develop a new coupe, and this collaboration will likely result in a new sports car for both automakers. Many speculate that will designate this vehicle the next Supra.
In addition to Supra rumors, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda has openly stated that he wants two more sports cars to join the Toyota GT-86/Scion FR-S in the automaker’s lineup. It’s said that Toyoda would like to see both a sports coupe that’s smaller (and more affordable) than the 86 as well as one that’s bigger and more powerful. Supposedly, while neither of these models have been given the official “green light,” many believe that the larger, more powerful coupe Toyoda desires is the vehicle being developed in collaboration with BMW.
While many people believe that a Supra comeback is a foregone conclusion, there are reasons to be skeptical.
First, the Supra might not be a moneymaker for Toyota, mostly because it’s difficult to sell Toyota customers a sports coupe that could sticker at $60k to $75k. The most expensive car in Toyota’s line-up today is the Avalon, and that vehicle maxes out at $43k. Toyota’s most popular cars – Camrys and Corollas – are often sold for half that amount. Automakers develop customers based on pricing (at least partially), and Toyota’s existing customer base isn’t likely to be able to buy a new Supra.
NOTE: While the Toyota Land Cruiser has an asking price that should be in the range of a new Supra, Land Cruiser buyers are not inclined to buy a Supra (or vice versa)…that’s a completely different customer.
Second, a Lexus version of the Supra would be a moneymaker…and a great big boost for the Lexus brand too. Lexus is world-renowned for quality and reliability, but the automaker’s reputation for performance is lacking. While the LF-A did a lot to raise the profile of Lexus, a Supra-like Lexus sports coupe would give the brand’s image a nice shot in the arm.
What’s more, the typical Lexus car consumer could easily afford a $60-$75k sports coupe. Indeed, Lexus showrooms are currently filled with customers that could afford the car. When you consider the difficulty that Toyota may have in finding customers for a high dollar sports coupe to the ease with which Lexus can find these buyers, it only makes sense to offer the next-gen Supra as a Lexus.
Three, a Supra might be a Supra and a Lexus. Again, when you look at how Toyota has carved up the North American market, an expensive coupe seems like it should be in the Lexus line-up. However, this same vehicle could be offered as a Supra in most other countries…much like the Toyota 86 is only known as a Scion FR-S in the US and Canada.
After all, it’s not as if enthusiasts wouldn’t be able to recognize the Lexus version of the Supra for what it is. Toyota would get a chance to renew the public’s love affair for a hallowed sports coupe while simultaneously marketing a new Lexus coupe to an existing base of affluent consumers. It’s the best of both worlds – Toyota get’s to re-launch the Supra without actually re-launching the Supra!
Adding it all up, it’s our opinion that Toyota will unveil the next-generation Supra soon. This vehicle will be developed in collaboration with BMW, it’s likely to use a Toyota-derived powertrain (BMW and Toyota are but certain to use different powertrains so the public can differentiate the models), and in the United States this new Supra is likely to be a known as a Lexus.
AuthorJason Lancasteris a long-time Toyota observer as well as the editor and founder ofTundraHeadquarters.com, a website that has broken numerous stories on Toyota product developments. Jason is also an avid fan of Japanese classic sports coupesRajagopalan writes: "The Obama administration has long emphasized the importance of domestic cybersecurity, but recent statements show an increasing openness about offensive capabilities."
A cyberweapon known as Stuxnet has been used to disrupt Iran's uranium enrichment program. (photo: Introversed.com)
Behind the US/Israeli Cyberattacks on Iran
By Megha Rajagopalan, ProPublica
he New York Times has published a report detailing how the Bush and Obama administrations created the cyberweapon known as Stuxnet and used it to disrupt Iran's uranium enrichment program.
Much has been written about Stuxnet, which, as ProPublica recently reported, remains a threat beyond Iran. But the Times account, based on interviews with unnamed U.S. and Israeli officials, is the most extensive account to date of U.S. cyberwarfare capabilities. Here's our cheat sheet on what's new and the fallout:
Because of Stuxnet's complexity, cybersecurity analysts have long suspected it was a U.S.-Israeli effort. The Times story confirms this for the first time, disclosing that the project was code-named "Olympic Games."
Olympic Games began under the Bush administration, and during development, it was known as "the bug."
President Obama has repeatedly expressed concern that if the U.S. acknowledges it is behind Stuxnet, it would give terrorists and enemy states a justification for their own attacks.
Stuxnet was introduced into Iran's enrichment facility at Natanz by an unwitting Iranian. "It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn't think much about the thumb drive in their hand," a source told the Times.
To test the bug in secret Department of Energy labs, the U.S. used aging centrifuges handed over in 2003 by Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, making them into replicas of the nuclear enrichment facilities Iran used.
The attack on Iran became the first known instance of the U.S. using computer code to physically damage another country's infrastructure. Obama, the Times writes, "was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade."
The Israeli role in the attack came from a military unit called Unit 8200 that had "technical expertise that rivaled" the U.S. National Security Agency's as well as significant intelligence about Iran's nuclear facilities.
When a programming error made Stuxnet's code public in 2010, Obama considered halting Olympic Games altogether. But in the end, the administration decided to accelerate the attacks.
It's unclear who was responsible for the programming error, but some in the Obama administration blamed the Israelis. The Times names Vice President Joe Biden: "Mr. Biden fumed. 'It's got to be the Israelis,' he said. 'They went too far.'"
American officials claim that Flame, an even more complex piece of computer malware that has also attacked Iranian infrastructure, is not part of Olympic Games - but they didn't explicitly deny it was an American project.
Opinion is divided as to whether Olympic Games was successful in slowing uranium enrichment in Iran. Administration officials said they had set the Iranians back 18 months to two years, but other experts say enrichment levels quickly recovered and that Iran today has enough fuel for five or more weapons with additional enrichment.
The Obama administration has long emphasized the importance of domestic cybersecurity, but recent statements show an increasing openness about offensive capabilities. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged last month that government hackers had attacked Al Qaeda propaganda sites in Yemen, changing information in ads that talked about killing Americans to show how many Yemenis had died in Al Qaeda attacks.
For years, the Iranians had no idea they were being attacked, blaming their own workers or faults in their facilities, The Times said. But because Stuxnet was inadvertently released, any government- not to mention any hacker with spare time and a malicious streak - can create their own mutation of the weapon.
As the Times points out, "No country's infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States." Siemens makes specialized industrial controllers that were targeted by the Olympic Games attacks. As Siemens confirmed to ProPublica, the same hardware and software holes Stuxnet took advantage of in Iran exist in thousands of locations in the U.S. and worldwide. The vulnerable equipment controls everything from natural gas pipelines to refineries and power transmission lines.
American cybersecurity experts have long warned that it's only a matter of time before someone turns an equally destructive cyberweapon on our own systems. Now that Stuxnet's origins are clear, the odds of that happening might be even higher.Carlos Gomez doesn't shy away from describing himself as sexy, which was a feeling he displayed during his tenure with the Milwaukee Brewers, and then brought with him to the Houston Astros at last season's trade deadline.
Asked whether he's hurt, Carlos Gomez said, "I don't have no problems. I'm playing, and I feel really sexy about it." — Adam McCalvy (@AdamMcCalvy) July 30, 2015
Now, the eccentric 30-year-old Dominican is bringing his six-pack to his Instagram with his shirtless offseason beast mode workout.
Starting #2016 focused and getting ready #NoDaysOff #LetsGo #BeastMode A photo posted by Carlos Gomez (@realcarlosgomez) on Jan 1, 2016 at 10:10am PST
#NoDaysOff #Focus #BeastMode #2016 A video posted by Carlos Gomez (@realcarlosgomez) on Jan 2, 2016 at 11:10am PST
Gomez joins a laundry list of baseball superstars, including Mike Trout and his weighted tires, and Bryce Harper's gun show, who are looking ripped while getting prepared for the 2016 season.
- With h/t to MLB.com's Cut4BRUNSWICK, Ga. -- A judge has sentenced Brunswick Pastor Kenneth Adkins to life for aggravated child molestation Tuesday morning.
Adkins' sentencing states he must serve a minimum of 35 years in prison, with the rest served on probation. He also faces up to 20 years for every additional charge, all to run concurrently.
Adkins turned himself in on one count of aggravated child molestation and one count of child molestation back in August of 2016. Authorities said that their investigation into the pastor focuses on suspected molestation in multiple locations.
Adkins is known for his controversial remarks and actions in the political sphere, beyond his work with the church. After the Orlando massacre at the Pulse gay club, he tweeted that gay people deserved what they got.
Related story: Behind bars, controversial pastor denies molestation conviction, lashes out at accusersI just received my arbitrary rematch gift!! Which I am ever so thankful for, and appreciate the kindness of rematch gifters (and a wag of my finger to the non-giftes out there). I kind of made it easy on my gifter with a couple of wish lists to choose from. My gift came within two days of being rematched. It arrived directly from Amazon and had came gift wrapped. A note on top of the gift read, "Since you enjoy Betrayal, I think you'll love this. It's truly one of my favorite games. Enjoy! --cstars079" This definitely clued me in to the gift being a board game, but which, was the mystery. I proceeded to destroy the beautiful wrapping paper to discover what laid inside. To my surprise, a game that I just recently been in discussing with amongst my friends. The last Night on Earth! I am very excited about my gift and cannot wait to play it. Thank you so much cstars079, I love me gift (as seen by smile in the attached photo).MUMBAI: The BMC plans to introduce variable parking rates in the city. It is working on a new policy to revise parking rates and make them area-specific. The rates will be higher in areas like Nariman Point where there is a greater demand for parking.In the same policy, the BMC is also looking at fining vehicle owners who park illegally. People manning parking lots would be given handheld devices with inbuilt cameras with which they will be able to take pictures of illegally parked vehicles and also note their numbers. If it would be impossible to recover the penalty from the vehicle owner on the spot, the data could be sent to the regional transport office, which would be able to recover the fine once the owner came to renew the vehicle’s registration.“We are in the process of finalizing a new parking policy, in which a lot of things will be worked out to minimize illegal parking,” said additional municipal commissioner Aseem Gupta; the number of parking and no-parking zones in the city would be revised and areas looked at where public parking lots can be opened.There are approximately 6.5 lakh cars in the city and over 14 lakh two wheelers. But the number of public parking lots is a mere 93.On Thursday, the BMC made a presentation to standing committee members on how the hi-tech web-based parking system would work. Printed receipts will be generated by the handheld device. The data of the receipts will be transferred to the central BMC server. The system includes an option to book parking slots online.The system failed to impress corporators, who said they would take a decision once the BMC was ready with the new parking policy.It’s no secret that batteries are holding back mobile technology. It’s nothing against the battery companies, which are surely dedicating quite a lot of R&D to improving their technology, hoping to be the first out of the gate with a vastly improved AA or rechargeable device battery. But battery density has been improving very slowly over the last few years, and advances have had to be in processor and display efficiency, in order to better use that limited store of power.
Researchers at Northwestern University claim to have created an improved lithium ion battery that not only would hold ten times as much energy, but would charge ten times as quickly.
It’s probably safe to call it a breakthrough.
Inside Li-ion batteries, there are innumerable layers of graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms. Lithium ions fill the spaces between these layers, and when the battery is being charged, these atoms must creep their way physically to the edge of the sheet in order to get down to the next layer and make room for more ions. The rate of recharge is limited by how fast these ions can go from layer to layer. One solution tried before was replacing the carbon sheets with silicon, which for some chemical reason can hold many times the lithium ions — but the silicon would expand and contract with the charge cycles, quickly breaking.
Professor Harold Kung, researcher at NU and lead author of the paper (published this month in the journal Advanced Energy Materials), has discovered not just one, but two techniques for improving this charge process. His lab decided to combine the strengths of both materials, carbon and silicon, by populating the area between the graphene sheets with silicon nanoclusters. These little clusters greatly increase the amount of ions that can be kept in the battery, and because they are small and the graphene is flexible, their size changes are manageable. Thus, the charge capacity of the battery was improved by, Kung says, a factor of ten.
But that’s not all. Kung’s lab also thought of perforating the graphene sheets, allowing ions to take a “shortcut” to the next layer. They call these 10-20nm holes “in-plane defects,” and they essentially rust
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follows:
The Atlanta Stove Works company was founded in 1889 (originally named Georgia Stove Company) to produce cast iron stoves. Their original location was on Krog Street, home of the famous and long-lasting Krog Street Market. Initially, their business boomed to the point where in 1902, a separate foundry was built in Birmingham, Alabama especially for the production of hollow ware and cast iron cookware to supplement their stoves. This separate foundry was named Birmingham Stove & Range.
Many of the original records from Atlanta Stove Works have been lost, especially because the original factory burned down in 1915 and was re-built. It is known that the first series of Birmingham Stove & Range cast iron pans, the Red Mountain series, was introduced in the year 1930. This name was based upon the geographic area around Birmingham, Alabama, known as the Red Mountain area – an area so rich in iron ore, the rock faces have a reddish tinge from the hematite iron ore present in the landscape.
In addition to stoves, Atlanta Stove Works also produced a barbecue grill stand named the Atlanta Stove Works Cue-Cart, which is legendary among barbecue afficionadoes. Even today, the Cue Cart is seen as the standard to which barbecue grills are compared. (More about the Cue Cart: www.barbecuen.com/faqs/cuecart.htm#axzz2lsc4emvB )
In 1957, the original Atlanta Stove Works foundry on Krog Street closed, leaving Birmingham Stove & Range as the sole producer of cast iron for this company. There was still a lot of competition at the time, both from neighboring foundries such as Lodge Manufacturing, and also from the new influx of foreign cast iron from Asia.
1957 also saw the introduction of the Century Cookware series from Birmingham Stove & Range. This was essentially a re-naming of their brand. Red Mountain was replaced with Century – but the cast iron pans were exactly the same. The name "Century" was stated as "made to last 100 years," and it went along with a famous phrase, "Will Not Dent Or Chip."
Major changes came to Birmingham Stove & Range in the 1960s, with the introduction of automated production using DISAMATIC equipment during the years 1966 through 1968. (Wikipedia article on DISAMATIC). This removed a lot of the hand-finished procedures from the production of its cast iron – and the result was a cast iron pan that was still good quality, but it no longer had the "smooth as glass" feel of previous BS&R pans. With the introduction of DISA automated production, BS&R re-designed thir skillets to provide exact sizes and measurements. 1966 saw the introduction of skillets with a size number listed as NO. along with a size measurement of IN. The majority of BS&R pans, especially their skillets, were machine-polished to give the cooking surface a smooth feel; while the outside and underside of the pan retained a rough surface, rather than being smooth all over. Automated production greatly increased the output of the BS&R facility, and in only a couple of years a great number of these new pans were shipped to suppliers across the country.
Within two years after introducing the newly redesigned Century pans, BS&R began adding a MADE IN USA mark to its cookware. This was a marketing move meant to strike back against the surge of cheaply made imported cast iron pans from Asia. The MADE IN USA mark was added beginning in late 1967, and by 1968 almost all BS&R pans bore this mark.
Along with production of everyday cast iron skillets, BS&R is credited with the introduction of the popular corn bread skillet, a cast iron pan with eight separate wedges meant for making individual pieces of corn bread. The corn bread skillet was introduced in 1967, and its sales immediately skyrocketed, resulting in banner years for BS&R in 1967 and 1968.
During the 1970s, increased pressure from competition resulted in Birmingham Stove & Range redesigning its cookware, changing the size of its pans especially so they would be compatible with other accessories from outside the company, such as glass lids.
In 1976, for the United States' 200th anniversary, BS&R produced a limited series of cast iron pans with wooden handles, named the "Lady Bess" series.
This section is intended to correct some misinformation regarding the closure of Birmingham Stove & Range.
For a while, the energy crisis of the 1970s appeared to be a boon to Atlanta Stove Works, their parent company, as manufacturing of wood-burning stoves increased dramatically between 1974 and 1980. However, the market for wood burning stoves crashed as oil-based energy prices returned to regular levels, resulting in hard times for Atlanta Stove Works. In 1986, Atlanta Stove Works, along with Birmingham Stove & Range, was sold to Martin Industries. As the company was restructured, its wood-fired stove and cast iron production facility in Birmingham was shut down. (Source: Maria Saporta, "Atlanta Stove Works closes operations here," Atlanta Constitution, January 2, 1987): [1])
Martin Industries was in fact the company originally founded as Martin Stove & Range. They had long since ended their production of cast iron cookware, and had been producing gas heaters since the 1940s. Martin was in the process of its own restructuring, and their purchase of the Atlanta Stove Works' gas and stove production fit into their business strategy. [2] Their ownership of Atlanta Stove Works acquired the production facilities for various areas of the business – but not the cookware production facility. Martin Industries managed the production of stoves and gas heaters, plus other items. The cast iron cookware facility was legally spun off into a separate business entity, and BS&R officially changed its business name to A&B Foundry. Their official name changed, but they continued to retain ownership of the brand names and designs for "Birmingham Stove & Range" and "Century Cookware."
Production of cast iron cookware continued at A&B Foundry from 1987 through 1991. It was at this time that some of the later items in the Century Cookware line were produced, such as the Handy Dan Corn Stick Pan.
In 1991, Atlanta Stove Works entered into a deal with a neighboring foundry (Robinson Foundry) to continue producing its cast iron products. However, due to corporate wrangling, the contract was negated after BS&R had removed its production equipment from the original Birmingham foundry location. This left them without the means to produce any cast iron products on their own. To survive, the company entered into a temporary agreement with Lodge Manufacturing to distribute their cast iron, which lasted for two years; though Lodge did not actually produce cast iron for BS&R (or A&B) during this time.
In 1992, A&B Foundry (doing business as Birmingham Stove & Range) declared bankruptcy and folded completely in 1993. As part of its debt settlement with Lodge, the patents and designs for its cookware were acquired by Lodge, who integrated them into the design of their own cookware; especially the Sportsman grill and the cornbread pan. These products continue to be produced by Lodge through the present day, and they are consistent sellers, especially the Sportsman grill (or hibachi).
Former BS&R manager Hugh Rushing wrote on Facebook, "Martin bought the gas heater business in the late 1980s. DISA molding equipment began to be moved out in 1991 in an ill-fated joint venture with Robinson Foundry. Manufacturing had ceased by mid-1992, but product was made at outside sources for another year in limited quantities. Probably the last cookware was run in late 1992 or early 1993. BSR (in the form of A & B Foundry) entered bankruptcy in January, 1993."
As an aside, in the 1980s, the re-structured Atlanta Stove Works was involved with the development of modern-day carbon monoxide alarms. One of the first producers of carbon monoxide alarms, Quantum Group Inc., described in its company history:
"Quantum Group Inc. (Quantum) was founded in 1982 to focus on forensic science for litigation. One of Quantum’s customers wanted a CO safety shut off device because he was paying out 10% of sales in CO litigation settlements. This company was Atlanta Stove Works (ASW). In 1984, ASW and the Gas Research Institute (GRI) partially funded the CO sensor development with about $1 million each, which was injected over a period of about 4 years. Quantum and several utilities companies also contributed money to the development cost. This led to a carbon monoxide alarm that could also shut off appliances. These products were field tested in 1986." – "Carbon Monoxide Alarms and its History," [ 3 ]
In 1996, the former site of Birmingham Stove & Range was purchased by a recycling company called KMAC Services (now named Evolutia), who completely renovated the old foundry site.
Martin Industries Inc. filed for bankruptcy in 2002 [4], and their assets were purchased by Monessen Hearth Systems Co. [5]
In 2013, retail corporation Paces Properties purchased the original nine-acre area on Krog Street, including the former Atlanta Stove Works building. They redeveloped the area into a modern food mall, incorporating the Atlanta Stove Works building into the project. The new market opened to the public on November 24, 2014. News stories related to this: [6], [7] The Web site of the new Krog Street Market is: www.krogstreetmarket.com/ ( Facebook: www.facebook.com/KrogStreetMarket )
Identifying BS&R
Birmingham Stove & Range never put an identifying logo or manufacturer mark on their cast iron pans. However, there are several unique traits to these pans that allow them to be easily identified.
BS&R cast iron pans are very heavy, and they have a weight and a heft similar to modern-day cast iron pans from Lodge. However, unlike Lodge, the cooking surface of a BS&R pan is very smooth. The manufacturer milled down the surface of the pan and gave it a smooth surface, far more smooth than the surface found on any modern day cast iron pan produced today. This adds to the appeal of these older vintage pans.
The heavy weight of a BS&R pan differs from the lighter weight of the more famous Griswold and Wagner pans. However, the weight and thickness of a BS&R pan gives it an advantage over lighter, thinner pans: it is far more resistant to damage and warping. I've found quite a few older Wagner pans, and even some Griswolds, with warped surfaces that caused them to spin when placed on a flat surface. Birmingham Stove & Range pans almost never warp (though I've found at least one). Likewise, they are incredibly durable and resistant to scratches, dents, and chips. As with any cast iron pan, their greatest enemy was rust. If you take the effort to clean up a BS&R pan and restore it to working condition, it will look nearly new, even as good as the day it was manufactured. Many of the BS&R pans found at flea markets and junkyards are decades old, often dating back to the 1930s.
The Birmingham foundry used a size numbering system to match the stoves produced by Atlanta Stove Works. These size numbers were somewhat larger than the sizes used by most other manufacturers. With most vintage cast iron pans, the most common size available is the "number 8," which corresponds to a cast iron pan or pot with a diameter of slightly greater than ten inches (not including the length of the handle). This approximates to a No. 7 size in a BS&R pan, which is stamped on the Century series as 10 1/8 inches. The number 8 pan is a full half inch greater in diameter, or 10 5/8 inches.
Size Number Red Mountain Century Cookware Century Cookware
(1970s-1992) Skillet Depth Dutch Oven Depth NO. 3-S 6 1/4 IN. N/A N/A 1 3/16" N/A NO. 3 6 5/8 IN. 6 5/8 IN. 6 5/8 IN. 1 9/16" N/A NO. 4 7 3/16 IN. N/A N/A 1 1/2" N/A NO. 5-S 7 3/16 IN. N/A N/A 1 1/2" N/A NO. 5 8 1/8 IN. 8 1/8 IN. 8 1/8 IN. 1 3/4" N/A Size 6 Red Mountain 8 11/16 IN. N/A N/A 1 7/8" 3 5/8" NO. 6 Century N/A 8 11/16 IN. 9 3/8 IN. 1 7/8" 3 5/8" NO. 7-S 8 11/16 IN. N/A N/A 1 7/8" N/A NO. 7 9 5/8 IN. 10 1/4 IN. N/A 2" 3 3/4" NO. 8-B (7) N/A N/A 10 1/4 IN. 2" 3 3/4" NO. 8 10 5/8 IN. 10 5/8 IN. N/A 2" 4" NO. 9 11 5/8 IN. N/A N/A 2" 4 1/4" NO. 10 12 5/8 IN. 12 5/8 IN. 12 7/16 IN. 2 1/8" 4 7/8" NO. 12 13 3/8 IN. 13 3/8 IN. 13 7/16 IN. 2 1/4" 5 5/8" NO. 14 15 3/8 IN. 15 IN. 15 IN. 2 1/4" N/A
Until BS&R introduced the size 8-B (7) pan in the 1970s, the older Red Mountain series pans were generally identical in size to Century Cookware pans of the 1950s through the 1960s. The two exceptions to this were the size #6 pans, and the S-series Red Mountain pans (3-S, 5-S, 7-S).
N/A = Not Applicable, as Birmingham Stove & Range did not produce a pan with this specification.
BS&R never produced pans of size 11 or 13. They also discontinued the number 4 size pan with the Century series.
The original BS&R Red Mountain catalog listed their #14 skillet with a diameter of 15 3/8 inches. I'm still looking for authentic or photographic verification of the size difference between the Red Mountain and Century series #14 pans.
One unique trait common to all Birmingham Stove & Range pans was the design of the handle. All of their pans had handles with a scooped hole on the underside for hanging the pan, shaped in the style seen here. The hole is teardrop shaped. There is a ridge or edge along the underside of the handle from the handle to the hole. This was a simple style that instantly identified any pan as being from BS&R.
During the 1960s through the 1980s, BS&R produced several modified pans that differed from their skillets, including the Chef Skillet, Breakfast Griddle and Square Skillet. These pans hand a handle design shaped slightly different from the handles of "regular" BS&R skillets. This handle was longer and thinner, and the hanging eye hole had more of an oval shape than a teardrop shape. More notably, the handle was curved rather than straight. More information on these pans can be seen on this page: Special Pans by Birmingham Stove and Range
All cast iron skillets from Birmingham Stove & Range, up until the 1970s, were made with a heat ring: a circular ridge on the underside of the pan. BS&R pans in particular had a very thick and distinctive heat ring. Also, as stated previously, each of these pans have the teardrop-shaped scoop on the underside of the handle.
"Red Mountain" series: 1930s to 1966
(These pans were renamed as "Century Cookware" in 1957.)
The first series of cast iron pans produced by Birmingham Stove & Range had very few markings on the underside. As noted above, they had a prominent heat ring, and the distinctive teardrop-shaped hanging hole on the underside of the handle. However, as this photo shows, the only identification stamps used were a large number and a letter, such as the ones on the pans shown above: 3 W and 5. (5 plus a dot). The number indicates the size of the pan – in this case, the number 5 indicates it is a size 5 pan. The letter W on the left photo is a mold marker, and it could be lettered A through Z. (Some molds used two letters for identification instead of just one, as seen in the 8 K G example above. That pan is a size 8, with the mold marker KG.) This indicated exactly which iron mold was used to cast the pan, and it assisted with easy identification if pans began showing flaws as the molds wore out or cracked from use. Some pans had a dot after the size number, instead of a pattern letter, as shown in the photo on the right.
Closeup photos of a No. 8 sized 1930s-1960s era Red Mountain skillet, showing the surface detail. Click on each picture for a larger image.
This original label shows that BS&R added a sticker to each of their pans, even though they did not include their own name on the pan itself. Click on the picture for a larger image of the label.
"S Series" Red Mountain pans
The Red Mountain series included a set of three skillets of an unusual size. These pans were marked with size numbers of 3-S, 5-S and 7-S. These pans are slightly smaller than other Red Mountain skillets of the 3, 5, and 7 sizes. This makes them of interest to BS&R collectors, though otherwise they are exactly like other skillets of the Red Mountain series.
Photos: 3-S by William Dallas; 5-S by Scott Newman; 7-S by Paul Rush Reed.
"Veri Similitude" wrote on June 4, 2015: "We don't know yet what S stood for or why they were made. So far we've captured 3, 5 and 7 in the wild. The 5 was made from a 4 and the 7 from a 6 so you will often see those with ghosted 4 and 6 marks. My theory is a special portable stove was made, but we really don't know." Later, the question of "why" the S series was made produced this remark: "To compete with another foundry. They made a camping set that featured a smaller size to complement that camping set." (Jason Walker, April 19, 2016)
"Handwritten" Red Mountain pans
Posted to the Cast Iron Cooking group on February 19, 2014 by Chris St. John: "And finally what appears to be another Red Mountain series, marked 5 Bx, and another marked 8Y. But notice that the marks are obviously scrawled by hand, rather than printed like the other Red Mountain." A number of these pans have appeared in the hands of collectors and cast iron enthusiasts. While much of Atlanta Stove Works' production records from its early days have been lost, speculation on the Facebook group for Birmingham Stove and Range came to a reasonable conclusion that these may be among the "first series" of Red Mountain pans, produced during the 1930s or possibly even earlier. The hand-etched molds may have been produced before the size numbers were standardized and permanently added to the design of the mold.
These photos show a close-up comparison between a Birmingham Stove & Range "handwritten" Red Mountain skillet and a special "S series" Red Mountain. The handwritten markings on the bottom indicate both of these pans are from the same approximate time period, 1920s to 1930s, though there could be as much as ten years' difference or so between the two. The 7P skillet has casting flaws on the bottom that appear to be cracks, but close examination shows the skillet is intact and will cook just fine. The 7-S also has a B mark, which likely indicates a mold ID in the same way the 7 has a mold ID of P. The 7-S is identical in size to a number 6 Red Mountain skillet (8 11/16 inches, according to the Red Mountain catalog), while the 7 is 9 5/8 inches in diameter, or exactly 1 inch smaller than a size 8 skillet. (Click on each photo for a larger high-resolution image.)
"Century Cookware: Will Not Dent Or Chip"
"Century" series: 1957 to 1966
The Century Cookware series of cast iron was officially introduced by Birmingham Stove & Range in the year 1957. While collectors usually assume all BS&R cast iron with the designs listed above were Red Mountain series pans, the change to Century Cookware actually took place before the designs were updated and changed. A fair number of pans were shipped to suppliers with the "Century Cookware" label, while still bearing the maker's marks of the "Red Mountain" series – even as late as the 1960s! The only difference was the adhesive label attached. As such, it's impossible to tell which pans were "early Century" and which were "later Red Mountain."
Birmingham Stove & Range re-introduced its cast iron pots and pans as Century Cookware, beginning in 1957. At this time, the cast iron pans themselves were exactly the same as the original Red Mountain series pans. The only difference was that BS&R produced new labels, stickers, and boxes to ship the same pans with the name of "Century Cookware." Because the pans themselves were the exact same pans, this change was entirely cosmetic and didn't apply to consumers.
Collector and researcher Dwayne Henson wrote on the BS&R Cast Iron Cooking And More Facebook group:
"The difference between late Red Mountain and early Century is only the label. I have heard two slight different stories on the change over. One: The Jones' being smart, frugal businessmen started using the new Century labels after using up all the Red Mountain labels they had. So somewhere in the middle of a shift the brand changed, same skillets, same patterns, possibly poured on the same day, different label. Two: a day was picked and on that day the new labels with Century were used. Same skillets, same patterns, different labels.
"When BSR went from Red Mountain to Century labels there was no change in patterns. The new "Century" skillets were being hand molded using the same patterns that just previously had been used to hand mold Red Mountain skillets. The only way to tell them apart is by the label. So this series of Century and the last of Red Mountain are exactly the same except for the paper labels." – Dwayne Henson, March 27, 2015
Here is a series of photos of a #12 skillet that is likely to be of the Century series, paired with an "older" Red Mountain #12 lid. This may be the heaviest BS&R lid I've ever held. It's a huge #12 lid, yet it still feels thicker and heavier than other BS&R lids. The handwritten #12 on the lid, and larger basting dimples, suggests it may be an "earlier" Red Mountain perhaps even made before the 1930s. However, it fits this "later" Red Mountain #12 skillet like a glove. The "later" Red Mountain is likely of 1960s make, due to the rough surface on the outside, and machine-polished inside. In contrast, the surface of the lid is smooth all over, top and bottom.
"Century" series: 1966 to 1970s
The years 1966 through 1968 were a landmark period for Birmingham Stove & Range. It was at this time the company's production facility introduced automated DISAMATIC cast iron production equipment. Dwayne Henson writes:
"The biggest change to BSR came with the automated molding machines. All the patterns had to be redone as the old patterns would not work with this new technology. Before this time their product had been hand molded, now a machine could pop out a mold every 15 seconds, giving them the largest production capacity for cast iron cookware in the world. This is when the thin pencil like tapered loop handle started for skillet and dutch oven lids. The CO [camp oven]lids had the tab handle with a hole drilled through it, they are marked using standard foundry letters and numbers, these are the ones everyone IDs as Century with the factional sizes." – Dwayne Henson, March 27, 2015
Closeup photos of a No. 8 sized 1966-1967 era Century Cookware skillet, showing the surface detail. Click on each picture for a larger image.
This is a "number 8" size pan of the "Century" series, with a diameter of 10 5/8 inches. It's slightly larger than the "number 8" sized pans from other manufacturers, such as Lodge or Griswold. Be sure to note the following:
BS&R was the only manufacturer to use the abbreviation of NO. for "number," and IN. for "inches."
for "number," and for "inches." The lack of a MADE IN USA mark indicates this pan was manufactured before the year 1968. This dates it to anywhere between 1966 and 1967 (or early 1968 at the latest).
mark indicates this pan was manufactured before the year 1968. This dates it to anywhere between 1966 and 1967 (or early 1968 at the latest). A rounded font style of the lettering, as opposed to the block style and typewriter-style fonts used by other manufacturers. The font size is smaller than the lettering used in the older Red Mountain series.
As with the older pans, there is a thick and prominent heat ring – the circular ridge – on the bottom of the pan. Other than on their skillets, the heat ring was removed from the bottom of some BS&R "Century" pans; in particular, BS&R dutch ovens from this period. They were still stamped with a NO. and measurement.
The teardrop-shaped scoop on the underside of the handle, unique to BS&R pans.
This original label shows that BS&R added a sticker to each of their pans, even though they did not include their own name on the pan itself. Click on the picture for a larger image of the label.
Dutch Oven
BS&R's dutch ovens of the Century series were essentially the same as their older Red Mountain series in general design, with smooth bottoms and no heat rings underneath. The identifying marks underneath were identical to those used on BS&R Century cast iron skillets, complete with identical size numbers and measurements. The lids were interchangeable and would fit on both the dutch ovens and skillets.
Closeup photos of a NO. 10 sized Century Cookware cookware dutch oven, dating from 1966 to 1968, showing the surface detail. Click on each picture for a larger image.
Chicken Fryer
The Birmingham Stove & Range chicken fryer, or deep skillet, was produced for the entire length of the company's history. These pans were made in only two sizes, number 7 (10 1/4 inches diameter) and number 8 (10 5/8 inches). Of the two, the number 8 is more commonly found. As with most BS&R pans, these chicken fryers are huge beasts, a full three inches deep. The regular skillet lids will fit these pans. The chicken fryer has a flat bottom without any heat ring.
(At least one specimen of an early Red Mountain #10 sized chicken fryer has been found, but this was apparently discontinued by the time Century Cookware pans were produced.)
Closeup photos of a NO. 8 sized Century Cookware chicken fryer, dating from 1966 to 1968, showing the surface detail. Click on each picture for a larger image.
MADE IN USA: 1967 to 1992
In the late 1960s, Birmingham Stove & Range added a MADE IN USA mark to the underside of its newly designed Century pans. This is believed to have occurred by the years 1967 to 1968. A large number of the newly designed Century pans were produced before the MADE IN USA mark was added to the majority of BS&R molds, from 1966 to late 1967 or early 1968, and these pans did not have a MADE IN USA mark. Until only recently, it was believed these pans had been produced in the 1950s, and the MADE IN USA mark indicated these pans had been produced after the year 1960. This is actually not correct. While Wagner Ware had begun marking its pans with MADE IN USA during the early 1960s, other major cast iron cookware makers waited until the later 1960s to add this mark to their pans. This included Lodge Manufacturing, and Birmingham Stove & Range.
The addition of MADE IN USA marks to all DISA production machines did not occur overnight. This is believed to have taken place between 1967 and 1968. If a BS&R pan had a MADE IN USA mark on the underside, this indicated it was made with a mold from an automated DISA machine, beginning in the year 1967 to 1968. If the MADE IN USA stamp was absent, the pan was older and was cast between 1966 and 1968.
While a BS&R pan marked with MADE IN USA can be guaranteed to have a manufacture date later than 1967, there have been individual pieces discovered that did not bear this mark. Other identifying traits on these pans still suggest they were cast in the 1970s or later, in spite of the lack of this mark. This is seen as proof that there was no law or government ruling declaring all cast iron to bear this mark. Rather, it was voluntarily added by manufacturers as a marketing strategy.
(In the YouTube video Identifying Old Cast Iron Pans, I incorrectly identified the date of the MADE IN USA mark as the year 1960. The identification of the year 1967 as the beginning of the MADE IN USA mark is a more accurate update.)
"Century" series: 1970s to 1992
In the 1970s, BS&R made adjustments to the sizes of the pans in their line, in response to requests from distributors for a pan that would fit popular glass lids from third-party makers. The size markings of their pans changed slightly as these adjustments were made, as seen in these photo of the NO. 10 size.
The photo on the left is a Century series pan from 1967 to the early 1970s. The photo on the right shows the size adjustment made in the mid-1970s.
At this time BS&R added a new size 8-B This photo of a 1970s Century series dutch oven shows a "number 8" (NO 8-B) sized pan measuring 10 1/4 inches, as opposed to the 10 5/8 inch size of the earlier pans. This particular size, 8-B, was introduced as the new standard, and the larger size 8 pan saw a reduced number in production, if not phased out completely. These more modern BS&R pans are harder to find than the older vintage pans. Hugh Rushing writes on Facebook, "The other reason the [size] 7 became an 8-B is so that we could run it two up on a DISA 2013 machine. That enabled us to actually lower the cost of the 8-B as opposed to the older model 8 which was 10-5/8" in diameter." – February 12, 2015
Photo courtesy of Tom Vallejo.
Also in the 1970s, BS&R added mold ID numbers to the markings on its pans, as seen by the 5H-2 mark in this photo. According to Hugh Rushing (posted to Facebook on March 4, 2015), "The 5H was the pattern designation and the 2 was the second impression in the pattern. [This was] needed so if something went wrong you would know which cavity to work on."
Photo by Duane Bennett.
Also in the 1970s, BS&R added mold ID numbers to the markings on its pans, as seen by the 5H-2 mark in this photo. According to Hugh Rushing (posted to Facebook on March 4, 2015), "The 5H was the pattern designation and the 2 was the second impression in the pattern. [This was] needed so if something went wrong you would know which cavity to work on."
Closeup photos of a NO. 3 sized 1970s Century skillet, showing the surface detail. This pan has a rough surface, but the inside of the cooking surface is soothed and milled. This particular pan shows the spiral pattern of the milling marks, created when the cooking surface was ground down to a smooth finish. Click on each picture for a larger image.
This is a 1970s-era original label from Atlanta Stove Works, using the same model cast iron pan; only with a different brand label ("ATLANTA") on the label. Click on the picture for a larger image of the label.
"Lady Bess" series: 1976 to 1980
Photos by Debra Taylor.
Photos by Byron Holt.
Former BS&R marketing manager Hugh Rushing writes, "The Lady Bess line was introduced to celebrate the [United States] bicentennial. Retailers were interested in glass lids, so the patterns and resulting diameter of the pans in that line were designed to fit standard available glass covers. Lady Bess also had wooden handles on the skillets and sauce pans. They were originally packaged as sets in a wooden crate. All very Early American. Later those patterns were used to make Con Brio, a short line with white porcelain handles which were sold mainly on the West Coast. This was also the first cast iron with a nonstick finish."
The size number marked on the bottom of the Lady Bess series did not match the earlier sizes of 3 through 14 used in the Red Mountain and Century series. The Lady Bess size had a W next to the number, which indicated "width." A pan marked 8W was 8 inches in diameter – and this was much smaller than a Century or Red Mountain size 8 (10 5/8 inches diameter). This was unintentionally ironic, as the Lady Bess series was intended to imitate an "Early American" style cast iron pan – yet, it would not fit in a genuine antique cast iron stove.
Con Brio: 1989 to 1992
Photos by Jason Walker.
About ten years after the Lady Bess series was produced, A&B Foundry (Atlanta Stove Works had been renamed in 1986) re-used the designs of these pans. A series of pans with porcelain handles, rather than wood, was issued under the name of Con Brio. The cast iron pans themselves were exactly the same as Lady Bess; the only difference was the handle.
Special Century Cookware pans: 1966 to 1992
Chef Skillet, Square Skillet, Breakfast Skillet, Small Fry, and the Jumbo Skillet
Photo Gallery: Special Pans by Birmingham Stove and Range
The years 1966 through 1968 saw the introduction of the new DISA automated production system at Birmingham Stove & Range. This new system allowed the company to greatly increase its production and output. It also gave them the opportunity to experiment with different designs and shapes, to generate further revenue for the company and see what might catch on with the public. Most of these pans were produced with a single size and shape. These included the Chef Skillet, Square Skillet, Breakfast Skillet, Small Fry, and the Jumbo Skillet.
More information on these unique and unusual pans produced for the Century series can be seen at this page: Special Pans by Birmingham Stove and Range
Lids
Birmingham Stove & Range lids differ from most other cast iron lids. While other lids have ridges to allow condensation to collect and drip onto the food as it cooks, BS&R lids have "dimples" or indentations on the underside of the lid.
Red Mountain series: 1930s to 1966
The handle on top of the lid was intentionally designed with one end larger than the other. As with the Red Mountain series skillets, iron lids of this era had a size number printed on the top, underneath the handle. This particular lid is an 8 F, signifying a size 8 lid cast in mold letter F.
On the underside of the lid, the basting dimples were spaced haphazardly, in a random placement that had no actual pattern. These random dimples are what immediately makes this lid unique as a BS&R Red Mountain series lid.
Century series: 1966 to 1992
The placement of the basting dimples under the lid became more of a distinct pattern, and the dimples were no longer randomly spaced. For identification purposes, the size and measurement of the lid was placed under the cover, instead of on the top. In addition to the differing sizes of each end of the handle, Century series lids had an additional bulge at the wider end.
Camp Oven Lid
Lids for Birmingham Stove & Range camp ovens differed greatly from their more familiar and common skillet and dutch oven lids. They were designed completely different, and their sizes were also different. The camp oven lids fit on BS&R's camp ovens and spiders, but not on their kitchen cookware. Because of this, these camp oven lids have been largely unknown throughout the years. Even though they were all manufactured in the 20th century, many antique vendors and collectors mistakenly state they were manufactured in the 1800s, for older 19th century spiders and camp ovens.
There was only one model or style of the BS&R camp oven lid. This was manufactured by BS&R throughout its entire history, from the earlier Red Mountain series all the way through later Century Cookware. The number of camp oven
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each EDF sees Earth invaded by different monsters: giant ants, spiders, robots, spaceships, dragons, bees, and a variety of other cliché B-grade science fiction characters. The player takes on the role of a single soldier, fighting vast swarms of bugs and robots on the streets of Tokyo. They are simple games. Trashy games, even. They are the kind of game someone might describe as “so bad it’s good”—or, just as likely, “bad.” The low budget with which the EDF games are produced is immediately visible in the bare-bones presentation: the simplistic menus and the basic fonts; the Tokyo streets full of rectangular buildings that disappear into the ground if they are shot too many times; the janky animations of the low-poly models; the inconsistent frame rate that sees animations stutter if too many creatures are on screen at one time. Taken on its own, the visual quality of the EDF games reaches neither a graphical nor stylistic fidelity.
Yet, despite this, there is something visually powerful about these games. In particular, they achieve an almost unprecedented sense of scale. From your vantage point down on the street as a single, puny human, you watch giant robots lazily step over entire skyscrapers while, at other times, the skyscrapers disappear behind throbbing masses of giant insects as a great army rushes toward you like a wave. An alien mother ship might descend out of the sky and swipe its “genocide cannon” laser across the map, wiping out a dozen city blocks and slowing the game down to a few frames per second as the PlayStation 3 struggles to render so many explosions at one time.
In the simplest terms, the sacrifice in graphical fidelity that the EDF games make (using less polygons per character model, for instance) allows them to render more models on screen at any one time, and to create vast armies that few other games can compete with. But there’s more to it than that. There’s an art to achieving a sense of enormity in video games, which is greater than simply producing a lot of models or one much larger than the playable character. It’s easy to make something big with three-dimensional graphics, but it’s hard to create a true sense of overwhelming largeness, of the self as puny in comparison to something else. This is why Fumito Ueda’s Shadow of the Colossus was so memorable. The colossi the player fought in that game were not just big; they almost felt like entire levels in and of themselves. You scampered up their sides, clawing onto an elbow or a waist as they moved across the environment. They felt like big creatures in an even bigger world.
Three aspects of EDF’s visuality in particular contribute to its grand sense of scale: environmental destruction, the flourishes on individual interactions, and, counterintuitively, the sacrifices it makes to its visual fidelity. The elements EDF chooses not to focus on are as relevant as those it does. With few exceptions, each EDF mission places the player on the streets of Tokyo, surrounded by skyscrapers and overpasses and suburbs. They are large maps, but they lack detail. Whereas the open worlds of Grand Theft Auto V or Skyrim lend a fine grain of detail to their world, EDF’s Tokyo is painted in broad strokes: a flat grid of asphalt roads surrounded by concrete skyscrapers. It feels, perhaps fittingly, like a miniature cardboard Tokyo that Godzilla might stomp through.
As you fight the giant bugs or giant robots or UFOs, your rockets and grenades and plasma cannons inevitably stray from time to time, obliterating another odd skyscraper. Or, alternatively, the giant UFO you shot out of the sky falls and demolishes a city block. The animations of the collapsing skyscrapers are nothing special: the rectangular models break into triangular pieces that then descend and conveniently fall through the bottom of the map, disappearing. There’s no real sense of the streets being covered in rubble and smoke and detritus; yet, as the battle inscribes itself on the city around you, a sense of weight and gravitas presses on your actions and those of your opponents. The conflict feels big because the world suffers from it.
If the global reactions to your actions in EDF are falling skyscrapers, then the local reactions are the visual flourishes. EDF has what some developers would say is good “game feel” (though I’m more inclined to simply say it feels good to play). As you shoot the low-detail ants and spiders and bees, clouds of green and yellow and purple blood spurt, providing instant visual feedback for each accurate attack. When one ant or spider or bee dies, they are thrown backwards, landing with a giant splat and a satisfying sound effect not dissimilar to a balloon deflating too fast. There is little I have experienced in a video game more physically satisfying than accurately lobbing a plasma cannon blast into the thick of an incoming wave of ants and watching abdomens, legs, and fluorescent blood fly in all directions as surrounding skyscrapers topple. Despite their low visual detail, these flourishes also lend the game a tangible weight, and give each of the hundreds of insects a physical presence.
Finally, it’s worth noting how EDF’s visual and technological constraints work in its favor. All video games demand the player’s imagination to seal off and make coherent their diegetic worlds. Video games don’t require a suspension of disbelief so much as a deliberate act of making believe. You see this when people who don’t commonly play video games are confused as to why they can’t open every door or go down every path, as opposed to the literate player who accepts that the game is sending them down a certain path and does the mental busywork to help this make sense. You can lean against a particular wall to recover from those four shotgun blasts to the face because, simply put, that is the reality of this video game.
EDF demands its players fill in the many visual gaps left by its low fidelity—or, rather, it asks its players to politely ignore those gaps. Its UFOs are a prime example. When the player destroys a UFO, its red lights fade and it slowly falls out of the sky and down on the city below. The entire screen shakes with the explosion, and skyscrapers topple beneath the weight of alien steel. But then the UFO doesn’t hit the ground so much as pass through it, conveniently exiting the game world now that it’s no longer needed, like an actor walking off stage. It’s amusing, cheap, and silly—but it also doesn’t matter. By the time the UFO has reached the ground, the drama of its defeat and crash have already passed.
EDF’s scale is also felt in the sense that the game is pushing itself to its technological limits. The games are often laughed at for their inconsistent frame rates, frequently slowing to a crawl due to the number of creatures onscreen. Rather than dilute the experience, I find this lag reinforces the game’s sheer, absurd scale. When the game momentarily pauses and skips a beat as I fire a missile into an oncoming swarm, it feels like reinforcement—this shot was so good that the game can barely handle it.
So-called B-grade games like EDF, which fall into neither blockbuster nor independent paradigms, have their own strategies that can’t be adequately accounted for in terms of graphical fidelity or visual style. Instead, like a film produced on a low budget, it’s a worthy artistic accomplishment in its own right. In EDF, when the mother ship wipes out a city block in unintentional slow motion, it feels like the game is pushing up against its own constraints, about to burst. Here, EDF feels grand—not because it seems like you are “really” fighting an army of giant insects, but because the video game is doing a whole lot with very little.Poll of Latinos shows further erosion in the GOP nominee's ratings Trump fueling Latino turnout
In this June 9, 2016 photo, Fabiola Vejar, right, registers Stephanie Cardenas to vote in front of a Latino supermarket in Las Vegas. Shielded from deportation under an Obama administration program that protects those brought to the country illegally as children, Vejar, 18, cannot vote. So she volunteers with Mi Familia Vota, encouraging others to be heard at the ballot box. "I don’t have that voice," she says, "but there's other people... who feel the way I do. They should vote." (AP Photo/John Locher) less In this June 9, 2016 photo, Fabiola Vejar, right, registers Stephanie Cardenas to vote in front of a Latino supermarket in Las Vegas. Shielded from deportation under an Obama administration program that... more Photo: John Locher, Associated Press Photo: John Locher, Associated Press Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Poll of Latinos shows further erosion in the GOP nominee's ratings 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
WASHINGTON - Latino leaders say Donald Trump's personal insults of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado could further propel turnout in November, and a new poll suggests that Trump's attacks may be having an effect on Latinos' already negative view of the GOP nominee.
But despite Trump's missteps and a surge in voter registration, some Latino advocates worry that Democrats and deep-pockets donors are failing to support mobilization efforts needed to get irregular voters to the polls.
A poll of Latinos released Sunday showed further erosion in the GOP nominee's ratings - 77 percent unfavorable now - 5 percentage points worse than a week ago. Democrats are looking at key battleground states, among them Florida, Nevada and Colorado, as places where Latinos' still-diminishing view of Trump could prove decisive.
The tracking poll, sponsored by the National Association of Latino Elected Officials Education Fund and Noticias Telemundo, captured fallout from Trump's ongoing jabs last week at Machado for gaining weight when she was Miss Universe. Latinos found the attacks in the debate and afterward as offensive to them, and Trump compounded the damage in his Twitter tirade when he referred to Machado's "sex tape past," widely seen as a false allegation.
Trump apparently was referring to a 2005 night-vision clip from "La Granja," a Spanish reality program, that shows Machado and a man moving rhythmically under a blanket or sheet absent nudity or anything explicit, similar to some scenes in U.S. reality shows.
The nonpartisan tracking poll showed why Trump is a refrain in Democratic ads focused on Latinos: Hillary Clinton is viewed favorably by two-thirds of Latinos - far better than by people generally - and led Trump 73-16 percent when Latinos were asked which candidate they prefer.
Adding to the decline
Houston pollster Sylvia Manzano of Latino Decisions, which conducts the tracking surveys, points to still another possible reason for Trump's ongoing decline among Latinos: Cuba - and Trump's efforts to drum up business opportunities in the 1990s during the embargo, an issue followed especially closely in Florida.
Manzano said that despite some reports of Latinos becoming tuned out, her polling shows that the level of interest already has eclipsed what surveys showed four years ago.
"I've heard media chatter about Latinos not enthused, but we don't have evidence to support that," she said.
In Bexar County, which surpassed the 1 million mark in registered voters in late June, had 1,028,657 registered voters Monday - 100,000 more than in 2012, said Elections Administrator Jacquelyn Callanen. Other cities with large Hispanic populations also say registration has surged.
Enthusiasm is not enough
Nonetheless, advocates worry that Democrats and philanthropies aren't devoting more to corralling that enthusiasm in the campaign's last weeks. The San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Registration Education Project operated in as many as 14 states in the past decade but limited funding this election has reduced efforts to just three states beyond Texas.
"I think campaigns and corresponding groups are supporting efforts to turn out the voters that the campaigns think they need. In Hillary's case, its white men," said Lydia Camarillo, Southwest Voter vice president.
Ben Monterroso, executive director of Mi Familia Vota, a Los Angeles-based national advocacy group, said he, too, worries about missed opportunity. He said Machado "represents pride in the Latino community. He (Trump) insulted one of our heroes."
Monterroso added: "It looks to me that it's politics as usual in not building for the future. I don't see the coordination. I don't see it in the streets. I don't see it in the barrios."
Democrats in Texas and Washington say efforts aimed at Latinos are building. Democratic National Committee spokesman Walter Garcia said additional party efforts will unfold in coming days.
"We're constantly working to make sure that we highlight how dangerous and divisive Trump's candidacy is," he said.
Red-state Texas typically settles for drips from the national party funding spigot in presidential election years. But Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa pointed to the DNC opening offices in Houston and Austin this season and heavy national funding of Alpine Democrat Pete Gallego in his challenge of U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-San Antonio, in the San Antonio-area quintessential swing district.
Four million votes on the table
In a conference call Friday, Hinojosa said: "We all know that the biggest problem we've had in getting the state to turn blue is the turnout in the Latino community. We leave 4 million votes on the table every election from that community. Texas is not really a red state, it's a nonvoting state."
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, pointed to the nearly 940,000 increase in the number of legal immigrants who have applied to become citizens as further indication of an energized Latino electorate.
Castro is doing his part for Democrats nationally: He campaigned in Louisiana over the weekend and has trips planned for Florida and Iowa.
Castro also is party-building in Texas, helping to finance a strategy in which people reach out to friends and relatives who in turn reach out to others with encouragement to vote. He likened the method to people asking others to help them move on a weekend.
"They help you not because they like moving on a Saturday but because you asked them to," he said.
In the Latino Victory Project's late efforts, a rock 'n' roll soundtrack accompanies the sound of money. Latino Victory was formed two years ago by actress and activist Eva Longoria and Henry Muñoz, the San Antonio entrepreneur and Democratic Party finance chairman.
Latino Victory is partners with the rock band Mana, of Guadalajara, Mexico, in an online campaign, #CuentaConmigo (count on me), with concerts so far in El Paso and Las Vegas and another planned in Miami.
The Longoria-Muñoz PAC also has spent $1.3 million this election, most of it supporting Latino candidates.
"You can't take our community for granted," said state Rep. Cesar Blanco, D-El Paso. "Just because Trump is out there doesn't mean these funding organizations have to make less investment. They can't be short-sighted."
Nevada, where more than 1 in 5 voters are Latino, is the battleground state with the biggest Latino percentage and potentially a place where Latinos could make a big difference Nov. 8.
Latinos see their best chance yet to send the first Latina to the U.S. Senate in the battle to replace Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat and former two-term state attorney general, trails U.S. Rep. Joe Heck, a physician and three-term congressman, in recent polls.
Heck led by just two points in a Las Vegas Review-Journal survey published Sunday, suggesting that a robust turnout could put Cortez Masto over the top.
Last week, Cortez Masto answered charges by two of Heck's former advisers that she is "hispandering" for votes, with one of her critics remarking that she doesn't speak fluent Spanish.
Cortez Masto, whose grandfather emigrated from Chihuahua, Mexico, called the barbs a slap at Mexican-Americans "who have come to this country. have worked hard, and have made a life for them and their families."
In the battleground state of Florida, an influx of Democratic-leaning voters arriving from Puerto Rico is rapidly changing the Hispanic electorate and may be a key factor in November, analysts say.
In the past, Republicans could bank on strong support from Cuban-Americans in Florida. That GOP support has eroded in recent years, particularly among young Cuban-Americans. In 2012, Barack Obama captured the Cuban-American vote.
Since then, tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans have moved to Florida after fleeing the island's debt crisis and economic woes, many of them settling in the Orlando area.
Susan MacManus, a commentator and University of South Florida professor, noted intense organizing in the Orlando area and successes in state legislative contests of candidates of Puerto Rican heritage.
"We're really starting to see the exertion of Puerto Rican political power. That has to be helpful to Hillary Clinton," she said.
***"Foolish Beat" is the fourth single, and the first ballad release, from American singer-songwriter-actress Debbie Gibson. Originally recorded in the winter of 1987 for the Dream Tour, months prior to its inclusion on Gibson's album Out of the Blue, the single topped the US Billboard Hot 100 on June 25, 1988, giving Gibson the record for the youngest person to write, produce, and perform a number-one single entirely on her own, at age 17.[1]
In the United Kingdom, the single reached number nine on the UK Singles Chart. The song also reached the top five in Canada and Ireland and the top 10 in the Netherlands and Switzerland. The single was released in Japan as the B-side to "Out of the Blue" on Atlantic Japan 10SW-15.
In 2010, Gibson re-recorded the song as an extra track for the Deluxe Edition release of the Japan-exclusive album Ms. Vocalist.
Music video [ edit ]
In the video, Gibson typecasts herself as a young performer who recently broke up with her boyfriend; although she now regrets jilting him and wants to make amends, he brushes off her efforts to do so. The video ends with him being sent a bouquet, clearly from her; he drops the flowers in a trash can, then walks off into the distance.
Track listing [ edit ]
All songs written by Debbie Gibson - Music Sales Corp., ASCAP "Foolish Beat" (Atlantic DM 86556)
1. (Vocal/Extended Mix/6:46) 2. (Instrumental/4:29)
"Only in My Dreams"
3. (Dream House Mix/10:03)
"Medley: Out of the Blue - Shake Your Love - Only in My Dreams"
Official versions [ edit ]
Foolish Beat [LP Version] 4:20
Foolish Beat [Extended Version] 6:40
Foolish Beat [Extended Pull Version] 9:47
Foolish Beat [Video Version] 4:20
Charts [ edit ]First lady Michelle Obama dances with school children at a “Let’s Move!” event. Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
It was announced today that Michelle Obama is spearheading a hip-hop album for children’s health, and, I should say up front, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that idea. Hip-hop has been one of the dominant forms of music for our youth for a couple decades, and the Obamas themselves represent our first hip-hop presidency. (Never forget: Michelle Obama can teach you how to Dougie.) So of course they would use hip-hop to spread their worthy message.
But the album makes the First Lady seem out of touch. Sure, it features names like Doug E. Fresh and DMC (of Run–), but these are the stars of the Obama generation, not the current one. Similarly, names like Jordin Sparks, Matisyahu, and Travis Barker might be closer to stars of today, but for a “Hip-Hop Public Health” collection, none of them are quite hip-hop. And surely there aren’t any budding junior athletes who care that “Stronger” features “E-Street Band guitarist Nils Lofgren.” For FLOTUS, it’s been a long fall from pulling Beyoncé for the campaign’s first single.
But of all the most embarrassing, most Weird Al-esque song titles here, the most embarrassing isn’t “Veggie Love” or even the more straightforward “We Like Vegetables.” It’s “Hip Hop LEAN.”
As anyone who’s followed hip-hop in the 2000s knows, “lean” isn’t just a body type and a dance move, it’s a drug. Also known as sizzurp, purple drank, and a number of other nicknames, the codeine cocktail is the same drug that’s been linked to the deaths of DJ Screw (who pioneered the lean-influenced chopped and screwed subgenre) and UGK’s Pimp C (who also featured on Three 6 Mafia’s “Sippin’ on Some Sizzurp”). Earlier this year, Lil Wayne’s seizures had the drink back in the news, though Wayne said they were caused only by his epilepsy and “just plain stress, no rest, overworking.”
Which is all to say that it’s a little weird to hear Artie Green and co. repeat “hip hop lean” over and over again on the song’s chorus. I’m not going to tell Wayne what to do, but I’m pretty sure that’s something best avoided on a hip-hop album for children. (It also makes the title of the following track, “Pass the Rock,” seem a little more awkward.)
Surely it was an innocent mistake, but someone in the room (Sasha? Malia?) should have spoken up. Or they should have had kid-friendly rappers who already get contemporary hip-hop, like Y.N.RichKids, who could have maybe pointed this out. (Who could be more perfect for this compilation than the kids behind “Hot Cheetos & Takis”?) For now, the old proverb holds true: “Parents just don’t understand.”Life is much more fun if you live it in the spirit of play and collaboration, working with instead of against others.
Life is not about how fast you run or how high you climb, but how well you bounce.
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.
Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing.
The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.
Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life.
I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Love is a friendship set to music.
In order to be happy oneself it is necessary to make at least one other person happy.
We always believe our first love is our last, and our last love our first.
Everyone in life is gonna hurt you, you just have to figure out which people are worth the pain.
Age does not protect you from love but love to some extent love protects you from age.
You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.
The art of love is largely the art of persistence.
True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.
Yeah, this isn't much since I just combined a bunch famous wise quotes into one big message for everyone, but it's to show everyone that life is wonderful~
So to everyone I love, go on and live your life and make it count~ I'll forever be in your heart~
There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still. God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well. No one ever finds life worth living - one has to make it worth living. Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else. Today is life--the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto. When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one that has opened for us. An unexamined life is not worth living. If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. You can never plan the future by the past. Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it. At the end of their lives, people assess how they've done not in terms of their income but in terms of their spirit, and I beg you to do the same, even if those who came before sometimes failed to do so.True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable. Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you; spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life. Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success. A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself. No friendship is an accident. Friends are God's way of taking care of us. A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down. Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings. Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness. Friendship is the most constant, the most enduring the most basic part of love.One of the most valuable things you can do for your video productions is to add camera movement. I’m not talking about the “shaky cam” fad that seems to be so overdone in too many videos. I’m talking smooth camera slides. Some time ago, I mentioned I was on the look-out for a DIY camera slider. I found a camera slider that met the cheap requirement, but it’s limited to slide distances of only about 20-inches – not bad, but not great. So, I set out to build a slider system that I could transport with a truck but that was very easy to assemble – for about the same price as that little camera slider. See if I accomplished my goal after the break.
I set several criteria for my build:
Cheap – no more than $200, but as close to $100 as possible. Easy to assemble – this had to be something I could teach (in 2 minutes) to a new grip. Off-the shelf parts – I did not want to fabricate anything, mainly because I wanted to be able replicate it easily. Elevated – Most dolly track systems sit on the floor, requiring a relatively smooth surface. Versatile – most of the systems are fixed-width, limiting the size of the tripod dolly that you use. Rugged – It needs to last and withstand various environments.
Rails
The most important part of the dolly track system is the track. It needs to be smooth and sturdy, so that your camera moves smoothly. I found some 10′-6″ metal rails that are used for chain-link fencing. They are about 1.5 inches in diameter. Potentially, this can give you 10′ of slide! You can also use metal electrical conduit. I chose the fence rails because they are galvanized to prevent rust.
Pedestals
There are many ways to elevate track. I considered many alternatives. For instance, I considered something like saw horses, but the problem is that they are either fixed height, or they are adjustable at intervals that are too large to be sure the track stays level in difficult situations (like outdoors). The research for the perfect pedestal was the hardest part of putting this thing together – a search that nearly killed the whole project out of frustration. Finally, I found perfect solution: stack jacks. They are used to support RV’s and Camper shells. The beauty of these things is that they have about 12″ of adjustment, with a screw post!
I bought a total of 6 stack jacks. I modified 4 of them by screwing metal hose clamps to the top of them. The idea is to slide the rails into the clamp at each end of the rail, then tighten the clamps to hold the rails securely. Here is what they look like with the clamp added.
The other two stack jacks are to support the middle of the track. The problem is that I can’t use clamps in the middle since they would be in the way of the dolly. The solution I came up with was pretty easy but required an over night “dry time.” First, I setup the track with the four clamp stands. Then I wrapped the center of the track with some plastic food wrap. I elevated the end clamp jacks about 1/4″ each to raise the track above the center supports, which I placed under the plastic wrapped section of rail. I filled the gap with a liberal amount of silicon sealant. It looked like this during drying:
The next day, I slit the plastic wrap to remove it from the rail but keep it still attached to the stack jack. Then I gently removed the plastic wrap leaving a cushy, concave “bed” for the rail to sit in. Here’s a close-up of the center support before trimming:
End Stops
The last thing you want is your dolly to fall off your elevated track. The solution to this was pretty easy too. Back to the fencing products, I found some end rail clamps. They are meant to provide a “T” connection. I set it up so that the leg of the “T” prevents the dolly from sliding off. I crimped one side to fit inside the other for easy assembly:
Extras.
I also added some foam pads that I had to use indoors to prevent floor scuffing by the stack jacks. I also added the nut drivers needed for the jack clamps and the end-stops.
Judgement Time!
Did I meet all my requirements?
Cheap – YES! The cost of the project is about $120. Easy to assemble – YES! It can be setup in less than 5 minutes. Off-the shelf parts – ALMOST! Everything was off the shelf except for the silicon bedding. Elevated – YES! Can be elevated up to 24-inches from the floor. Versatile – YES! It can be used with full-on tripod dollies, as well as smaller cart type dollies. Rugged – YES! It’s basically all-metal, either galvanized steel or cast aluminum.
Here’s what she looks like in action!
Future Improvements
One thing I am definitely going to add additional “center” supports. The current setup works, but you can induce bouncing if your rig is really heavy. Putting stack jacks at a 2-foot interval instead of 5-foot interval would really firm it up.
Another thing I am still mulling over is a way to easily fasten the center supports to the rail.
I’m also thinking about an easy way to adapt what is already in the kit to be able to be elevated even more – like some kind of adjustable base to mount the stack jack pedestals on.Jan 8, 2017; Milwaukee, WI, USA; Washington Wizards guard Bradley Beal (3) drives for the basket against Milwaukee Bucks guard Tony Snell (21) in the first quarter at BMO Harris Bradley Center. Beal scored 26 points to help the Wizards beat the Bucks 107-101. Mandatory Credit: Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports
The Washington Wizards are locked into the playoffs this season, but the East is a tough conference. Who would be the best and worst teams for the Wizards to face in the first round?
With their win against the Brooklyn Nets this past Friday night, the Washington Wizards have clinched a spot in the 2017 NBA Playoffs. The Eastern Conference is not an easy conference though, so let’s look at who the best and worst opponents for the Wizards would be.
If the season ended today, the first round playoff matchup for the Washington Wizards would be the Milwaukee Bucks, and that might actually be the worst case scenario for them.
Granted, the Bucks only have a 1-3 record this year against the Wizards, but they’re a team that can handle, and possibly beat Washington.
The Bucks have really started to pull things together lately, and that’s been lead by “The Greek Freak”, Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s averaging 23.1 points per game and 8.6 rebounds per game while shooting 52.5%.
So far in March, the Bucks are top-10 in offense and defense and have an 11-4 record this month. While the Wizards would be the favorite in that matchup, the last team they want to face is a team on a hot streak like Milwaukee.
The Wizards defense has been slipping recently, and the Bucks are full of great scorers. Matthew Dellavedova is an excellent outside scorer, and he along with Malcolm Brogdon would certainly keep John Wall and Bradley Beal busy.
Plus, Antetokounmpo would likely overwhelm Otto Porter and Markieff Morris, making the Bucks an overall very difficult matchup for the Wizards to overcome.
However, the best case scenario for the Wizards would be if they faced the Indiana Pacers.
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The Pacers have a similar problem to the Wizards: a lack of depth, and that works to the Wizards advantage because that’s not a weakness the Pacers can easily exploit.
Plus, the Pacers offense just isn’t good enough to cause major issues for the Wizards defense. Indiana typically seems to go with the “give Paul George the ball and see what happens” strategy, and Porter and Morris should be able to handle that, if not shut it down entirely.
Outside of George, the Wizards have an advantage in every matchup. Jeff Teague is no difficult match for Wall, Myles Turner shouldn’t be too much of a challenge for Marcin Gortat or even Ian Mahinmi, and whatever combo of C.J. Miles/Rodney Stuckey/whomever the Pacers go with at shooting guard will be no match for Bradley Beal.
If the Wizards are fortunate enough to go up against the Pacers in the first round, they should make short work of them. Here’s hoping that happens.Robert Lewandowski
Robert Lewandowski's late winner for Borussia Dortmund at Emirates Stadium ended Arsenal's flawless start to their Champions League campaign and threw Group F wide open.
Arsenal were more than a match for last season's beaten finalists for long spells but Lewandowski demonstrated the ruthless streak that was missing when his Poland team faced England in last week's decisive World Cup qualifier at Wembley with a clinical finish eight minutes from time.
Arsenal's remaining Group F fixtures 6 November: Borussia Dortmund (away) 26 November: Marseille (home) 11 December: Napoli (away)
The pain of defeat was increased as Arsenal will surely feel Lewandowski was lucky to still be on the pitch following an earlier elbow on Laurent Koscielny. He was fortunate only to be booked by Swedish referee Jonas Eriksson as a red card would also have ruled him out of Arsenal's forthcoming visit to Dortmund.
Henrikh Mkhitaryan gave Dortmund an early lead but Arsenal showed real character to battle back into contention and equalise through Olivier Giroud before half-time.
Group F was always touted as the closest in the Champions League and one glance at the table confirms this is the case, with Arsenal, Dortmund and Napoli now all on six points, with the Gunners top courtesy of their head to head record.
It made it an unhappy 64th birthday for Arsenal manager Arsenal Wenger. The Gunners still face hazardous trips to Dortmund and Napoli - but they can also take great heart from many aspects of their performance.
Arsenal were without midfielder Mathieu Flamini, who suffered concussion against Norwich City, and they missed him as Dortmund's pressing game held sway in the opening moments.
Prolific Lewandowski After scoring 34 goals last season, Lewandowski's strike against Arsenal was his 10th of this campaign
It is the hallmark of Jurgen Klopp's side, allied to plenty of natural talent, and Arsenal found it impossible to control midfield and play the passing game that has swept them to the top of the Premier League.
Dortmund's relentless pressure on the ball paid off after 16 minutes when Aaron Ramsey, outstanding so far this season, was caught in possession and when Lewandowski fed Mkhitaryan, the man who was a £25m summer transfer target for Liverpool, fired past Wojciech Szczesny from the edge of the area.
It was a deserved reward but, to Arsenal's credit they managed to wrestle control back from the impressive German side and make an impact of their own as the interval approached.
Dortmund defender Mats Hummels showed superb positioning and anticipation to station himself on the line behind goalkeeper Roman Weidenfeller to clear Tomas Rosicky's shot off the line - but it was defensive confusion that led to Arsenal's equaliser five minutes before half-time.
Weidenfeller and Neven Subotic were involved in a mix-up as they moved to clear Bacary Sagna's cross, leaving Giroud with a simple finish as he hammered the ball into the unguarded net.
Jack Wilshere needed lengthy treatment on an ankle injury in the first half after going down chasing the ball into the penalty area with Weidenfeller and it was no surprise when he was replaced by Cazorla after 57 minutes.
The Spaniard almost gave Arsenal the lead after 68 minutes after the first contribution of significance from Mesut Ozil. He found Cazorla on the edge of the area and his shot glanced off the angle of post and bar with Weidenfeller motionless.
Arsenal had
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problems paying medical bills. These country variations likely reflect the combined impact of insurance benefits, levels of cost sharing, and income- or disease-specific protections, such as French provisions protecting those with chronic conditions in care plans. 6
The survey also asked respondents about their access to and use of dental care—a benefit covered for adults in only some of the countries (Appendix 1). 3 A high share of US and New Zealand adults (33 percent and 32 percent, respectively) had gone without dental care because of costs in the past year ( Exhibit 1 ). Germany and the United Kingdom appear to be the most protective in terms of dental cost barriers.
In the United States, rates of forgoing dental care were particularly high for uninsured adults, where one in two had not seen a dentist because of costs. However, dental access concerns appear in other countries as well. More than one-fourth of adults in Australia, France, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom had not visited a dentist or received preventive dental care in the past two years.
Access And Waiting Times
A strong primary care infrastructure is recognized as the cornerstone of a high-performing health care system, offering a critical entry point and a hub for organizing care that is patient centered, coordinated, and comprehensive. Enhanced, accessible primary care that employs teams—including nurses—supported by information systems to help provide, manage, and coordinate care has the potential to improve health outcomes, reduce hospital use, improve equity, and slow the rate of cost growth. 14,15
Although the vast majority of adults in all countries reported having a regular doctor or place of care (data not shown), access experiences varied widely ( Exhibit 2 ). Roughly 70 percent of the respondents in Germany and New Zealand reported having been able to get a same- or next-day appointment the last time they were sick. In contrast, fewer than half of adults in Canada and the United States reported such speedy access. And at least one in four adults in Canada, Norway, and the United States waited six days or more to see a doctor or nurse when sick.
Exhibit 2 Adults’ Access To Health Care And Wait Times In Eleven Countries, 2013 Percent of adults who: Saw a doctor or nurse last time they needed care Heard from the doctor’s office the same day after calling with a question during practice hours a Waited to see a specialist b Country Same or next day Waited 6 days or more Always/often Sometimes/rarely or never Less than 4 weeks 2 months or more AUS 58 14 79 21 51 18 CAN 41 33 67 33 39 29 FRA 57 16 63 37 51 18 GER 76 15 90 10 72 10 NETH 63 14 84 16 75 3 NZ 72 5 80 20 59 19 NOR 52 28 78 22 46 26 SWE 58 22 84 16 54 17 SWI — c — c 82 18 80 3 UK 52 16 75 25 80 7 US (all) 48 26 73 27 76 6 Insured all year 53 21 75 25 77 5 Uninsured 36 ** 40 ** 65 ** 35 ** 70 ** 10
Asked how often they heard back the same day when they called their regular practice with a medical question, German adults were the most likely (90 percent) to say always or often ( Exhibit 2 ). At the low end of the spectrum, 25 percent or more of UK and US adults and 30 percent or more of Canadian and French adults said that this happened only sometimes, rarely, or never.
Access to specialists also varied notably. In Norway and Canada more than one in four of adults needing to see a specialist waited two months or longer ( Exhibit 2 ). In contrast, most (72–80 percent) Swiss, UK, US, Dutch, and German adults said that they were seen within four weeks.
In the United States, lack of insurance undermined access to both primary and specialized care. Compared to those with insurance, uninsured adults were significantly less likely to be seen quickly when they needed care, to be called back by the practice the same day, and to be seen by a specialist within four weeks ( Exhibit 2 ). Same- or next-day access to a provider for insured US adults was also relatively low (53 percent) compared to rates reported in Germany, New Zealand, and the Netherlands—which suggests that there is room to improve primary care access for both the insured and the uninsured in the United States.
After-Hours And E-Mail Access And Emergency Department Use
For primary care to be accessible, it must be available after hours—during the evening and on weekends and holidays—as well as during the workday. Yet fewer than 40 percent of US, Canadian, French, and Swedish adults reported that it was very or somewhat easy to be seen for care after hours without going to the emergency department (ED) ( Exhibit 3 ). In contrast, more than half of the adults in five countries—the United Kingdom had the highest rate, 69 percent—said that getting after-hours care was easy.
Exhibit 3 Reports Of Adults And Primary Care Physicians On After-Hours Care, Emergency Department (ED) Use, And E-Mail Access In Eleven Countries, 2012 And 2013 Percent of adults (2013) or primary care physicians (2012) After-hours care ED use E-mail access to doctor Country Adults report it is somewhat or very easy to obtain a Physicians report they have arrangement b Adults report using ED in the past 2 years With wait of 2 hours or more before being treated c Physicians report patients can e-mail practice with questions or concerns Adults report they can e-mail their regular practice with a medical concern d Adults report e-mailing their regular practice with a medical question in past 2 years d,e AUS 46 81 22 25 21 24 9 CAN 38 46 41 48 11 10 2 FRA 36 76 31 36 39 9 2 GER 56 90 22 23 45 19 3 NETH 56 95 24 17 47 32 20 NZ 54 90 28 14 39 16 5 NOR 58 80 f 28 34 27 22 6 SWE 35 68 32 32 44 20 9 SWI 49 78 28 18 68 29 15 UK 69 95 27 16 35 25 13 US (all) 39 35 39 28 35 28 6 Insured all year 43 — g 36 24 — g 31 7 Uninsured 30 ** — g 48 ** 36 ** — g 19 ** 4
In most of the countries where adults reported easy access—the United Kingdom, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Germany—primary care practices have a statutory responsibility to make arrangements to provide after-hours care. In our 2012 international survey of physicians, 90 percent or more of primary care doctors in these countries confirmed that they had set up arrangements to allow patients to see a doctor or nurse after hours ( Exhibit 3 ).
Relatively frequent use of the ED generally tracked reports of limited access to after-hours care or lack of timely access when sick. One-third or more of adults in the United States, Canada, France, and Sweden reported having used the ED in the past two years. Patients in these countries were also among the most likely to experience long waits in the ED, with more than one in four US adults; roughly one-third of French, Norwegian, and Swedish adults; and nearly half of Canadian adults saying they had waited two hours or more to be treated ( Exhibit 3 ).
Primary care practices have the potential to expand patients’ access beyond visits and phone calls through e-mail and other electronic exchanges. Comparisons of patients’ 2013 survey responses with the 2012 responses of primary care physicians indicate that use of such electronic access is spreading slowly, and that patients may not be informed of or encouraged to use such tools ( Exhibit 3 ). Thirty-two percent of adults in the Netherlands said that they could e-mail their regular practice with a medical concern; the percentages in the other countries were lower. Only 2 percent of patients in Canada and France said they had e-mailed their regular practice with a question; the highest rate of use was in the Netherlands, with 20 percent.
In all of the countries except Australia and Canada, the share of primary care physicians who said that their patients had e-mail access to their practice tended to be far higher than the percentage of patients who were aware of that capacity ( Exhibit 3 ). The gap between patient and physician reports was widest in Switzerland—almost forty percentage points.
US patients’ reports of having e-mail access to their regular practice rivaled responses from the leading countries, especially among the insured ( Exhibit 3 ). For all patients, the United States ranked third among the eleven countries, at 28 percent. However, rates of e-mail use still remain low.
Reflecting their more limited access to primary care, uninsured US adults were more likely than those with insurance to face difficulties getting after-hours care, to seek care in the ED, and to endure long waits when in the ED ( Exhibit 3 ). The uninsured were also less likely than the insured to report having e-mail access to their regular practice (19 percent versus 31 percent).
Administrative Costs And Complexity
Administrative complexity can generate hidden health care costs, requiring time and resources from patients, physicians, and payers. Complying with coverage restrictions, billing documentation, and other regulations can elevate the price and erode the quality of interactions with the health system.
In terms of just the costs to insurers of health insurance administration—that is, without including administrative costs for physicians or hospitals—the United States is an outlier. According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 16 in 2011, US health insurers 17 spent $606 per person on administrative costs—more than two times the amount in the next-highest country participating in the survey ( Exhibit 4 ). Even the multipayer Swiss and Dutch private insurance systems operate with less than half of the US per person administrative overhead. 18
Exhibit 4 Administrative Costs And Complexity Of Health Insurance In Eleven Countries, 2012 And 2013 Percent of adults reporting, in the past year: Country Per capita spending on health insurance administration, 2011 a “Spent a lot of time on paperwork or disputes” for medical bills or insurance, 2013 b “Insurance denied payment” or “did not pay as much as expected,” 2013 b Had either difficulty, 2013 b Percent of primary care physicians reporting the time they or their staff spend getting patients needed care because of coverage restrictions is a major problem, 2012 c AUS $70 6 15 16 11 CAN 148 5 14 15 23 FRA 277 10 17 23 20 GER 237 8 14 17 41 NETH 199 9 13 19 28 NZ 128 4 6 7 18 NOR 35 7 3 8 12 SWE 55 2 3 4 12 SWI 266 16 16 25 24 UK — d 2 3 4 10 US 606 18 28 32 54
Insurance-related complexity costs patients time. When asked about administrative hassles in the 2013 survey, US and Swiss adults were the most likely to report that they had spent “a lot of time on paperwork or disputes” concerning medical bills or insurance in the past year ( Exhibit 4 ). And adults in the United States were more likely than those in any other country to say that their insurance had denied them payment or had not paid them as much as they had expected. About one in three US adults reported having either concern, attesting to the lack of transparency and standardization of benefits coverage, the amount of paperwork required, and the complexity of the US health insurance system. 19
Notably, US adults younger than age sixty-five were more likely to cite administrative concerns than were adults who were older and thus eligible for Medicare (Appendix 3). 3 This difference may reflect the more stable and more protective coverage available to older adults. US adults ages sixty-five and older were also far less likely than younger adults to go without care because of costs or to have serious problems paying medical bills.
The United States also stood out in the 2012 survey of physicians in eleven countries for time-consuming insurance-related complexity. Fifty-four percent of US primary care physicians said that the amount of time that they and their staff spent dealing with coverage restrictions was a “major problem,” a significantly higher percentage than that in any other country ( Exhibit 4 ). In only two other countries, Germany and the Netherlands, did more than a quarter of the physicians report time-consuming insurance problems.
Countries whose health systems operate on a “National Health Service” model—New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—had lower administrative costs than the other study countries, based on OECD data. They also tended to have relatively fewer patients or physicians who complained about spending time on insurance-related paperwork, constraints, or disputes.
In contrast, countries where private insurers play a larger role, including offering supplemental insurance with varying benefits, and where patients have higher cost sharing tended to have higher administrative costs or more patient or provider concerns. Notably, in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, patients’ concerns about denial of payments were concentrated among people who had private supplemental coverage (data not shown).
System Views
Repeating a question asked since 1998, the 2013 survey solicited adults’ overall views of their country’s health system—whether it needed only minor changes, fundamental changes, or to be completely rebuilt. Perhaps reflecting issues related to access, cost, and complexity in the US system, adults in that country were by far the most negative, with three out of four saying that the health system needed to undergo fundamental change or to be rebuilt ( Exhibit 5 ). US calls for change were strongly associated with forgone care because of costs, struggles to pay bills, waits for primary care, lack of after-hours access, and insurance complexity (Appendix 4). 3 Exhibit 5 Adults’ Views Of The Health System In Eleven Countries, 2013 a Per capita spending adjusted for differences in cost of living. Australian data are from 2010. SOURCES 2013 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey in Eleven Countries; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD health data 2013 (see Note 16 in text). NOTES Excluding respondents who did not answer the question. Between-country significance tests are shown in online Appendix 9 (see Note 3 in text). The three response options were that the health system “works well, only minor changes needed”; “needs fundamental changes”; and “needs to be completely rebuilt.”Per capita spending adjusted for differences in cost of living. Australian data are from 2010.
Half or more of the Dutch, Swiss, and UK respondents said that their system worked well and needed only minor changes ( Exhibit 5 ). Compared to US adults, adults in the other ten countries were more likely to opt for minor changes and less likely to call for rebuilding the health system. Within the countries, respondents’ views were related to their experiences: In countries with long waits for care or high cost burdens, people calling for major change were more likely to have faced such problems (Appendix 4). 3
Implications
As the United States proceeds to implement insurance expansions and market reforms, this study underscores the vulnerability of the uninsured and the importance of successfully expanding coverage. At the same time, the variable experiences across countries with universal coverage indicate that having insurance is important but not sufficient to ensure timely or affordable access. Study findings across countries suggest the importance of calibrating any cost sharing in insurance policies to people’s ability to pay; providing payment as well as regulatory support for increased access to primary care, including after-hours care; and being alert to the time and resources required to deal with insurance complexity. Looking forward, countries can examine their own and others’ experiences as they consider reforms that may have an impact on access or affordability.
Insurance Design And Affordability
In this study, US adults—both the insured and the uninsured—were more likely than adults in other countries to report going without care because of costs, having high out-of-pocket costs, and having difficulty paying medical bills. The experiences in Switzerland and other countries where mandatory insurance includes both deductibles and copayments indicate that it is possible to incentivize patients to be sensitive to price yet protect them against undue financial burdens when they are sick.
Reforms scheduled under the Affordable Care Act provide for subsidies to lower cost sharing for those with incomes below specified thresholds as well as reductions in premiums for people with low or modest incomes. However, by international standards, cost-sharing exposure will remain high for those with low incomes. Also, states will have considerable leeway in insurance design for middle- and high-income families, with annual out-of-pocket maximums and deductibles that will continue to be high compared to those in other countries. For people with chronic, ongoing conditions, the result could be continued high medical cost burdens.
To avoid such cumulative costs and resulting barriers to effective care, France provides for either low or no cost sharing for treatments that fall within care plans for chronically ill patients. In effect, this approach protects patients’ access while ensuring that they receive care according to clinical guidelines. Australia provides additional funds to cap patients’ out-of-pocket expenses, and Germany limits out-of-pocket spending relative to income, with lower thresholds for sicker patients. As the US reforms take hold, the purchasers of care—states, private insurers, and employers—could consider how such insurance design provisions could evolve in tandem with efforts to hold care systems accountable for health outcomes, patients’ experiences, and costs.
The scope of covered benefits also makes a difference. Across countries, dental care is least often covered for adults (and will not be covered under scheduled US reforms). This study’s findings indicate that there is room to improve dental access in multiple countries. This could include incorporating at least preventive dental care into core benefit designs, in recognition of the fact that basic dental care can provide early warnings of potentially serious physical as well as dental risks.
Insurance And Primary Care
Insurance design and payment policies also matter for access and countries’ primary care infrastructure. In increasing primary care access, again the United States and other countries can learn from international as well as domestic experiences. The Dutch and UK systems, for example, exempt primary care from deductibles and cost sharing; provide direct support for after-hours care cooperatives and other arrangements; and pay primary care practices in ways that support both ready access to care and the addition of nurses and other staff to primary care teams trained to provide, manage, and coordinate care. 20
The high rates of ED use associated with long waits for primary care in the United States (including among insured patients) and several other countries underscore the importance of 24/7 primary care coverage in terms of overall system cost and resource allocation. Past international surveys of primary care physicians and “sicker” patients—those who have recently been hospitalized, are in poor health, or both—reveal discontinuities and often poor flow of information back to primary care providers for patients who are seen in emergency departments. 12,21 Insurers as payers have access to this information and could do more to facilitate its flow, such as supporting information exchange for practices that are not formally linked to integrated systems.
Insurance Complexity
The experiences of patients and physicians in other countries regarding the time-consuming complexity of insurance also provide potential insights for the United States. Although the Dutch, Swiss, and German health care systems all rely on competitive insurance markets, each of these countries has standardized benefits and both more-standardized payment methods across insurers and more-centralized quality and regulatory reporting systems, compared to the United States.
A recent Institute of Medicine study estimated that administrative layers throughout the US health insurance and care system add as much as $360 billion per year to the cost of health care—and much of that sum was deemed to be wasted, with little or no return in value. 22 Evidence from other countries suggests opportunities to reduce such costs. The survey results further indicate the potential to reduce patients’ frustration and improve their views of the US health system.
Conversely, the US experience provides a cautionary example for other countries of the potential consequences of insurance complexity. Recent studies 23 suggest that countries seeking to vary their insurance designs to introduce incentives for patients to find and use high-value care may increase administrative costs. By sharing their experiences, all countries will be better able to ensure that resources spent on administrative costs yield net returns.
Cost Control
A key challenge for the United States is its already high level of health spending, which is 50–167 percent higher per capita than in the other study countries. The higher costs are particularly notable when comparing costs of hip and knee replacements and prescription medicines. 24 These costs undermine the financial protections offered by insurance and drive premiums up. Sustaining access and affordability will likely require systemic reforms to control costs, including payment reforms to make care systems more accountable for health and cost outcomes.
Although the level of health care costs in the United States is particularly high, all of the countries face health care spending growth rates that exceed the general growth rate of the economy. Holding the line will require creative responses and vigilance regarding insurance design to achieve the joint goals of safeguarding access, improving health outcomes, and meeting public expectations of high quality.
Support For Reform
Polls in the United States show mixed public support and lack of knowledge about the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. 25 Yet in the survey most US adults called for major change, with a minority preferring the status quo. People who had experienced problems with access to or affordability of care or who had time-consuming insurance problems had more negative views than people who had not had such problems. The areas of access, affordability, and insurance complexity provide key indicators to monitor over time in the United States as well as other countries.
Looking forward, the study indicates likely public support in the United States for reforms if they succeed in improving access and affordability, strengthening primary care, and reducing insurance complexity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study was supported by the Commonwealth Fund. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Commonwealth Fund, its directors, or its officers. [ Published online November 13, 2013. ]
NOTESPORTLAND, Ore. — More than 75 people attended Wednesday's public meeting in Southeast Portland to convince the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles to create a third gender option to the state's driver's licenses and identification cards.
The DMV held another public hearing in Eugene recently. More than 50 people attended that meeting.
Oregon DMV spokesman David House says of the approximately 50 people who attended, 22 testified. All of them, he said, were in support of the DMV adding a third gender option.
If the DMV approves the change, Oregon would become the first U.S. state to allow residents to identify as "non-binary," neither male nor female. The designation would be signified by an "X."
Last year, a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge allowed Portland Army veteran Jaime Shupe to legally identify as neither male nor female. Legal experts believed the ruling was a first in the United States.
In doing so, it required the state to explore a third gender option.
Basic Rights Oregon Co-Executive Director Nancy Haque says it validates those who identify as transgender.
"There're transgender people and there has always been," Haque told KATU. "It's just that we're at a point in society where we are recognizing the rights of transgender people."
According to The Williams Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles, an estimated 20,000 Oregonians identify as transgender, and 1.4 million nationwide.
"The person's name is still their name. Their height is still their height. I don't think it changes anything because our gender shouldn't make a difference," Haque told KATU. "Gender is a spectrum, and along the spectrum are many people who do not identify as either a male or female."
House told KATU for the past year, the DMV consulted with stakeholders, including local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, insurance companies and organizations. He says, if approved, the ID could be used out of state, airports and on legal documents without a problem.
"When a state updates the format of the driver license: upgrades, its security features, for example, there is a national system to share that information with other DMVs," House said. "So, if I show up to another state and show them this totally new driver's license, they are already aware of it."
House says the DMV will review all testimony, and then decide how to best change the DMV's administrative rule. Once that is complete, it may only take a month for non-binary designated identification cards and driver's licenses to become available.
You can still submit testimony by mailing a letter addressed to the DMV at 1905 Lana Avenue NE, Salem, Oregon 97314, or by emailing Lauri Kunze at: [email protected] News has issued a correction to a story that was published last week which labelled Breitbart editor MILO a “white nationalist troll.”
The article, which was originally titled “Leslie Jones Rips Simon & Schuster for Publishing Book by White Nationalist Troll Milo Yiannopoulos,” was authored by NBC News staff writer Emma Margolin.
In addition to the article’s title, the original version also included a passage that labeled MILO a “white nationalist troll.”
“Leslie Jones Rips Simon & Schuster for Publishing Book by White Nationalist Troll Milo Yiannopoulos.” The article focuses on disparaging comments that Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones made about MILO’s recent book deal with Simon & Schuster,” Margolin wrote in the original article, which can still be viewed in an archived format.
In addition to the changes, NBC News issued a correction at the bottom of the article, claiming that it was a mistake to label MILO a white nationalist. The correction suggests that the decision to call MILO a “white nationalist” stemmed from MILO claiming to be an “occasional fellow traveler” with the alt-right movement, which NBC News says promotes white nationalist values:
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article referred to Milo Yiannopoulos as a “white nationalist.” Instead, he has called himself a “chronicler of, and occasional fellow traveler with the alt-right,” which espouses white nationalist views.
The alt-right has repeatedly disassociated itself with MILO, declaring on more than one occasion that he is not a member of their movement.
Despite the changes, the URL for the piece still reflects the article’s original title, meaning that “white nationalist” still appears in the user’s browser when they visit the story.
Earlier this week, USA Today issued a correction after erroneously labeling MILO a “white nationalist,” “racist,” and “alt-right.”Last week, Jon Corzine testified before Congress that he had no idea that the company he ran into the ground, MF Global, had borrowed money from customer accounts. Corzine might end up wishing that he’d just taken the Fifth instead. A witness directly contradicted his claim in Senate testimony yesterday, saying that Corzine not only knew about the raids on customer accounts, he ordered at least one of them himself:
The head of the private exchange tasked with overseeing MF Global said Tuesday that Jon Corzine may have been aware of a transfer of client funds from the firm he formerly led, possibly contradicting the former governor and senator’s statements under oath that he had no knowledge of the events that resulted in the disappearance of $1.2 billion in customer funds. In a hearing before the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, Terrence A. Duffy, the chief executive of CME Group, said a senior female executive of MF Global told a CME auditor that Corzine — the former chief executive officer and chairman of the firm — was aware of a $175 million loan of customer money to a European affiliate of the now-bankrupt commodities brokerage. “Mr. Corzine was aware because our employee had heard this, on the phone—‘Send back 175’ — and said he was aware of this loan,” Duffy told the Senate committee. … Duffy didn’t elaborate on the exact nature of the $175 million loan that Corzine had allegedly known of, or whether that specific loan was among those that were illegal and improper. Futures firms are required to segregate customer money from the firm’s own funds, though there are circumstances under which moving customer money is permitted, provided there is sufficient collateral. “The only thing I can tell you [is] that MF Global transferred customer money to its broker dealer, and that Mr. Corzine was aware of the loans being made from segregated accounts,” he said. When asked for elaboration, a CME spokesman said the firm would not comment beyond the remarks Duffy made at the hearing.
If that testimony holds up, Corzine has just set himself up for a perjury charge on top of his other woes. That is a materially false statement of a kind that demands perjury prosecution; the entire point of the hearing was to determine how customers lost $1.2 billion in the collapse. Giving knowingly-false testimony under oath to Congress could add several years to whatever sentence Corzine eventually gets.
Zero Hedge caught this yesterday:
Following another boring day of hemming and hewing, during which Corzine repeatedly exhibited unbearable amnesia and said he had no knowledge of virtually anything until Sunday night, here comes the CME Executive Chairman Terry Duffy, under oath, with what Roberts said “is a bomb” statement which basically says that Corzine lied under oath. Specifically, according to Duffy’s remarks during the Q&A, an MF Global employee, a woman, advised the CME that Corzine had been aware of a $175 million loan made to Euro affiliates just days prior to the bankruptcy: a loan which effectively was that of commingled customer accounts, and more importantly a refutation of previous statement under oath by the man who was “financial advisor” to none other than the vice president of the United States who said he did not know about this until late on Sunday. This was not in his prepared testimony.
This is why defense attorneys try to get their clients to take the Fifth in any hearing that comes before prosecutions. It’s too easy to get tripped up by hostile questioners even if one isn’t intending to offer false and/or misleading testimony. Taking the Fifth looks bad politically, but at the point where a client is facing a big SEC investigation, Congress is holding hearings, and over a billion dollars has gone missing, a competent defense attorney — or even one just out of law school — knows that the client’s political life is over anyway.
If confirmed, will this change the media coverage of Corzine and the MF Global scandal? Two of the three broadcast networks have avoided even mentioning that the former New Jersey governor and US Senator is a Democrat, and no one else is bothering to mention that Corzine was one of Obama’s biggest bundlers in this cycle, as well as Obama’s liaison to Wall Street for ginning up big bucks for the re-election campaign. I seem to recall the media getting into a lather over Ken Lay’s much less concrete connections to George W. Bush after Enron’s collapse.Judge Dale, retired
Thursday, 11 April 2013
THE SOVEREIGN CITIZEN by: Judge Dale, retired
Our federal government has instructed our federal, state and local police agencies that everyone who purports to be a SOVEREIGN should be TREATED as a TERRORIST! They have also brainwashed the American public into believing that being a SOVEREIGN is anti-American and unpatriotic! Perhaps this is: “The POT calling the KETTLE black?”
WHAT IS SOVEREIGNTY? It is the inherent right and prerogative of a civilized people to rule itself, and to dictate all of the forms and conditions of the institutions it sets up to carry out this rule. Ironically, the U.S. SUPREME COURT agrees with those people who claim to be SOVEREIGN citizens of the American Republic!
Bond vs. UNITED STATES, 529 US 334 – 2000, The Supreme Court held that the American People are in fact Sovereign and not the States or the Government. The court went on to define that local, state and federal law enforcement officers were committing unlawful actions against the Sovereign People by the enforcement of the laws and are personally liable for their actions.
Bond v. United States, 529 US 334 – 2000 – Supreme Court – Cited by 761 litigants in other cases.
Bond v. US, 131 S. Ct. 2355 – 2011 – Supreme Court – Cited by 306 “ “
Bond v. US, 1 F. 3d 631 – 1993 – Court of Appeals, 7th – Cited by 66 “ “
What are the implications of this 2000, U. S. Supreme Court ruling?
1] The delegates to the first Federal Convention prohibited the use of corporations by all governments representing the American Republic. Therefore, all of these corporate governments and their corporate laws are a usurpation of the organic Constitution of the United States of America. All State Governments are now sub-corporations of the Federal Government, making all Courts and all law enforcement personnel, corporate federal agencies or employees. [See: James Madison Journal of the Federal Convention, Vol. 2, P. 722] and [Pull up your State Code on your PC and search the Code for the words “District of Columbia” and “Federal Government.” You will receive about 1000 references linking your state to the federal government.]
2] The state and federal government is a corporation and therefore the Congress, State Legislatures, City Councils, Municipalities and all State and Federal Courts are corporate entities posing as Constitutional branches of government.
3] Corporations are privately owned businesses, meaning that the Corporate United States belongs to one or more private individuals, which is always governed by a Board of Directors. The Corporate United States is privately owned by a group of European Royal and Elite individuals tied to the Federal Reserve System and the letters of incorporation are recorded in the Vatican. The President of the United States is actually the CEO of the United States and the Congress and all others are corporate employees. Everything they do is in the interest of the corporate owners! I can’t access those documents because of National Security.
4] In order to promulgate and enforce Criminal Laws to govern the SOVEREIGN public, government must be SOVEREIGN too, which is an accepted RULE of LAW derived from the, Ancient Law of Kings. Corporations are not and can never be SOVEREIGN. They are not real, they are a fiction and only exist on paper.
5] Therefore, all laws created by these government corporations are private corporate regulations called public law, statutes, codes and ordinances to conceal their true nature. Do the Judge and your lawyer know about this? You bet they do!
6] Since these government bodies are not SOVEREIGN, they cannot promulgate or enforce CRIMINAL LAWS; they can only create and enforce CIVIL LAWS, which are duty bound to comply with the LAW of CONTRACTS. The Law of Contracts requires signed written agreements and complete transparency! Did you ever agree to be arrested and tried under any of their corporate statutes? For that matter, did you ever agree to contract with them by agreeing to be sued for violating their corporate regulations?
[Citations and Complaints are contracts but they lack transparency because you were never told what might happen to you if you agree to contract, and that you had a right to refuse the accommodation!]
7] Do any of Americas Courts have Jurisdiction over a SOVEREIGN? Yes … but only by your consent to be judged by the Court. Can they compel [Summon or Subpoena] you to appear or participate in their process? No … they can’t compel you and Yes … they can ask but you can reject the accommodation in writing and nothing can be done about it because you have refused to give the court jurisdiction over you!
8] Enforcement of these corporate statutes by local, state and federal law enforcement officers are unlawful actions being committed against the SOVEREIGN public and these officers can be held personally liable for their actions. [Bond v. U.S., 529 US 334-2000]
9] There being no Constitutional Criminal Laws or Transparency in the American Justice System, everyone arrested, convicted and sentenced to prison under these CIVIL LAWS are in prison by CONSENT and therein, all American Jails are actually DEBTORS PRISONS!
10] Most of the County and State Prisons and all of the Federal Prisons are privately owned corporate businesses for profit, which kick back to the sentencing Judges. The Bureau of Prisons Privatization Management Branch provides general oversight, for these institutions. So if you are convicted in these Courts, you can expect to serve some jail time! Now you know why America has such high prison populations!
11] Can the State Government and Courts take Custody of your children? Only with your consent, otherwise their agents and officers can be held personally liable for their actions! Orphans are a different matter and can become wards of the Court until emancipated.
Corporate governments are a usurpation of the organic American Constitution and this corporatist onslaught in America has since its creation, been an ANTI-SOVEREIGN and TERRORIST REGIME and are in fact the real TERRORIST and TRAITORS to the American Republic.
Blessings, Judge Dale, retired
Related
Is Our Country a Corporation?
Democratic-Federal Franchise
We are the Enemies of the State
Our Government is a Corporation... and so are Our Schools
See also: The Great American Adventure, by Judge Dale
AdvertisementsHANOVER, Germany (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Germany on Sunday to protests over his human rights and democracy record and a warning from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Russia needed an active civil society to flourish.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin pose for photographers before they officially open the Hanover Messe, industrial trade fair, in Hanover April 7, 2013. Russia is the partner country of the Hanover fair 2013, which runs from April 8 -12. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer
Putin’s visit to Germany and the Netherlands, Moscow’s biggest trade partners in Europe, was supposed to focus on trade but comes at an awkward time after a wave of state inspections of foreign-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Russia, much criticized abroad.
In her address at the opening of an industrial fair spotlighting Russian business, Merkel told Putin Russia was propped by its raw material deposits and huge investment in infrastructure but Germany could help it in its aims to innovate and diversify.
“We believe this can happen most successfully when there is an active civil society,” she said.
“We must intensify these discussions,
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appell began pushing NSW to give Warner a chance in the Shield but the best minds at the state were convinced he was a short-form slugger.
Davey and Viru: peas in a pod © Getty Images
"During my first year as head coach of the Centre of Excellence he came up in the winter and I got to see there was something quite extraordinary and needed to be encouraged," Chappell says. "He just needed to have a penny drop about the difference between how you practise to be a good hitter and how you practise to be a good batsman."
In the dying days of the 2008-09 Shield season NSW relented and gave him a game, but had not changed their opinion. The following season he was given just three starts and the same again the next summer.
"I was close to leaving," Warner says. "We speak about how many players who are playing for Australia now started in NSW and moved elsewhere to get a chance. The opportunity you get from moving is fantastic and it is great to see other states backing these players' potential.
"I played about seven or eight one-day games but they wouldn't consider me for the Shield team. They said, 'Score more runs.' I scored something like seven hundreds and a double-hundred in grade cricket and 2nd XI, but I don't know, I just didn't see eye to eye with the coach, I felt like I was an outcast in a way. I found it hard to get along with him."
Warner only stayed when a group, including Khawaja, Hughes and Cowan, left the state and created a space in the side for him.
Mentors
It's hard to put your finger on exactly what it was that NSW did not like about Warner, and it's hard to shake the idea that they just didn't like the way he went about it. Confident to the point of cocky, he was reverse-engineering cricket: had an IPL contract before he'd played T20 for his country, played T20 for his country before he'd played first-class for his state, belted the ball before he'd block it. The last was something that stuck in many throats and almost tripped up his Test career.
If you watched Warner's 89 closely you may have noticed him occasionally rehearsing a leave or a defence, almost as if he was sending out a message
Behind the scenes there were reservations about the suburban boy and his attitude. Warner should have recognised Michael Brown's name when he called because the year before, the same man had seen him, Mark Cosgrove and Aaron Finch sent home from Australia's cricket academy for repeatedly ignoring warnings to keep their rooms tidy. It was a junior school version of Homeworkgate and cost the trio a chance to play on a tour of India the following month.
But you couldn't change Warner. What you saw was what you got. You could mould the talent and it would be people like Chappell and batting coach Trent Woodhill who understood that, but not everyone else did. Former junior team-mate Max Abbott remembers when a coach thought the batsman hit the ball in the air too often. "He made him bat right-handed for almost a season," he recalls. Sense eventually prevailed, but perhaps the lesson wasn't a complete waste. These days Warner has one of the better switch hits in cricket.
Rejected at home, Warner found believers in the unlikeliest of places. In Delhi during his first IPL season Virender Sehwag offered words of encouragement.
"Sehwag said to me, 'You'll be a better Test player than you are a T20 player' and even I thought that was going a bit far," Warner recalls. "I told him I hadn't played a first-class game but he said to me it didn't matter. He said the way I hit the ball I would score a lot of runs in Test cricket because the fields are up and if the ball is there you just hit it past them or over them. Once you start hitting the ball you have the edge over them."
Dr Jekyll: Warner showed in his Hobart innings against New Zealand that he could also bat circumspectly © Getty Images
Chappell, who had observed Sehwag's methods closely during his time as India coach, was of a similar mind. But he became so frustrated with NSW's reluctance, he had Warner picked for an Australia A tour of Zimbabwe to give him some exposure by bypassing the state system.
"He was a project player and one we wanted to fire up if we could, so we spent quite a bit of time with him to get him to understand [the difference between good hitting and good batting]," Chappell says. "So much so that we kicked him out of the nets twice in Zimbabwe."
Warner would have a 20-minute slog at practice out of habit. Used to limited time at club and state practice, he got his eye in and then went for it, slogging everything. Chappell and the Australia A coach Troy Cooley took him aside and told him to use his time better.
"He said, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah', and he went back in the next day and started slogging every ball," Chappell remembers. "I said, 'Righto Dave, that's the end', and he said, 'I have just started', and I said that's the point. 'You haven't started and if you won't do it properly you won't bat at all.' And so he sulked and the next day he went back and did the same thing, so we called him out again and said, 'Mate, you won't get a hit until you start doing it properly.' He started doing it properly and was allowed to finish his training sessions. I think that helped get the message across that if he wanted to be considered for long-form cricket he had to start practising for it and take his talent seriously."
"He cannot be a conventional batsman. If you try and change that you will destroy him"
When Warner wants to, he learns fast and he proved it by making 211 against a Zimbabwe XI in an innings that took nearly eight hours. Chappell recognises that ordinary people are rarely extraordinary.
"I have always found David really good, albeit headstrong, but that's part of his attraction. He's a risk-taker. He doesn't look at the world in the same way we do. He doesn't look at batting the same way we look at it, and that's why he is what he is."
Warner eventually got a chance in the Australian Test side in 2011 as the selectors cast about for openers to fill the void left after the retirements of Hayden and Langer and the axing of Katich. In his second Test he scored a sedate 170-ball century, though Australia lost a thriller to New Zealand. But he revealed the true nature of the beast three games later in belting 180 from just 159 balls against India.
In the following years, he lost his rhythm. He scored a century in the second Test of the 2012-13 home series against South Africa but Chappell believes he started to move away from his natural game after being encouraged to work on his defence.
All up in your grill: Warner is happy to get into confrontations and has his team's backing when he does © Getty Images
"He cannot be a conventional batsman. If you try and change that you will destroy him. You have to get him to become a better decision-maker." Warner failed to reach triple figures in his next 23 Test innings, and like the rest of the team he hit his lowest point in India early in 2013. Woodhill was watching from the sidelines with concern. Woodhill was part-time at NSW when Warner began and had made him a personal project. He has stayed in the background as a sounding board ever since. They met at the start of the 2013-14 season at a café in Sydney and got back to their core philosophy: attack balls that are there to be hit and defence will look after itself.
The chat worked. Warner hit three centuries in four 50-over domestic games, including 197 against Victoria, which would be the closest to a List A double-hundred in Australia until July 2014. He began the Ashes with 124 in Brisbane, hit an unbeaten 83 in Adelaide and 112 in Perth. In the following series, against South Africa, he scored 12, 115, 70, 66, 135 and 145. Last summer he wiped the tears from his eyes to open the batting against India in Adelaide. Days earlier he'd been unable to bat in the nets, but in the middle he struck out in grief at the death of his friend Hughes, clubbing the first, fourth and sixth deliveries he faced to the boundary. At the end of the fourth over he was 35, at the end of the 37th he was 100 and India were chasing the match and the series.
Trouble
Ahead of the 2015 World Cup, the ICC chief executive David Richardson adopted his sternest tone and drew a line in the sand on bad behaviour. "There are a few serial offenders," he said. "You know the names better than I do. And for that kind of behaviour, the message is going out loud and clear that it's not acceptable."
Confident to the point of cocky, Warner was reverse-engineering cricket
Richardson couldn't have been more headmasterly if he had said, "You know who you are" and couldn't have been clearer who he meant if he had held up a picture of Warner. A serial minor offender, Warner is Australia's pit bull, licensed to sledge and intimidate opposition batsmen and bowlers. His aggressive, confrontational behaviour is uncomfortable for many, but is clearly sanctioned by the team hierarchy, who forever go on about knowing where lines are and accepting punishments when they are crossed. For those wondering where the line is, take a look at Warner: he is almost always on it or has just crossed it. England and India have their Warners, but there is something about his pugnacious approach that draws the particular ire of purists.
Abbott, his former junior team-mate, recalls that even as a young player Warner had edginess. "He was always the one to get stuck into the opposition. He did it with the bat, belting them to all parts, and he was like that fielding too. It is the way he is as a person. He feels confident in most situations, he won't back down when attacked, and sometimes it gets him into a bit of trouble, but nothing serious."
Sometimes he can't help himself. His infamous observation during the 2013-14 Ashes about Jonathan Trott looking afraid at the crease was poorly timed but classic Warner. He is no flat-bat diplomat and he proved it again by suggesting that the South Africans had overstepped the line with their ball management in Port Elizabeth. Warner wasn't raised in an environment where you politely ignore an opponent's flaws or failings, and petty fines from officials are not going to stop him.
Warner got into a fracas with Joe Root during Mickey Arthur's tenure as Australia coach: "I think what happened was the last straw for [Arthur] and they used it as a reason to get rid of him" © Getty Images
Warner took a long time to realise that playing hard on the field was not commensurate with playing hard off it. Single, wealthy and restless, long tours and tournaments drove him to distraction. He was always looking for a way to fill in evenings, pacing corridors, seeking company in hotel bars and enjoying the privileges of being an elite sportsman.
Being sent down from the Institute of Sport was his first clash with cricket authority but far from his last. In early 2013 his career had hit a difficult patch. Runs weren't coming and he'd got away from what made him a good player. Coaches were into his ear about working on defence, but it was a mindset that tripped him up. It was off-field troubles, though, that eventually cost Warner a place in the Test team. It was a bad period for Australian cricket. The side lost 4-0 in India and had been rocked by Homeworkgate, which Warner had managed to sidestep. But he was getting worn down. The side had travelled to India at the end of the home summer; he had stayed on for the IPL and was starting to go stir-crazy.
In the middle of the IPL, Warner launched into an attack that wouldn't be unfamiliar to opposition batsmen. Unfortunately, this time he chose to do it via social media against a pair of Australia's most respected cricket reporters.
"Sehwag said to me, 'You'll be a better Test player than you are a T20 player' and even I thought that was going a bit far"
"It was about 3am and the papers had just come out in Australia and a mate sent me a link to the story about fixing with a picture of me, but nothing about me in the story," he recalls. "You can't do that. People who read a paper look at the headline and the picture and make a link and that really upset me. I admit I had a bit of booze in me, but I was so frustrated. The story was about Sreesanth and his mates fixing, but it looked like it was about me. If I hadn't called that journo an 'old fart' or whatever, I wouldn't have got in trouble."
Warner's heated middle-of-the-night exchange earned him a fine from CA but sent a shiver through the organisation. They were wary of his headstrong ways and worried that one day it could land everybody in serious trouble. A storm was brewing. Things got worse when the caravan moved to England for the Champions Trophy in June and Warner headed out to a famous Australian theme pub in Birmingham with some team-mates after their defeat to England. The opposition were in the same bar and at 1.30am Warner got involved in a scuffle with Joe Root and threw a punch. The matter was kept secret by those involved, but when coach Mickey Arthur found out he placed the batsman on an "amber alert". When Sutherland heard he reacted angrily and demanded Warner be kept out of the next Champions Trophy match and ordered a disciplinary hearing.
"I was in a bad place," Warner says. "I had been in India for 14 weeks and hadn't seen my family and there was a lot of personal stuff going on at home that was causing me a lot of stress and pain. I can't use that as an excuse. That would be a cop-out. That is my stuff to deal with and no excuse for what I did. I was drunk, I didn't like the guy and I might have done what I did anyway. I did the right thing by ringing him, and when we left it everything was fine but someone else got a hold of it and wanted to make some mileage out of it, and you know English journalism."
With partner Candice Falzon and daughter Ivy at Mt Eden, Auckland, during the 2015 World Cup © Getty Images
Some in the media and the public called for him to be sent home. Instead Warner was suspended until the start of the Ashes, a penalty that meant he missed the tour games and could not be chosen for the first Test. He missed the first two Tests and it was at this stage that people began to ask whether the Matraville boy was too much of a problem child. He had shown hints of brilliance, but not enough consistency. The fallout was greater than anybody suspected. It led directly to Arthur, a great fan of Warner, losing his job as coach.
"I feel bad because it was all around the same time and I think what happened was the last straw for him and they used it as a reason to get rid of him," Warner says. "Obviously there was other stuff they weren't happy about. I have spoken to him and he was understanding. He is a gentleman and says, 'Don't be silly, it has nothing to do with you', but credit to the guy. He is a very, very, very nice man. I owe him a lot."
Warner concedes he was running off the rails in this period, but it is also around this time that he met triathlete Candice Falzon, a down-to-earth girl from Maroubra beach. They fell in love, and her influence has been profound. The disciplines of her sport are far greater than cricket's, or at least cricket the way Warner approached it. She urged him to begin early-morning training sessions with her and change his ways. Her presence curtailed his bar-crawling and come the Australian summer he was as fit and focused as he had ever been. He began the 2013-14 season with a string of domestic one-day failures and quickly began to despair. His mates were telling him to come out, that he always scored runs when balancing a healthy social life with his sport. He was ready to give it up but Falzon begged him to give their new routine one more chance. He scored a hundred next game. And then another and another.
A serial minor offender, Warner is the team's pit bull, licensed to sledge and intimidate opposition batsmen and bowlers
Warner, however, has hardly retreated to a life of modesty and good manners. The various code-of-conduct breaches continue, meaning that he entered the World Cup on threat of another suspension. But you take what you get with Warner, says coach Woodhill.
"It is great to see a young cricketer who doesn't give the press cliché after cliché, one who doesn't leave you to write, 'Another polished innings from David Warner' and 'He is taking it one innings at a time'. It is good to see he has a bit of personality about him and he is an entertainer. You pay money to see these guys play but you want to be entertained."
Blue sky mining
I've spent plenty of years on Warner's trail since that drive to Matraville in 2009 and can vouch that he is not wired like anyone else. Two exchanges in the intervening years stick with me. The first was in South Africa in 2011, when he'd flown to Johannesburg as cover for an injured batsman in the last Test. He was not needed in the match and we spent a few evenings in the bar in reasonable proximity. One evening before the Test ended I spied him carting his gear across the foyer.
"Where you going?" I asked.
"Home, to make some runs," he said.
"See you soon," I replied.
"The next time you see me, mate, I promise you I will be in that Test team," he said.
Not factory-made: Warner did the academy, U-19, A team route, but he was always far too special a player to be held back by selectorial biases © Getty Images
Sure enough he was. We spoke in South Africa again ahead of the 2014 tour and he informed me I better watch him because he was going to score big runs. Turned out he was right again. Later when I noted he had lived up to his word, he said: "You haven't seen anything yet. I got some really big ones coming."
Chappell thinks Warner might be right.
"We have seen his best, but he can show us more of it more often. He will take another step at some stage and I don't think it's far away. He will become more ruthless, he will get some big scores. That will be the difference in the next phase - his brilliant hundreds will become big hundreds and double-hundreds, maybe more."
Whatever comes, Warner, the suburban boy with the big bat and the bigger chip on his shoulder, won't change. He will hit first and ask questions later. Take it but don't leave it. Very few batsmen, especially openers, win games in a session. Warner is one. Sehwag knew that earlier than most. Warner may well become the ICC's poster boy for bad behaviour. He could well be Australia's counterpoint to Virat Kohli. But like Kohli, he too will make Test cricket compelling for a generation wired differently.
Peter Lalor is the chief cricket writer for the Australian @plalor
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.Last weekend, McKay Nielsen took his daily scroll through the Reddit page “Exmormon”, a forum meant in part for those who have cut ties with the Mormon Church.
He decided to post a hypothetical question: What might happen if the President of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, suddenly decided to tell the world that the religion is all a lie.
“There would still be believers,” Nielsen told the more than 35,000 members of the forum.
The post by the 22-year-old from South Jordan, Utah launched a nuanced discussion surrounding some Mormons’ seemingly unbreakable loyalty to their church.
One followed up by writing that perhaps the religion is more like its own country, providing members with an intimate, safe community for the price of worship and strict lifestyle rules.
Like many of the other members of the Reddit group, Nielsen recently left the Mormon Church. He had been raised in the faith, but resigned soon after he realized he was attracted to men.
He said he has relied on the forum and other online and in-person ex-Mormon groups to get him through the transition. “I can’t really express my feelings here at home with that because it would just cause drama,” said Nielsen, who lives with his parents and younger siblings, all active members of the church. “I have to have some way of communicating with people who feel the same way.”
Nielsen is not alone.
This month marks one year since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) updated its stance on same-sex unions, threatening expulsion for adults in same-sex marriages and withholding baptism for their kids.
Although they updated that stance slightly last month by saying that members who are attracted to people of the same sex are not necessarily sinful, the effects on membership have had an impact.
The immediate result was a group-resignation that involved about one hundred members leaving the some 15-million-member church. Since then, thousands more have followed suit. “The policy came out like a significant bombshell,” said Philip Barlow, who directs religious studies at Utah State University.
But that policy decision is not the only reason people are choosing to leave, Barlow explained. At the same time that the Internet’s fountain of information on Mormonism--some true and some extremely misleading, said Barlow--is making some question what they’ve been raised to believe, there is also an overall shift among young people in the U.S. who have opted to move away from organized religion altogether.
“Undoubtedly this is a historic time,” said Barlow, who is a member of the LDS Church.
Only about 64 percent of those raised Mormon continued to adhere to the faith when they entered adulthood, according to the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey. That is six percent less than the numbers in 2007. “This is especially true among Millennials,” said Jana Riess, senior columnist for Religion News Service.
And for those who stay, only about 25-percent of the young, single members are actually active in the faith, she said.
The Mormon Church declined to provide a comment for this article.
No matter why someone decides to leave the church, the process can be fairly grueling. In order to no longer be considered a member, you must submit a letter that announces your official resignation, according to Mormon No More, an organization that is meant to help people leave Mormonism. “WARNING: If you live with people who are members of the church, they will almost certainly be told about your resignation,” stated the website.
Once the letter has been submitted, you’ll likely receive some follow-up messages attempting to change your mind, as well as a visit (through mail or sometimes even in-person) from a local bishop or branch president. The process can take a few months, so lately many members have started to resign through an attorney so that the church can’t contact them.
Nielsen said he opted to go the attorney route. “Doing it without an attorney is a long-winded process,” he said.
There is also a substantial emotional toll that leaving Mormonism can take. The Mormon community is very close and reliant on one another, so breaking out of that group can be fairly traumatic. “Mormonism as a whole is so knit together as a community,” said Barlow.
That’s where support groups come in. From PostMormon.org, a website full of personal resignation stories, blogs and support groups that has more than 10,000 current members, to Postmormons and Friends, a 2,100-member group that meets in Salt Lake City every Sunday morning so attendees can talk about their experience leaving the church, Utah has a wide array of resources.
“I’m surprised at how many post-Mormon meet-ups there are,” said Nielsen. “And subscribers on the Reddit page just continue to grow.”
Natalie Harris, a 24-year-old from Bluffdale, Utah, recently started work as an organizer for two Meetup groups for former Mormons, “Non-LDS Single Parents” and “Non-LDS Singles.” She was raised Mormon, and began questioning the faith when she was a teenager, but it took a few years for her to leave.
She said the groups allow her to be around other people who have gone through the same thing. “It’s nice because we’re all there to support each other,” said Harris.
At some of her meetings, Harris said the Mormon Church never even enters into the conversation. While at the beginning of the transition, venting frustrations and grief can feel very necessary, at some point that begins to lessen.
Many start to adapt to their new life, sometimes with the support from their family and Mormon friends but sometimes not. In either case, this support group and many others like it then transforms--at least for one day--into simply a fun get-together for good friends.
Harris recalled being at a BBQ for Non-LDS Singles a few months ago and meeting a young woman who told her that her parents don’t want anything to do with her now that she left Mormonism. Harris said she completely understood the woman’s pain. So she gave the woman a hug and told her what she thought would help: “If your parents don’t love you for who you are they don’t deserve to be in your life.”Donald Trump will not have anywhere to hide, as the big four broadcast networks, in addition to cable and online outlets, will be covering former FBI Director James Comey's congressional testimony.
All four broadcast networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox — reportedly plan to air live coverage of former FBI director James Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Additionally, the hearing will likely be covered on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, as well as on C-SPAN. The video will also stream on multiple online networks, including YouTube.
The much-anticipated hearing will be seen across the country, as well as internationally.
It is unusual for a congressional hearing to get the sort of coverage that disrupts daytime talk shows and soap operas. Historically, that level of interest has applied to events like the Clinton impeachment, Iran-Contra, and Watergate.
Given the green light to appear by special counsel Robert Mueller, Comey will testify about his allegation that Donald Trump leaned on him to publicly exonerate Trump from the investigation into connections between his presidential campaign and Russia.
Comey is unlikely to speak about details of the investigation, as it is still in progress. But regardless of what is said, a mass broadcast on a scandal like this only six months into his presidency is surely not something Trump ever wanted to happen.
For months Trump has denied that the investigation is of any consequence, blaming it on sour grapes from Democrats over the results of the election.
Now he will have to deal with it — with the whole world watching.CHARITIES are warning elderly people could be driven into poverty as the cost of care rises.
Figures revealed more than £11m is owed to the county council from people who receive personal and social care in Oxfordshire.
At the end of May, 857 people owed a total of £3.5m in arrears for the care they received, an average of about £4,000 a person.
A further £7.5m is owed from deferred payments and invoices that are not yet due for payment, bringing the total debt to £11m.
The figure is an increase from May 2013 when 696 people were in £2.9m worth of arrears, with a total debt of £9.4m.
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Age UK Oxfordshire chief executive Paul Cann said older people who received care from the county council were finding it increasingly hard to cope.
He said: “It is not surprising but it is deeply alarming more people are getting into debt in relation to social care.
“There are 9,000 people in Oxfordshire who have adult social care needs that are not being met, according to the Personal Social Research Unit.
“It risks driving people who are not in poverty towards poverty.
“That is about not being able to buy food, not being able to keep themselves warm in the winter.”
Spokeswoman Jan Sunman from the Oxfordshire Family Support Network, which works to help those who have relatives with learning disabilities, added: “I think it is an issue that people have been pushed further and further towards poverty.
“People who are on fixed incomes are going to have to dig deeper to pay for increased costs.”
There are 6,732 people who currently receive long-term social care in the county and another 12,000 receive short term or one- off care each year.
The county council’s total budget for adult social care is about £209m.
For many types of care provided by the county council, such as home and respite care, people have to pay a means-based contribution.
People with an income or savings below £14,250 do not have to pay and people with more than £23,250 have to pay the full amount themselves.
The Oxford Mail spoke to several people who receive care from the council, all of whom said they were worried about the impact the rising cost of care might have on them, particularly should they have to start making contributions.
War hero and Rose Hill resident Bill Buckingham gets a disability grant but said it would be hard to cope if he had to pay and worried others who were just over the benefit threshold would struggle.
His views were echoed by George Roberts, from Eynsham, whose wife Maureen has dementia and receives care. He said the fear of debt always hanged over them.
Since May 2013, the average weekly cost of home care has risen from £187 to £206 and the average weekly cost of care home care has jumped from £563 to £587.
Those who contribute must pay within 28 days of receiving an invoice or could have their benefits suspended if they fail to respond to subsequent reminder letters.
County council spokesman Chris Birdsall said if a person had “genuine difficulties” paying, the council would review the situation.
He added: “All service users receive a means-tested financial assessment and should be able to afford their contribution as that contribution is based on their ability to pay.
“Recovery is a last resort after we have worked to look at all the options and to understand fully why people cannot pay.
“In addition, social services may request that, due to exceptional circumstances, a waiver should be applied so that the assessed contribution need not be paid for a specified period.
“The council does not stop providing the service as it has a legal obligation to provide it.”
Mr Birdsall said if people were unable to pay their bills due to issues such as learning disabilities, their social worker should be able to see if someone else could manage their finances on their behalf.
Oxford East MP Andrew Smith said: “With unrealistic assumptions behind the government have imposed cuts on the county council, the actual costs of care packages are rising faster than the public support available, and also faster than the ability of many people to pay privately.
“The increasing number of elderly and disabled people needing care means that this crisis is going to continue to get worse unless there is radical reform of the social care system, and more, not less, public expenditure on it.”
Oxford West and Abingdon MP Nicola Blackwood and Witney MP David Cameron were both on holiday and could not comment, while Henley MP John Howells and Wantage MP Ed Vaizey did not respond to requests.
‘There’s always a fear hanging over us’ EYNSHAM resident Maureen Roberts, 80, has received care from the county council for the past two-and-a-half years.
Carers visit the dementia sufferer’s home every morning and evening. Her husband George Roberts, 71, said: “We are very lucky at the moment, we are getting just enough care. We do not pay a contribution towards our care at the moment.
“But I really fear that I may have to contribute in the future. It is always hanging over us.”
Former Lord Mayor Bill Buckingham
PENSIONER NEEDS A GRANT FOR HIS CARE
WAR hero and Rose Hill pensioner Bill Buckingham pays a contribution to the county council for carers to visit his home every morning.
The former Lord Mayor of Oxford and Labour councillor said he would struggle without extra support.
The 94-year-old, who joined the 4th Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in 1938, said: “I was fortunate because I had Age Concern who got me a disabled grant and that helps me to pay for the care.
“Without that it would be a real struggle because I am 94 now. I imagine people can really struggle.
“I think if people have got plenty of money they should pay.
“But I think it is difficult for people in the middle who don’t have enough to pay but have more money than the threshold where they would get it free. But times are tough for the county council as well.”
FUNDING VITAL TO HELP CARE FOR FOUR SONS
LUCY Baxter is the mother of four adopted men with Down’s syndrome.
She is mum to James, 33, Titus, 19, Raphael, 11 and 28-year-old Otto, pictured above – who has worked as an actor and had a documentary written about his quest for love.
Her sons receive a monthly stipend for her to organise care so the three adult men can have independence, and a smaller amount for Raphael.
She said: “I’ve always thought that it’s quite generous and it’s incredibly important to the boys.
“If they lost this help they would be devastated, they would end up relying on their ageing mum.”
The 57-year-old Abingdon resident recently had an issue after a social worker reduced her son Otto’s entitlement from £2,500 to £700 a month.
This has subsequently been resolved, but since the Government has closed the independent living fund (for which her three eldest are eligible) it is likely their allowance will be cut in September.
She said she would have trouble caring for her four sons, who are dependent on home care, by herself.
She is a full-time mum and does not have a permanent income.
WHAT'S AVAILABLE
Care which people have to contribute towards
ALERT service – Telecare alarm equipment for vulnerable and older adults
Care home placements
Home support – a range of personal care and support services to help people live in their own homes
Respite care – a short stay in a care home or a care home with nursing or other suitable accommodation
Supported living – a range of housing and support services for vulnerable adults
Extra Care Housing
Shared Lives service
Day services for older people enabling them to live in the community
Support for people with dementia aged under 65
Support for people with acquired brain injury aged under 65
Foot care for older people who are unable to cut their own nails safely
Learning disability daytime support
Transport
Community meals
Care people do not have to contribute towardsWould you rather prepare your tax return or get a tattoo that says "IRS"? Well, about 20% of respondents in WalltHub's recent tax survey would get the tattoo. A full 39% would rather paint their house. Preparing tax returns is not something most of us look forward to, but a good tax software program can make it much less painful.
For example, there's TurboTax, TaxAct, TaxSlayer.com, FreeTaxUSA, Quickbooks, and more. When you need to prepare your tax return, companies from Intuit to H&R Block to Jackson Hewitt offer software for you. So what's the best tax software out there? Well, the answer depends to some degree on you and your particular needs.
For example, your situation will dictate which version of the 1040 tax form you'll need to use. The 1040EZ form is the simplest, as you might have guessed, but you can only use it if you meet certain criteria, such as filing as a single person or married and filing jointly, claiming no dependents, having taxable income below $100,000, and not claiming any adjustments to income (such as contributions to a traditional IRA or 401(k), self-employment taxes paid, and alimony paid). The 1040A still requires taxable income below $100,000, but it will accommodate a slightly more complicated tax profile, such as if you have made contributions to retirement accounts and are only claiming certain credits and deductions.
The best tax software
Without further ado, following are the main tax-prep software packages you're likely to run across. Here's what you need to know about them: Each offers a version that's free to use for preparing your federal tax return, with the free version supporting the 1040EZ form, sometimes supporting the 1040A form, and not typically supporting the full 1040 form. (Even the IRS offers free online tax filing, for some taxpayers.)
Most offer a range of software versions that will cost you, with the more costly versions best suiting those with more complicated tax situations, such as people who claim tax deductions and credits, who are self-employed, who have investment income, who have rental properties, and so on. Most also charge extra to prepare your state tax form, though some offer that service free with certain products. In the following table, note that the list price is for the least expensive non-free software.
Software Free Version Completes List Price Cost for State Return Intuit TurboTax 1040EZ, 1040A $55 and up $30 and up* H&R Block 1040EZ, 1040A, 1040 $30 and up $20 and up* TaxAct 1040EZ, 1040A $37 and up $0 or $38 TaxSlayer 1040EZ $22 and up $0 or $27* FreeTaxUSA 1040EZ, 1040A, 1040 $7 $13 Liberty Tax Service N/A $20 and up $32 Jackson Hewitt Tax Service 1040EZ $35 and up $30
Why use tax software?
If you're not quite sold
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IT IS THE CLOSEST HULK HAS SEEN IN A MAINSTREAM FILM TO GETTING TO THE ESSENTIAL "IRONY" AT THE HEART OF HOW OFTEN WE THROW AROUND THE TERM "MEANINGLESS VIOLENCE" ITSELF. BECAUSE SO OFTEN, WE WANT THE VIOLENCE. SO OFTEN WE ROOT FOR IT. SO OFTEN IT IS PART OF THE LANGUAGE OF OUR IMPULSES. BUT EVEN WHILE THIS SCENE GOES ON AND ON AND ON, THERE IS NO REAL SENSE OF WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING (WHICH IS WHY THE EXPLANATION HAS TO COME AFTER) IN ORDER TO FULLY THROW YOU INTO SOMETHING WITHOUT CONTEXT. AND HERE'S WHY IT'S IMPORTANT:
IF WE DEMAND THAT FILMS BE HONEST, IS AN ACTUAL REPRESENTATION OF MEANINGLESS VIOLENCE NOT THE MOST HONEST THING A VIOLENT BLOCKBUSTER CAN DO?
8. POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE
YES, HULK KNOWS THAT SOME DETAILS ARE EASY TO MISS.
BUT HULK WOULD ARGUE SOME DETAILS AREN'T.
IT'S THE CONVERSATION COMING OUT OF MOVIES LIKE KINGSMAN WHERE HULK DOESN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THE ALMOST THUNDEROUS NON-OBSERVANCE, SPECIFICALLY IN REGARDS TO THE FILM'S FEELINGS ABOUT CLASS. TO BE FAIR, HULK IS PROBABLY ON THE MORE SENSITIVE SIDE OF THINGS WHEN IT COMES TO CLASS ISSUES IN FILM. AFTER ALL, IT'S PROBABLY THE SINGLE DOMINANT ISSUE OF OUR ERA AND YET NO ONE REALLY TALKS ABOUT HOW INVASIVE AND PROBLEMATIC IT IS, ESPECIALLY IN HOLLYWOOD. HECK, IT SEEMS WE TALK ABOUT EVERYTHING BUT CLASS IN AMERICAN FILMS. BUT THANKFULLY FOR US, ENGLAND TENDS TO HAVE A BIT MORE FOCUS THERE (LOTS OF LEFTOVER SENTIMENTS ABOUT THE MONARCHY AND ARISTOCRACY AND ALL THAT). BUT EVEN ON BOTH SIDES OF THE POND, THERE SEEMS TO BE A GREAT DEAL OF CONFUSION ABOUT THE HOW THIS PARTICULAR FILM FEELS ABOUT CLASS. THE GUARDIAN EVEN STARTED A RUCKUS IN PARTICULAR, CALLING THE FILM "THE MOST CONSERVATIVE COMEDY THIS CENTURY" BECAUSE IT KILLS LIBERAL POLITICIANS, WANTS THE POOR TO KILL EACH OTHER, AND BECAUSE THE LEAD BADDIE IS A CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVIST. AND THEN, THE REVIEWER HAS THE GALL TO SAY THE FOLLOWING:
"The extent of Kingsman’s troubling moral viewpoint is matched only by the determination of reviewers to overlook it. “Just try not to think too much,”... This curiously disengaged sentiment runs throughout a surprising number of the film’s overwhelmingly positive reviews."
OKAY... IT'S SENTENCES LIKE THIS, COMING AFTER ALL THE SUPPOSED "EVIDENCE" ABOVE, THAT GIVE HULK A BIT OF EXISTENTIAL CRISIS. BECAUSE THE BAD GUY'S PLAN REALLY DOESN'T HAVE MUCH TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE. IN FACT, THE PURPOSE OF ALL HIS MACHINATIONS IS PRETTY DAMN CLEAR:
THEY'RE GIVING FREE CELL PHONE CHIPS TO ALL THE POOR PEOPLE OF THE EARTH, WHICH HAS A SECRET TECH ABILITY TO MAKE THEM BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF EACH OTHER AND MURDER EACH OTHER (JUST LIKE IN THE CHURCH), ALL SO THE RICH AND POWERFUL CAN INHERIT THE EARTH AND NOT HAVE TO CHANGE ANY OF WHAT THEY DO.
THAT IS LITERALLY THE BAD GUY'S PLAN IN THE MOVIE.
HECK, THE MOVIE EVEN GOES SO FAR AS TO MAKE CLEAR THAT ALMOST EVERY SINGLE RICH PERSON AND POLITICIAN, LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE ALIKE, GOES ALONG WITH THIS PLAN SWIMMINGLY BECAUSE WHEN PUSH COMES TO SHOVE THEY SIMPLY DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT POOR PEOPLE. THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE FILM, BOTH "GOOD GUY" AND "BAD GUY" SIGN UP TO GO ALONG WITH IT. YES, EVEN A BARACK OBAMA LOOKALIKE. AGAIN, BEYOND ALL THE LIP SERVICE, MOST LEADERS MAKE IT CLEAR THEY DO NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE POOR. YOU WILL NOTE THAT HULK SAID "MOST." BECAUSE THOSE LEADERS AND CELEBRITIES IN THE FILM WHO ARE DECENT AND SEE THE OBVIOUS TRUTH THAT THIS PLAN IS NOTHING MORE THAN A HOLOCAUST AGAINST THE POOR? WELL, THEY ARE SIMPLY IMPRISONED IN A LUXURIOUS SUPER-VILLAIN LAYER, SEEMINGLY BECAUSE THEIR LIVES ARE STILL "WORTH IT" TO V BECAUSE THEY ARE AMONG THE RICH AND POWERFUL AND DESERVE TO LIVE IN THE NEW AGE! AND BECAUSE OF THIS CONFLICT, OUR MAIN HERO, EGGSY, PRIDE OF THE LONDON UNDERCLASS, AND ONE OF THE FEW EVER TO MAKE INTO THE KINGSMAN CIRCLE, HAS THE BASIC ABILITY TO SEE THIS INHUMAN GARBAGE FOR WHAT IT IS AND TRIES TO PUT A STOP TO IT.
SO, UM, THIS IS LITERALLY THE PLOT OF THE MOVIE AND IT MAKES IT PRETTY FUCKING CLEAR HOW THE MOVIE FEELS ABOUT THE UPPER CLASS.
HECK, IT MIGHT BE ONE OF THE MOST SCATHING PORTRAITS OF THE UPPER CLASS HULK CAN THINK OF. IT THROWS OUT ANY PRETENSIONS TO UPPER CLASS MORALITY AND POLITICS AND NAILS THE REALITY THAT WHEN IT COMES TO ANYTHING THAT ACTUALLY IMPACTS "THEM," WELL, IT TURNS INTO US VS. THEM.
BUT LET'S GO THROUGH THE REST OF THE INTERPRETATION, SHALL WE? WHILE THE FILM HIGHLIGHTS THE MANIA IN WHICH THE POOR PEOPLE ARE RIPPING EACH OTHER APART, IT IS AGAIN AT THE MANIPULATION OF THE RICH AS OUR POOR HERO RUNS TO TRY AND STOP IT. AND AT NO POINT IN THE FILM DOES ANYONE IMPLY THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS ANYTHING OTHER THAN A REAL, SUBSTANTIAL AND GENUINE THREAT TO THE WORLD. IN FACT EVERYONE SEEMS PRETTY MUCH IN AGREEMENT ABOUT THAT THREAT. SO WHAT IT IS THEREFORE TRYING TO ARGUE IS THAT RICH PEOPLE'S CONSTANT SOLUTIONS ONLY INVOLVE LOOKING OUT FOR THEMSELVES AGAINST THE BETTER NATURE OF THE VERY HUMANITY THEY THROW UNDER THE BUS. AGAIN, IT IS A FILM WITH SUCH SEETHING HATRED FOR THE UPPER CLASS THAT IT WILL ZERO IN ON THEIR HYPOCRISY AND THROW THE ENTIRETY OF IT INTO THE FIRE. AND GENERALLY SPEAKING? THERE IS NO MORE APT CHARACTERIZATION FOR THE 99% OF THE 0.1%'S INTENSE SELFISHNESS, ESPECIALLY AS IT PERTAINS TO THEIR INFLUENCE ON WORLD POLITICS.
THE MESSAGE OF KINGSMAN IS UNRELENTING IN THAT REGARD.
AND IT'S ALWAYS BEEN THERE IN VAUGHN'S WORK, TOO. YOU CAN GO BACK ALL THE WAY TO BACK TO LAYER CAKE, A TITLE WHICH DIRECTLY REFERENCES THE LAYERS OF SOCIAL STRATA IN ENGLAND, PARTICULARLY THE CRIMINAL WORLD. YOU CAN SEE THAT SAME SEETHING, BUT MOSTLY DIRECTED AT THOSE AT THE TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN WHO CAN'T BOTHER TO LOOK DOWN AND SEE WHO THEY ARE STEPPING ON. THE ENEMIES IN VAUGHN'S MOVIES ARE ALWAYS THE PEOPLE WHO FEEL LIKE THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH SOMETHING, AND OFTEN DO. FOR THE FOLLOWING POINT, PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT HULK DOESN'T REALLY LIKE TO DIVE INTO ARTIST'S BRAINS TO PLAY POP PSYCHOLOGISTS, BUT KNOWING THAT MATTHEW VAUGHN IS LITERALLY THE DISREGARDED BASTARD SON OF A BRITISH ARISTOCRAT IS A THING THAT IS KIND OF HARD TO IGNORE. BECAUSE HE IS BOTH A PRODUCT OF THAT WORLD AND THE ONE WHO IS MOST SINGULARLY DRIVEN IN HIS CONTEMPT FOR IT (THOUGH IT ALSO SEEMS TO MANIFEST IN OTHER ODD WAYS WE'LL GET TO LATER). POINT IS, WITH KINGSMAN, VAUGHN HAS SET HIS SIGHTS ON THE THING THAT HAS ALWAYS SEEMED TO BOTHER HIM ON AN INSTINCTUAL LEVEL.
AND THE FILM'S MOST DAMMING MOMENT OF INTENT OF COURSE COMES AT THE FILM'S BIGGEST TRIUMPHANT MOMENT, WHEREIN EDWARD ELGAR'S "POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE" PLAYS AS THE MCGUFFIN DOOHICKEY IS REVERSED BACK ONTO THE RICH AND POWERFUL AND ALL THE WORLD'S LEADERS AND POOR-HATING-UPPER CLASS PEOPLE'S HEADS EXPLODE TO A TRIUMPHANT SWELL OF MUSIC!
YOU MAY ASK: "WAIT, THEY PLAY THE GRADUATION SONG AS ALL THAT HAPPENS? CUZ, WE LIKE, GRADUATED INTO A NEW ERA OR SOMETHING??"
NOPE! SOME OF YOU MAY NOT KNOW THIS, BUT POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE - A.K.A. THE GRADUATION SONG - WAS WRITTEN DURING WORLD WAR ONE AS A SCATHING INDICTMENT OF RICH PEOPLE SENDING YOUNG KIDS OFF TO DIE FOR THEIR NATIONALISTIC BULLSHIT PRIDE.
CUE WIKI-FIED LYRICS:
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war! [He also added an epigraph to the marches that sets out their apparent intention. It comes, according to Dr. Young, from Lord de Tabley’s ‘The March of Glory’, quoted by Newman in a version that differs profoundly from de Tabley’s published version:] Like a proud music that draws men on to die
Madly upon the spears in martial ecstasy,
A measure that sets heaven in all their veins
And iron in their hands.
I hear the Nation march
Beneath her ensign as an eagle’s wing;
O’er shield and sheeted targe
The banners of my faith most gaily swing,
Moving to victory with solemn noise,
With worship and with conquest, and the voice of myriads.
YOU HAVE THE POMP: THE DRIVE FOR REASONS AND IDEOLOGIES! AND THEN YOU HAVE THE CIRCUMSTANCE: ACTUAL WAR, DEATH AND BLOODSHED. BASICALLY THIS SONG WAS THE MOST SCATHING IRONIC THING YOU COULD WRITE IN THOSE DAYS (THIS WAS LIKE COLBERT AT THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENCE DINNER LEVEL SCATHING). IT DOESN'T EVEN PULL PUNCHES OR USE SUBTLETY. BUT OF COURSE, LIKE MOST THINGS AFFECTED BY THE DULL DIN OF HISTORY, WE'VE LOST THAT ETYMOLOGY IN THE POPULAR CONVERSATION. WORSE, WE'VE LITERALIZED IT AND THUS PERVERTED THE INTENTION TO THE POINT THAT IT'S JUST BECOME "THE GRADUATION SONG." BUT IT IS ONE OBVIOUSLY LACED WITH SUCH SECRET MEANING THAT HULK FINDS ITS USE HERE TO BE COMPLETELY APT: SENDING CHILDREN OUT IN THE WORLD TO BE CHEWED UP AND SPIT OUT FOR BULLSHIT NATIONALISTIC PRIDE AND THE AID OF THE WEALTHY.
IT IS SAFE TO SAY, GIVEN THE THEMES OF THE FILM, KINGSMAN IS NOT USING IT BY ACCIDENT.
AND IF WE ARE KEEPING A RUNNING TALLY, IS THIS THE SECOND MUSIC CUE OF A DRAMATICALLY MISUNDERSTOOD AND IRONIC SONG USED TO A VERY SPECIFIC EFFECT? OKAY, JUST CHECKING. BECAUSE TO ARGUE THAT THE USE OF THE SONG IS ACCIDENTAL WOULD BE TO IMPLY THEY WERE UNAWARE OF THE SONG'S MEANING AT THE PRECISE MOMENT IT WENT ALONG WITH THE MURDER OF WORLD LEADERS BECAUSE THEY ARE COMMITTING A HOLOCAUST AGAINST THE POOR? AS IN, YOU KNOW, THE VERY THING THE SONG IS ABOUT?
SIGH... WE JUST ALWAYS MISS THE DETAILS.
WHICH AGAIN, IS UNDERSTANDABLE. BUT HULK ALWAYS WANTS TO WONDER WHAT MAKES PEOPLE STOP THEMSELVES FROM GETTING IN CLOSER TO ANALYZE SOMETHING, WHILE THEY READILY DO IT FOR SOMETHING ELSE. TRUTHFULLY, HULK ISN'T ANGRY WITH THAT GUARDIAN CRITIC; HULK WANTS TO GET DRINKS WITH THE WRITER AND SUGGEST: "HEY, MAYBE PEOPLE ARE RESPONDING TO THIS FILM POSITIVELY FOR GOOD REASON?" BUT PEOPLE ALWAYS SEEM TO LET A FEW QUICK ASSUMPTIONS GET IN THE WAY OF ACTUALLY SITTING THERE AND DOING THE SIMPLE ARITHMETIC WITH A MOVIE.
EVEN ANTHONY LANE TOOK A CLEAR SHOT AT THE FILM, IMPLYING IT WAS RACIST BY HAVING SAMUEL L. JACKSON SERVE MCDONALDS WHEN HE INVITES COLIN FIRTH OVER, SOMEHOW MISSING THE CLEAR INTENTION OF THE MOMENT WHERE COLIN FIRTH DOESN'T MISS A BEAT AND RESPONDS "I'll have the Big Mac." CLEARLY MEANT TO HIGHLIGHT THE FACT THAT IT IS A POOR GUEST WHO DENIES THE FOOD THAT IS OFFERED (AGAIN, FIRTH IS MANNERED AND UNCONCERNED WITH THE SIGNPOSTS OF CLASS, MEANING HE DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ACTUAL CLASS, WHICH IS PRECISELY WHAT MAKES HIM A PROVERBIAL CLASS ACT). AND HULK WOULD EVEN GO SO FAR AS TO ARGUE THAT IS DOWNRIGHT WEIRD FOR LANE TO THINK OF MCDONALD'S AS "BLACK FOOD," AS HULK HAS LITERALLY NEVER EVER THOUGHT THAT IN HULK'S ENTIRE LIFE. THE ENTIRE MCDONALD'S DISCUSSION IS CLEARLY A QUESTION OF AFFORDABLE FOOD FOR LOWER CLASSES, AND AS SUCH, HULK CAN'T HELP BUT FEEL LIKE IT'S ONE OF THOSE WEIRD ATTEMPTS TO CALL OUT RACISM THAT PROBABLY REVEAL MORE ABOUT THE PERSON'S ASSOCIATION OF RACE THAN THE THING THE PERSON IS CRITICIZING. BUT IT'S ALL PART OF THE LARGER QUESTION:
HOW DO WE KEEP NOT CONNECTING THE DOTS THAT ARE REALLY, TRULY THERE?
OR DOES THE FILM'S ENTIRE PROBLEM REST IN THE SAME IRONY THAT PLAGUES THE UPPER CLASS OF THE FILM ITSELF? DOES A GROUP OF RULING CRITICAL INTELLECTUALS NOT HAVE THE ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE THAT PERHAPS THEY'RE GUILTY OF A VERY UGLY THOUGHT: CHIEFLY, ONE BEST EXPRESSED THROUGH THAT GREAT NORM MACDONALD QUOTE:
"I think clever people think poor people are stupid."
BECAUSE THAT'S THE UGLY THOUGHT THAT CLEVER PEOPLE NEVER TALK ABOUT. WHICH SUCKS BECAUSE YOU REALIZE IT'S PRACTICALLY AT THE HEART OF ALL OF OUR PROBLEMS. BECAUSE YES, ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM CAN BE SUPER PROBLEMATIC FOR A CULTURE, BUT TO TAKE THAT ISSUE AND LAY ALL OUR PROBLEMS AT THE FEET OF IT IS INSANELY RIDICULOUS. JUST IMAGINE SOMEONE SAYING TO AN ENTIRE GODDAMN SOCIETY: "ALL OUR PROBLEMS ARE BECAUSE YOU DON'T PUT ENOUGH TRUST IN US, THE SMART PEOPLE!"
RIGHT. BECAUSE SMART PEOPLE HAVE DONE A BANG-UP JOB. BECAUSE WE ALWAYS THINK OF POLITICIANS AS BEING DUMB, WHEN REALLY THEY ARE MADE UP OF THE INTELLECTUAL ELITE AND IVY-LEAGUED WRAPPED. THEY DON'T INCLUDE EXPERTS FROM OUTSIDE THEIR FIELD BECAUSE IT'S COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE TO THEIR LARGER AIM OF KEEPING LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE UPHOLDING THEIR POWER STRUCTURE. IT'S WHY THEY DON'T CANNIBALIZE THEIR OWN RANKS. IT'S WHY THEY TAKE RIPE ADVANTAGE OF VOTERS AND SABOTAGE EXPERTS WITHIN THE RANK AND FILE OF ACTUAL ACADEMIA.
SO TO COME AT ANY OF THIS WITH ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE AN EMPATHETIC HEART IS TO ESSENTIALLY MISTRUST THE NATURE OF HUMANITY AND OUR VERY CAPACITY.
WHICH IS PRECISELY WHY EGGSY, THE HERO OF OUR STORY, REFUSES TO SHOOT HIS DOG. HE REFUSES TO DO CALLOUS THINGS. HE REFUSES TO SACRIFICE HIS HUMANITY, NOR HIS TEAMMATES, NOR HIS FAMILY, FOR THE GLORY OF QUEEN AND COUNTRY.
HE IS THE HERO OF THE STORY BECAUSE HE KNOWS IT'S ALL BULLSHIT. HE REFUSES THE POMP AND STAYS FIXATED ON THE CIRCUMSTANCE. WHICH MAKES HIM A GODDAMN REVELATION OF A MODERN PROTAGONIST, IF YOU ASK HULK.
SO HERE'S THE REAL QUESTION:
JUST WHY IS IT SO HARD TO BELIEVE KINGSMAN OF ALL MOVIES IS SAYING THESE THINGS?
9. TIS NOT THE FAULT IN OUR STARS...
EVERYONE CAN PRETTY MUCH AGREE THAT COMEDY IS HARDER, BUT SERIOUS MOVIES WILL ALWAYS WIN THE OSCARS. SURE, THERE MAY BE THE OCCASIONAL FILM THAT BREAKS THROUGH, BUT HULK'S NOT SURE WE'LL EVER BE ABLE TO CHANGE ALL THAT. EVEN WITHIN GENRE, WE SEEM TO JUST ATTACH MEANINGS TO SURFACES. WE FALL IMMEDIATELY FOR TONE OVER METAPHOR. AND WE ARE JUST BAD AT LOOKING AT WHAT A FILM IS SAYING.
AND YET, WHEN IT COMES TO AUDIENCE "INTERPRETATION," THE THING THAT WE ARE BEST DOING IS FILLING A VACUUM.
TO WIT, LOST PRESENTED A BUNCH OF MYSTERIES / UNANSWERED QUESTIONS AND LEGIONS OF FANS BENT OVER BACKWARDS TO TRY AND ANSWER THOSE QUESTIONS. THEY LOOKED AT EVERY LITTLE FRAME OF THE SHOW. THEY BECAME MINI-DETECTIVES. THEY PUT THE PIECES TOGETHER AND THEN WROTE ABOUT IT, THOUSANDS OF WORDS AT A TIME. AND WITH ALL THE UNSOLVED MYSTERIES OF CINEMA AND TV, PEOPLE READILY TAKE UP THE CALL TO INTERPRET THE LINGERING PLOT ISSUES, BREAK OUT THEIR LOGIC, AND ENGAGE IN THAT THING THEY THINK IS "STORY." HECK, EVEN A FILM LIKE WHIPLASH, WHICH PLAYS OUT AS A MOSTLY STRAIGHTFORWARD FILM, BECOMES A HUGE TALKING POINT IN TERMS OF INTERPRETATION BECAUSE OF THE CLEAR MORAL AMBIGUITY OF THE FILM'S ENDING IS MEANT TO PROVOKE SUCH RANGES OF RESPONSE. WHICH PROVES THE WHOLE POINT: WE ONLY CARE TO DIVE INTO THINGS THAT ARE ACTUALLY OUTSIDE OF THE TEXT. MEANING WE ALO LIKE TO UNDERSTAND INTERPRETATION BASED ON WHAT WE BRING TO IT, NOT NECESSARILY WHAT THE FILM CONTAINS IN AND OF ITS OWN ATTEMPT AT MESSAGING.
IS THIS WHY WE ARE BAD AT INTERPRETING A FILM LIKE KINGSMAN?
BECAUSE IT DOESN'T GIVE US A VACUUM TO FILL. IT DOESN'T THRIVE ON AMBIGUITY. INSTEAD, IT PRESENTS A FUN, SLICK MOVIE WITH AN IRONIC, SEETHING MESSAGE JUST SITTING THERE IN THE PLOT MECHANICS AND ETHOS, PLAIN AS DAY. BUT BECAUSE WE DON'T RECOGNIZE THE KINDS OF CUES THAT PROMPT US TO CONNECT THOSE IDEAS, THE "ARITHMETIC" JUST SITS THERE, UNCOMPUTED. EVEN THE OFT-MALIGNED "ENGLISH MAJORS" WHO LOVE NOTHING MORE THAN SOME THEMATIC INTERPRETATION (AND OF WHOM HULK COUNTS HULKSELF), DON'T REALLY FEEL PROMPTED TO ENGAGE A FILM LIKE KINGSMAN, BECAUSE IT ISN'T A CLEAR SYMBOLIC MYSTERY LIKE MULHOLLAND DR. OR UNDER THE SKIN OR SOMETHING OF THAT NATURE. NO, EVERYONE SEEMS TO BE DISINTERESTED IN REALLY THINKING ABOUT A FILM LIKE THIS.
WHICH JUST MEANS THAT MAYBE WE AREN'T DOING OUR JOB?
BECAUSE KINGSMAN, FOR ALL ITS MANY AGGRESSIONS AND CRUDENESSES, HAS SOMETHING CONCRETE TO SAY. AND IT'S NOT LIKE HULK WENT HOME AND THOUGHT ABOUT ALL THIS FOR HOURS. HULK GOT ALL OF IT RIGHT AS THE MOVIE WAS GOING ALONG. AND THAT UNDERSTANDING FOSTERED HULK'S ABILITY TO ENJOY THE FILM THROUGH AND THROUGH. IT'S ALL RIGHT THERE. AND NOT TO SINGLE OUT THEIR RESPONSE, BECAUSE PEOPLE TEND TO GET REALLY MAD WHENEVER HULK SAYS SOMETHING LIKE THIS, BUT FOR WHATEVER IT'S WORTH, MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO LOVED KINGSMAN THE SAME WAY HULK DID WERE FILMMAKERS. PERHAPS THEY JUST SAW THE INTENTION OF THE LANGUAGE IMMEDIATELY. BUT WHATEVER IT MEANS, IT MEANS. AND IT IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE HULK ALWAYS LIKES TO SAY IT IS THE JOB OF THE CRITIC TO REALLY ENGAGE A FILM ON THE LEVEL WITH WHICH IT IS TRYING TO ENGAGE YOU. AND IF IT WANTS YOU TO RECONCILE THOSE ATTEMPTS WITH MEANING, IT IS THE CRITIC'S JOB TO COMMUNICATE THAT EFFECTIVENESS.
BUT WHAT IF WE AREN'T DOING OUR JOBS? AND WITH THAT HAUNTING QUESTION: IT'S TIME TO DISCUSS THE FILM'S ENDING...
10. BUTTZ
SO AFTER A LIFETIME OF WATCHING THE MOVIES, HULK SPENT AN ADDITIONAL HALF A YEAR RESEARCHING JAMES BOND IN ORDER TO WRITE A GIANT FREAKING TOME THAT IS ESSENTIALLY A FEMINIST APPROXIMATION OF THE ENTIRE JAMES BOND SERIES. AND THE BOOK IS LITERALLY TITLED "JAMES BOND: STARING INTO THE ID OF A BONER INCARNATE." NOW, THE LAST THING HULK WANTS TO IMPLY IS THAT THIS WORK IS BY ANY MEANS A DEFINITE INTERPRETATION OF BOND AND HIS MEANING IN MASCULINITY / FEMINISM. ALL HULK WANTS TO SAY IS THAT HULK HAS THOUGHT ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR SUBJECT A WHOLE FREAKING LOT. AND WHAT HULK WOULD ARGUE IS THAT THE MOST "FUNCTIONAL" INTEGRATION OF FEMINISM EXISTS WHEN THE FILMS REACH THE NEXUS BETWEEN THE ROMANTIC LIE OF JAMES BOND AT HIS BEST, MOST CHARMING, MOST SENSITIVE SELF, WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY NOT LYING ABOUT THE OFTEN UGLY PSYCHOLOGY AT THE HEART OF HIS CHARACTERIZATION.
MEANING IN ORDER TO SUCCEED, A JAMES BOND ENTRY MUST BOTH UNDERMINE AND "OVERMINE" THE HONESTY OF WHO HE IS AT THE CORE... BUT MOST OF THE TIME?
THE JAMES BOND SERIES DOESN'T DO THAT AT ALL. IT INSTEAD TENDS TO JUST WRAP EVERYTHING UP WITH A MERE BUTTON OF "EVERYTHING'S OKAY!" AS BOND SETTLES DOWN WITH WHATEVER GIRL IS LEFT ALIVE AND THEY GO ON TO FUCK AND THE CAMERA CUTS AWAY BEFORE ANYTHING GETS RATED R. THAT'S JUST THE TRUTH OF IT. VERY RARELY DOES THAT WOMAN ACTUALLY MEAN SOMETHING TO HIM, NOR DOES SHE MEAN ANYTHING TO THE AUDIENCE. AND VARY RARELY DOES THE "ENDING FUCK" HAVE ANY KIND OF GENUINE CATHARSIS. WHICH PROBABLY MAKES THIS "THE WORST LIE" OF THE SERIES. OR HECK, MAYBE IT'S THE BEST, MOST IMPORTANT LIE, THE INTENTION OF THE LIE THEY WANT TO UPHOLD IN THEIR COCK-SMITHING INTEREST. OR HECK, MAYBE WE CAN JUST SHRUG OUR SHOULDERS AT WHAT IS PRESENTED TEXTUALLY AS A CELEBRATORY HOOK-UP OF TWO AGREEING PARTIES WHO ARE JUST HAPPY THE WORLD'S NOT OVER AND STILL REELING OFF THE HIGH OF THE FILM'S CLIMAX. AND MOST LIKELY, IT IS A COMBINATION OF ALL THESE THINGS.
BUT WHAT IS THE MOST HONEST WAY TO TREAT IT?
THAT'S REALLY WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT, RIGHT? HONESTY. AND IN SENDING UP BOND THERE'S SO MANY WAYS ONE COULD DO IT. FOR INSTANCE, THERE'S THIS MONSTER GAG IN OSS 117 WHERE OUR HERO BEGINS MAKING OUT WITH ONE OF HIS SEXUAL CONQUESTS AND THE CAMERA, IN TYPICAL BOND FASHION, BEGINS TO GRACEFULLY PAN AWAY FROM THE SEX, BUT IT ACCIDENTALLY CATCHES THEIR REFLECTION IN A MIRROR SO THAT WE SEE THEIR AWKWARD, FUMBLING, NAKED BODIES. THE PERSON OPERATING THE CAMERA CLEARLY PANICS AND TURNS IT AWAY AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. IT'S ONE OF THOSE FOURTH WALL BREAKS THAT HAS MORE IN COMMON WITH THE AUSTIN POWERS SERIES, BUT IT CONVEYS SO MUCH ABOUT THE RULES WE TAKE FOR GRANTED IN THE BOND UNIVERSE, AND HOW PEOPLE REGARD THE OBLIGATORY SEXUAL NATURE OF THESE CHARACTERS ANYWAY. THE GOAL OF BOTH IS TO SAY SOMETHING SIMPLE AND HONEST:
THAT THIS IS COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS.
AND HULK WOULD ARGUE THAT THE MOMENT AT THE END OF KINGSMAN IS REMARKABLY SIMILAR, BUT LIKE ALL THINGS IN THE VAUGHN OEUVRE, IT IS PRESENTED AS CRUDELY AND PLAIN-FACEDEDLY AS POSSIBLE. BUT LET HULK ALSO BE CLEAR: IF SOMEONE WAS OFFENDED BY THE FOLLOWING MOMENT, HULK CAN COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND WHY. BUT HULK WILL SIMPLY MAKE A CASE FOR AN ALTERNATIVE TAKE. SO WITH THAT SAID, HERE WE GO WITH SPOILER TALK:
KINGSMAN ENDS ON AN ANAL SEX JOKE.
HULK WOULD ARGUE IT'S NOT EVEN REALLY MEANT TO BE A FUNNY ONE. IT INSTEAD SEEMS TO BE MADE AS BOLD, BLATANT AND TONE-DEAF AS POSSIBLE. TO WIT, OUR LEAD GENT EGGSY IS ON HIS WAY FOR THE FINAL CONFRONTATION, BUT HE MEETS THE ICELANDIC PRINCESS TILDE IN THE PRISONS BELOW. NOW, SHE WAS REVEALED EARLIER IN THE FILM AND SHE WAS ONE OF THE GOOD RICH PEOPLE WHO WAS HORRIFIED BY SAM JACKSON AND HER PRIME MINISTER'S CASUAL WILLINGNESS TO GO ALONG WITH THIS WHOLE "KILL THE POOR" PLAN. AND FOR HER HUMANITY AND MORAL FIBER, SHE WAS LOCKED UP HERE. WHEN THEY MEET, SHE BEGS HIM TO GET HER OUT OF THERE. AND HE SAYS IN TYPICAL BOND-ISH BRAVADO THAT HE'S ON THE WAY TO SAVE THE WORLD AND IF HE COMES BACK TO LET HER OUT, CAN HE HAVE A KISS? (WHICH IS NOT A "GOOD THING" OF COURSE, BUT THE IMPLICATION IS DISTINCTLY BONDIAN), BUT THEN SHE JUST SIMPLY RETORTS WITH HER HEAVY ACCENT: "If you save the world, we can do it in the asshole." HER BLUNT DELIVERY LANDS RIGHT THERE WITH AN AWKWARD THUD. AND WHEN IT HAPPENED, HULK LITERALLY HEARD AN ENTIRE AUDIENCE NOT CHEER, BUT EKE OUT VISCERAL, UNCOMFORTABLE GUFFAWS. EVEN EGGSY, PARALYZED FOR A MOMENT BY THE THUD, THEN CALMLY REPLIES: "I'll be right back." AND GOES OFF WITH HIS DORKY SUAVENESS. IT'S A WINKING "MOMENT" BUT YOU WILL NOTE THE CINEMA DOESN'T WINK.
FROM THERE, OUR EGGSY GOES OFF AND DEFEATS THE BAD GUYS, COMES BACK WITH CHAMPAGNE IN DISTINCTLY BONDIAN FASHION, AND SHE'S WAITING FOR HIM WITH EAGER ATTENTION. AND IT CUTS AWAY TO MARK STRONG IN THE JET. WHO, IN TRYING TO FIND WHERE EGGSY WENT TURNS ON THE VISION SETTING THROUGH HIS SPY GLASSES AND THUS SEES HIM LOOK DOWN AT THE PRINCESS IN BED (THIS IS BASICALLY WHAT HAPPENED IN MOONRAKER, BY THE WAY, COMPLETE WITH THE LINE "ATTEMPTING RE-ENTRY"). THE BIG DIFFERENCE IS THAT, LIKE OSS 117, THE CAMERA DOESN'T CUT AWAY AND INSTEAD EGGSY'S POV PANS DOWN TO SHOW WHAT CAN ONLY BE DESCRIBED AS HER "EAGERLY AWAITING BUTT" IN PLAIN VIEW. THE SHOT HOLDS FOR A BEAT, EVERYONE IN THE THEATER GOT QUIET AND NERVOUS AND STARTED SHUFFLING. IT'S JUST THIS HUGE, WEIRD VISCERAL REACTION OF "WAIT, ARE THEY GONNA!??!"
AND THEN WE CUT TO MARK STRONG'S CHARACTER STARING DIRECTLY INTO CAMERA AND QUIETLY REMARKING "OH!" BEFORE HE CLOSES THE DECK OF THE COMPUTER LIKE THEY ARE SHUTTERS, THUS REMOVING THE AUDIENCE FROM VIEW SO WE CAN'T SEE. BOOM. WE ARE THEN HIT WITH A "DIRECTED BY MATTHEW VAUGHN" TAG. IT'S ONLY KIND OF FOURTH WALL-Y, BUT UNLIKE THE CLEAR JOKE OF OSS 117, THERE IS A WEIRD ELEGANCE TO STRONG'S RESPONSE, ESPECIALLY WHEN SET AGAINST THE BLUNTNESS OF THE MOMENT, WHICH HULK WOULD ARGUE IS VERY MUCH PURPOSEFUL.
BUT IT'S NOT OVER YET! BECAUSE THE ENTIRE FILM COMES BACK AND RETURNS FOR A CODA OF NOTHING MORE THAN A LITTLE CHARACTER BEAT OF EGGSY TAKING CARE OF THE JERK RUFFIANS IN THE BAR WHO PLAGUE AND "OWN" HIS MOTHER, AND THEN EGGSY ENACTS BEAT FOR BEAT THE START OF COLIN FIRTH'S SAME FIGHT IN THE BAR FROM EARLIER. THEN THE FILM ENDS FOR REAL AND MATTHEW VAUGHN HITS US WITH ANOTHER TITLE CARD, THIS TIME DEDICATING THE FILM TO HIS MOTHER, "WHO TAUGHT HIM HOW TO BE A GENTLEMEN."
...
......
.......... OK.
SO THERE'S OBVIOUSLY A LOT TO UNPACK HERE, AS WHAT IS DESCRIBED ABOVE CERTAINLY SEEMS LIKE ALL MANNER OF ILL TASTE, BUT HULK HAS A FEW THOUGHTS ON IT. STARTING WITH THIS: REMEMBER NORM MACDONALD'S POINT ABOUT THE LACK OF HONESTY IN INNUENDO? WELL HULK ARGUES THAT WHAT WE ARE SEEING HERE IS THE CINEMATIC EQUIVALENT OF THAT CLASSIC NORM MACDONALD DOUBLE-ING DOWN ON THE OBVIOUS JOKE. IT'S WHY THE REQUEST FOR DOING IT IN THE ASSHOLE LANDS WITH AN AIRLESS THUD. IT'S WHY THE FILM PANS DOWN TO THE ACTUAL BUTT. THIS IS ALL THE SCREAMING ACT OF CRUDE NON-INNUENDO. THIS IS BLUNT. BUT IT IS ALSO HONEST.
WHICH MEANS VAUGHN JUST SHOWED US WHAT A JAMES BOND JOKE REALLY LOOKS LIKE.
THE INTENTION COULD NOT BE MORE CLEAR. IT'S THE MOST CLASSIC BOND ENDING SCENARIO. THEY'VE CLEARLY CHOSEN THIS CHARACTER CAREFULLY. SHE'S BARELY IN THE FILM, SHE'S DEFINED AS BEING INHERENTLY GOOD, SHE'S EVEN A REPUTABLE PRINCESS. AND SHE TAKES HIS JUVENILE ATTEMPT AT FLIRTATION AND OBLIGATORILY RUNS WITH IT TO THE FURTHEST END. THAT'S PRECISELY WHY IT IS SO OUT OF NOWHERE. IT IS VERY SPECIFICALLY SET UP TO READ AS THE "RIDICULOUS OBLIGATORY BOND GIRL" AND SHOWING JUST HOW OUT OF NOWHERE SUCH OBLIGING FLIRTATION AND OBLIGATORY CONSUMMATION CAN BE. AND EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT ENDING IS DESIGNED TO BE VISCERAL AND CONFRONTATIONAL. IT'S WHY THE SHOT IS A P.O.V. SHOT. IT'S NOT LETTING US OFF THE HOOK. IT'S VERY PURPOSEFULLY PUSHING THE SCENE INTO A FORCED REACTION INSTEAD OF MERELY CALLING OUT THE JOKE IN SAFE WAY. IT WANTS IT TO BE UNSAFE. IT WANTS OUR REACTION. IT WANTS TO SEE US REACT WITH ENTHUSIASM OR SHOCK. WHICH IS PRECISELY WHY MARK STRONG'S MERLIN TREATS THE MOMENT WITH AN UNDERSTATED RESPONSE LIKE IT'S JUST BUSINESS AS USUAL.
NOW. HULK IS PERFECTLY WILLING TO TO ADMIT THAT THIS SCENE MIGHT FEEL WEIRD BECAUSE IT IS SOMEWHAT OUT OF SYNC WITH THE BOND-SKEWERING TACTICS WITHIN THE REST OF THE MOVIE. MEANING RARELY DOES THE BONDIAN LANGUAGE IN KINGSMAN FEEL AS DIRECT AS THIS (THOUGH TO BE FAIR, SAM JACKSON LITERALLY TALKS ABOUT THESE KINDS OF SPY MOVIES). BUT ULTIMATELY, HULK ACCEPTS THE ATTEMPT BEING MADE BECAUSE, AGAIN, HULK GENUINELY UNDERSTANDS THE ACT'S CONFRONTATIONAL SEQUENCING IS PART OF THE COMMENTARY. WHICH LEADS HULK TO THINK THERE ARE TWO PLAYS ACTUALLY BEING MADE HERE...
1) THE FIRST BEING ALL THE AFOREMENTIONED WILL TO PUSH A JAMES BOND SEX SCENE OUT OF MERE INNUENDO AND INTO FACING THE ACTUAL CRASSNESS IT PERVADES.
2) THE SECOND IS TO DIRECTLY ENGAGE THE VIEWER WITH THIS RATHER BAITING SCENE TO SEE WHICH SIDE OF THE REACTION THEY COME DOWN ON.
BECAUSE AS HULK'S TRIED TO PROVE TIME AND TIME AGAIN, THE MOVIE IS WORKING IN A DIRECT, PROVOKING WAY. YOUR REACTION MATTERS. AND THE SECOND IT PANNED DOWN TO HER BUTT, HULK WASN'T CELEBRATORY, HULK BASICALLY PANICKED. HULK THOUGHT: "YIKES!" WHAT ARE THEY- ARE THEY REALLY GONNA SHOW???" AND THEN THE SCENE GOES ON TO THE CLOSE WITH THE CHUCKLE, WHICH LETS YOU SEE EXACTLY WHAT VAUGHN IS TRYING TO DO.
IT IS BASICALLY ASKING YOU A SERIES OF QUESTIONS: ARE YOU THE KIND OF PERSON WHO WANTS TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? ARE YOU HORRIFIED THAT THE SHOT LINGERED TOO LONG AND DIDN'T CUT AWAY? DO YOU GET WHY THE JOKE ENDED EXACTLY WHERE IT DID? AND DOESN'T THIS WHOLE THING BRING UP THE CONVERSATION ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT PEOPLE ARE MORE FREAKED OUT BY CONSENSUAL ANAL SEX THAN THEY WERE ABOUT THE MEANINGLESS VIOLENCE AND THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF THE UNDERCLASS?
AND YES, HULK IS COMPLETELY AWARE OF THE COMPLICATIONS IN ENGAGING IN THE ASSUMED INNOCENCE OF A GIVEN SCENE BY DECLARING ANY SEX IN A FILM "CONSENSUAL" (AS THIS IS STILL BEING WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND EXECUTED BY THE OVERSIGHT OF VAUGHN). AND YES, HULK WOULD ALSO AGREE THAT ANY KIND OF SEXUAL TRANSCENDENCE WOULD BE PREFERABLE TO THE DOUBLING-DOWN ON THE OBVIOUSNESS. AFTER ALL, THE FILM HAD THE INGENUITY TO TURN A BOND FILM INTO CLASS COMMENTARY; WHY CAN'T THEY TRANSCEND THIS ONE? HECK, DEVIN HAD THE GREAT IDEA THAT THE ENDING SHOULD REVEAL THAT EGGSY IS IN FACT GAY - AS HE HASN'T REALLY SHOWN SEXUAL INTEREST IN WOMEN THAT WAY TILL THIS POINT - AND THAT HIS ENDING SEXUAL TRYST WITH SHOULD BE WITH A GENT. WHICH WOULD BE A BRAZEN MOVE AND
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it at first,” she says. “He thought it was awesome I was so in to what he did.” Dad allegedly showed her how to find bugs in C source code and exploit them.
She is extremely secretive online:
With just half a dozen close friends online, she has a strict regimen to remain invisible on the web. Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox. She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. “I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds,” she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans.
She once hacked 4chan, the site from which Anonymous originated:
In December 2008, she wrought havoc on one of the most famous forums of all, 4chan’s notorious /b/ channel, finding and exploited an SQL injection bug on its content management system, hacking in and causing mayhem on the forum for a few hours.
Her dad has a good sense of humor:
These days Kayla’s dad is aware of her activities with Anonymous, and while he is concerned about the legal implications–she lives in a country where she could be tried as an adult–she says he finds the whole thing “hilarious.”
She doesn’t really spend much time online:
[Kayla] refuses to be chained to her computer, limiting herself to a few hours a night online. She rarely visits online forums–they’re “boring”–and a few days a week takes a course in college to further her goal of being a teacher. She lives in an English-speaking country–not the U.K.–but won’t say more about it.
Read the full article about Anonymous member Kayla here.Ontario will become the first province to stop paying for high-dose opioid medications under its public drug plans, as part of a measure aimed at combatting the widespread abuse of prescription painkillers.
The Ministry of Health has posted a notice on its website saying all opioids that exceed the equivalent of 200 milligrams of morphine a day will be delisted from the province's drug formulary as of January. The ministry is overhauling its drug plans against a backdrop of rising addiction rates and overdose deaths across Canada.
"The inappropriate use, abuse and diversion of prescription narcotics has emerged as a significant public health and safety issue in Canada and other jurisdictions around the world," the ministry says in the notice advising physicians and drug manufacturers of the changes.
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INVESTIGATION: A killer high: How Canada got addicted to fentanyl
The move comes after a Globe and Mail investigation found that Ottawa and the provinces failed to take adequate steps to stop doctors from indiscriminately prescribing highly addictive opioids to treat chronic pain. Ontario is the biggest per-capita user of prescription painkillers in Canada. In 2015, doctors wrote 8.1 million prescriptions for opioids, enough for nearly every person between the ages of 15 and 64 in the province, according to figures compiled for The Globe by IMS Brogan, which tracks pharmaceutical sales.
The over-prescribing of opioids is behind Canada's epidemic of painkiller abuse. By completely delisting the full portfolio of high-dose opioids in Ontario, ministry officials are acknowledging what medical experts have been saying for years: The risks associated with these powerful opioids are substantial and the benefits uncertain. Most other provinces and territories continue to list these opioids on their drug formularies either as general benefits or restricted access for cancer and palliative-care patients.
In 2014, the country's public drug programs spent $180.5-million on opioids, ranking them in the top 10 for spending on prescription medications, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. The programs typically pay prescriptions for those aged 65 and older and those on social and disability assistance. Just over 40 per cent of prescription drugs are financed by the public sector, with the remainder paid for by private insurance plans or individuals paying out of pocket.
Read more: Prescriptions of opioid drugs skyrocketing in Canada
Ontario's changes follow a review by a committee of the opioids funded by the province. The committee included physicians with clinical expertise in addiction, palliative care and pain management.
"I think it's a positive step but more needs to be done," said Meldon Kahan, medical director of the Substance Use Service at Women's College Hospital in Toronto.
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Dr. Kahan said he would also like the province to set a daily dose limit because physicians could simply replace the high-dose opioids with more tablets of a lower-dose version.
"Doctors prescribe high doses to the wrong people," Dr. Kahan said. "This remains a problem."
British Columbia's physician regulatory college recently unveiled the first mandatory standards in Canada for prescribing opioids, in response to a spike in the number of fatal overdoses linked to illicit fentanyl. The standards are modelled on new national guidelines in the United States for prescribing painkillers, which urge doctors to start patients with low doses of opioids and provide only a few days' supply.
Related: How B.C.'s fentanyl crisis became a public health emergency
Gordon Jones, head of the emergency department at Kingston General Hospital, said the department has a policy of not prescribing high-dose opioids or renewing lost or stolen prescriptions for painkillers.
"By far the vast majority of people who want these drugs are using them for illicit purposes," Dr. Jones said.
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The changes announced by the ministry target classes of opioids that have grown in popularity since 2012, when every province stopped funding the country's most widely prescribed painkiller. OxyContin, a brand-name version of oxycodone made by Purdue Pharma, was once the top-selling, long-acting opioid in Canada. But it became a lightning rod in the early 2000s as reports of addiction and overdoses exploded.
Purdue pulled OxyContin from the market in 2012 and replaced it with OxyNEO, a tamper-resistant alternative that is difficult to crush, snort or inject for a quick high. That same year, the provinces stopped paying for either opioid through their public drug plans. But by focusing specifically on those two drugs, medical experts said, policy makers missed the larger picture. Prescriptions for alternative, potentially addictive painkillers, including hydromorphone and fentanyl, rose sharply.
Ontario will no longer pay for 24- and 30-milligram capsules of hydromorphone, transdermal patches that deliver 75 and 100 micrograms of fentanyl per hour, and morphine in 200-milligram tablets.
Fentanyl was developed as a prescription painkiller but gained popularity as a street drug after OxyContin was removed from the market in Canada. OxyContin was popular not only with people who became addicted after their doctors prescribed it, but also with heroin users because it could be snorted like cocaine or injected like heroin for a quick high.
A palliative-care doctor who asked not to be named questioned whether the changes will do anything to address the fact that illicit fentanyl is behind many overdose deaths. He also said the changes could have an adverse impact on his patients who need high-dose opioids.
"Is this going to make a difference or is this just a knee-jerk reaction?" he asked.On Friday I was invited to tour the aquaponics facility at the Clovis Surface Water Treatment Plant. Leon Penney, the Water Production Manager for the City of Clovis, extended this invitation after learning about this blog.
The Clovis Surface Water Treatment Plant is capable of delivering up to 15 million gallons per day of clean drinking water to the city of Clovis, California. And the city government is committed in educating everyone about where we get our water, and about the water cycle on our planet. An excellent way of teaching people about the water cycle is to present a simple closed system – and this is where aquaponics has come in. No, the aquaponics system isn’t creating clean water, it is just a great way to explore the water cycle!
Mr. Penney is driving this aquaponics project along with his regular duties as Water Production Manager. He has received assistance from the City of Clovis and the state of California – but more importantly the aquaponics demonstration system has received eager assistance and donations from local Clovis businesses.
The original plan for the system was pretty simple. A tank of fish, some grow beds, and a sort of plastic and electrical conduit hoop house for everything.
Instead, as you can see here, Lowes donated much of the materials needed to create a geodesic dome out of pressure treated lumber, Home Depot has assisted with some of the hardware. The Fresno Metropolitan Flood Control District assisted by giving the project a $2000.00 grant. Guardian Glass and Anlin Windows have supplied tempered glass cut in the proper shapes for the dome. Pacific Gas and Electric has supplied a 40 amp solar panel and the City of Clovis has provided a 15 amp solar panel – and when completed the entire aquaponics facility will be powered from solar and batteries.
I took plenty of pictures during the tour, and have them all available on my Flickr page. I’ll also link to individual images of interest here.
The facility is still under construction, but it already houses donated fish, bluegill, bass and crappie all living together in an 800 gallon tank. There are also a few Tilapia fingerlings left from an earlier purchased shipment. They haven’t done very well.
The donated fish come from J and J Aquafarms. They are donated after being caught from local recharge basins that are being drained for maintenance.
The Tilapia were purchased from an online vendor who didn’t check any relevant California law before mailing them. In Fresno County it is unlawful to raise Tilapia. Mr. Penney spoke to the local California Department of Fish and Game represenative to get an exception to the law. The DFG took his request all the way to Sacramento, where the Clovis Surface Water Treatment Plant Aquaponics Display was classifed as a educational demonstration and issued an exception to the current law.
The good news to take from this is that Sacramento is being petitioned all across California by fish growers to be allowed to raise Tilapia, and lawmakers are seriously considering changing this law.
The tank is a container spill tray – it was used as a chlorine containment tank (A secondary spill tank) from an old well site that is no longer in use. These tanks are usually expensive and out of the reach of most aquaponics hobbyists, but Mr. Penney got this tank for free. He buried the tank half underground so that it will be the lowest part of the water cycle – all water eventually runs back to this tank. In the photo you are only looking at the top half of the tank.
The grow beds are constructed out of modified Intermediate Bulk Containers (IBCs) connected to plastic pallets. These IBCs are donated, and have only contained food-grade items in the past. Mr. Penney only needs to rinse them before use. He is already growing some plants in pots and in IBCs, but not connected to the aquaponics because that plumbing is not complete. Plastic drainage pipes packed with gravel will be used to support the grow beds at a convenient height inside the dome. Right now it is not completely decided what kind of grow media to use. Expanded clay is a favorite, but gravel is cheap and easy to come by for the City of Clovis. Coconut coir is also under consideration as a grow media. It has an advantage of allowing the growth of root vegetables, but it can break down and clog an aquaponics system.
You can see here that the inside of the dome is still under construction, and that panels of glass are being attached by calk adhesive. The dome has been built under permit by the City of Clovis, and is rated by a structural engineer / architect as “overbuilt” in other words, extremely safe.
In the Central Valley, summer heat is a big problem, and a glass box in the sun is also called a solar oven. Since it isn’t a good idea to cook your fish and vegetables before they finish growing, Mr. Penney is adding several methods of cooling to the dome. The top glass panels of the dome are hinged to allow them to open to release excess heat. This will be operated automatically by a heat activated actuator. (Here’s an example.)
Besides vents, there is also a pair of 12 volt radiator fans donated from Clovis Foreign Auto Wreckers. They were the largest fans that they had! There is also a misting system, and Mr. Penny explained that the glass panels may eventually be treated to reduce the ultraviolet in order to reduce the greenhouse effect of the glass. Alternatively, he may instead use sun shade material designed for plants.
The aquaponics will be a flush and fill type of system driven by pumps on timers. Since the entire system is 12 volts, Mr. Penney had some difficulty finding 12 volt timers. He examined several battery powered garden timers for feasibility, but they were all stuck with a maximum of 5-10 cycles per day. This is not enough to run a system that is expected to flush and fill a few times per hour. But he hit on an ingenious solution. He used school bell timers! Here you can see the timers installed into the dome electrical panel. These timers cost about $10, and offer more than enough cycles per day. They are the ZYT08 programmable school bell timer, and you can find them here.
The dome has four of these timers installed, each controls a different function – aeration pump, grow lights, circulation pump, and fan/misters.
Mr. Penney has also started building specialized 12 volt grow lights for the plants. These lamps each contain two red LEDs and one blue LED for the mixture of mauve light needed for photosynthesis. These are high output LEDs, so I was surprised at how much power they used. One lamp will use just under 120 watts of power. They will be placed on a timer to supplement the daylight. When turned on, they are very bright!
A black soldier fly composter is also being tested. This is a converted plastic trash tub on wheels that currently lives in an outdoor accessible closet at the water treatment plant. Eventually the composter will be on display inside the dome, and will be discussed during classroom tours. To keep the “ick” factor down for the kids, soldier fly larva are not being called “maggots”, instead they are called “grubs”. They live on a diet of coffee grounds provided by Starbucks, and on whatever waste the dome generates. The pupa of these flies are fed to the fish. Some are allowed to escape to adulthood and lay eggs for the next generation of fish food.
As I’ve said, this project was originally supposed to be very simple. A down and dirty greenhouse with a basic aquaponics system inside. Mr. Penney was pleasantly surprised at just how generous the local businesses have been with their time and materials.
Also to be congratulated for their efforts are the rest of the staff at the Clovis Surface Water Treatment Plant – all who have pitched in. One person who stands out is Mr. Bill Hasson, the carpenter for the dome. As a woodworker myself, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the hexagonal gussets holding together the mitered ends of the 2×4 trusses for the dome. All screws were torx headed deck screws and the lumber is treated to resist the elements.
You can see the whole photoset at my Flickr page. If you have comments or questions for Mr. Penney, leave them here and I’ll direct them to him.
I can’t wait to see the whole aquaponics dome up and operational. I expect good things from this!
25 October 2011 edit: Corrections made about doners and details of construction.
28 October edit: minor correction made to calm down people on Reddit who assume an aquaponics system actually makes clean drinking water. That is not what aquaponics systems do.GPs in England are being balloted on whether they would be willing to take industrial action by collectively closing their patient lists.
In a letter to GPs, acting GPC chair Dr Richard Vautrey urged GPs to take part in the ballot which will close Thursday 10 August.
But Dr Vautrey's letter did warn that the move would have'significant implications on GPs as independent contractors'.
The letter said that 'there are two ways in which practices may cease the registration of new patients'. It said these are:
i) Temporarily suspend new patient registrations (strictly speaking, a practice’s list is not considered ‘closed’ in these circumstances); or
ii) Apply to the commissioner for formal list closure.
It added: 'We are therefore balloting practices whether or not they are prepared to undertake either or both of the above courses of action as a form of industrial action.'
The ballot follows the carried LMCs Conference motion which said that 'conference believes that the GP Forward View is failing to deliver the resources necessary to sustain general practice and demands that GPC ballot GPs as to whether they would be prepared to collectively close their lists in response to this crisis'.
Dr Vautrey's letter said: 'As a result, GPC England has been asked to ballot practices as to whether GPs in England are prepared to collectively close their practice lists. Such action would constitute industrial action, and with significant implications on GPs as independent contractors.
'It is therefore important for you and your practice colleagues to read the accompanying explanatory document carefully before responding to our ballot.'
In a FAQ distributed with the letter, the GPC said it was 'important to note that this ballot is about assessing whether or not practices are prepared to undertake this form of action' and that 'the BMA is not at this stage asking practices to undertake any action'.
It also said that GPs should 'note that as self-employed doctors, GP partners do not have the same (limited) immunities from the consequences of taking industrial action as employees do'.
It added: 'If a practice refuses to do something which is a contractual obligation they could be served with a breach notice (the most severe outcome of which is a termination of the contract) – irrespective as to whether it is done as part of a campaign of industrial action... or not.'
The move comes after the GPC announced last August that it had dropped plans to ballot members on potentially submitting undated resignations, or industrial action, after claiming that it had won concessions on workload from NHS England.
It said at the time that NHS England has agreed to take on board a number of suggestions from the GPC’s 'Urgent Prescription for General Practice', including ensuring GPs work within safe limits and longer appointments.
Meanwhile, GP leaders in Northern Ireland are in advanced stages of collecting undated resignations from practices in protest at a the lack of a rescue deal for general practice in the country.
Family Doctor Association chair Dr Peter Swinyard said: 'I don’t think the leadership of GPC were at all pleased with that vote at LMCs conference, it ties their hands quite wickedly and they’re going to have great difficulty with it. I certainly wouldn’t like to be in their shoes at the moment, it really is the devil and the deep blue.
'Even though it stops short of undated resignations, I think this still might be hard to get past as well. We’re a soft-old lot at heart, we all have at-least a bit of cardigan in us.'
Dr Swinyard further said that he will be 'fascinated to see the result', adding: 'It would certainly strengthen GPCs hand in negotiation if there were a strong ballot in favour of doing something along those lines. They’re taking the temperature aren’t they.
'But if everyone says “heavens no old chaps” then they know they haven’t got as strong a negotiating position with NHS England. They can’t say “everyone will quit or close shop if you don’t behave yourself”.''THE Anglo Tapes’ shocked the nation last year, reverberated around the world and provided the most vivid insight into the heart of the toxic bank that bankrupted the country.
'THE Anglo Tapes’ shocked the nation last year, reverberated around the world and provided the most vivid insight into the heart of the toxic bank that bankrupted the country.
Anglo: The New Tapes - 'I'll tell you what sharp is, sharp is €400 f***ing million of losses...'
Following on from the award-winning series, Independent.ie and the Irish Independent return with more startling audio and dramatic revelations from Anglo Irish Bank.
‘Anglo: The New Tapes’ contains astonishing, secret recordings from inside the bank, we also reveal for the first time explosive internal emails and confidential reports that expose what was really going on within the bank as it teetered on the brink of collapse.
Over the coming days, ‘Anglo: The New Tapes’ reveals the culture of excess inside the bank, efforts to play down the financial difficulty the bank was experiencing in the run up to collapse and, now also, the bank's interaction with Sean Quinn.
The cast of characters featured includes former Anglo Irish Bank chief executive David Drumm, this week awaiting the verdict of a US Federal bankruptcy court.
‘Anglo: The New Tapes’ contains the colourful language that has become synonymous with the executives at the bank.
Independent.ie and the Irish Independent will be broadcasting the tapes, running breaking news and analysing these latest developments in the saga.
In this extract, Drumm rants about a plan to burn the bank’s own bondholders, by quietly buying back Anglo’s own bonds at a discounted rate. The bank will then make a profit because of its own precarious financial position.
‘Anglo: The New Tapes’ – only on Independent.ie and the Irish Independent.
Online EditorsInequality is a major theme of current research in economics throughout the world. The now-famous Capital by Thomas Piketty released in English in 2014 is a case in point. It is also a major focal point in Canada, as illustrated by the book Income Inequality: The Canadian Story published recently by the Institute for Research on Public Policy and in the ongoing work of the Broadbent Institute and other groups.
There's another aspect of income inequality to tackle related to inter-temporal considerations — that is, to an aspect of inequality through time.
One area of interest in this field is whether it costs more to purchase an average residential property now than it did in the past. In other words, are residential properties becoming less affordable over time, and as a result less accessible or plausible for those with lower or median incomes?
Obviously, the nominal dollar cost of a house or a condo today is much higher than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Indeed, it is even higher than what it was just a couple of years ago. There exists a number of indices that look at the price of housing by deflating the nominal dollar price of a house by the consumer price index (CPI) to get an idea of how fast housing prices are rising relative to the general rise in prices of consumer goods.
I want to do something different. I want to calculate how many weeks of labour time, paid at the Canadian average weekly rate, it takes to purchase an average residential property.
The result, from 1970 to 2015, is shown below in Figure 1:
The figure shows clearly that the cash cost of a residential property in terms of weeks of labour time remained roughly constant all the way from 1970 to 1986, at which point housing prices in Canada (and in particular in the Toronto area) rose drastically during the next three years.
This boom in real estate prices, the rise in CPI inflation, as well as the desire of our monetary authorities to achieve price stability and impose inflation targeting, eventually led to the brisk intervention of the Bank of Canada. The Bank decided to double short-term interest rates from seven to nearly 14 per cent in the late 1980s, thus inducing our longest economic recession ever between 1990 and 1992.
On the housing front, one could say that the Bank’s interest rate policy was highly successful. The cash cost of a residential property in terms of weeks of labour dropped and did not catch up with the peak reached in 1989 until 2006. Thus while in 1984 it only took 184 weeks of labour time at the average weekly wage to purchase an average Canadian house (the same as it did in 1971), at the 1989 peak, 293 weeks were required.
Since 2001, except for the downward blip in 2009 associated with the subprime financial crisis in the United States, housing prices in Canada in terms of weeks of labour have increased at a fast pace.
In 2015, the cash cost of a residential property is double the amount of weeks of labour time that was required during the whole of the 1970s: no less than 400 weeks of labour is now needed to buy the average Canadian house. This is nearly 8 years worth of labour time and about an extra 100 weeks compared to the 1989 peak.
Clearly, at cash cost, young Canadians who wish to own their dwelling are much worse off than were their parents when they bought their house in the 1970s or during the first half of the 1980s.
Mortgage affordability bleak
Unless they inherit from their parents, most people are unable to purchase their dwelling with a cash payment. What is more interesting is to assess how much it costs Canadians (again, in terms of weeks of labour time) to purchase the average residential property when these individuals finance their purchase through a mortgage.
This is what Figure 2 shows:
For ease of computation, the numbers are based on some simplifications and assumptions.
I assume, for example, that the whole value of the dwelling is financed through a series of three five-year fixed mortgages, amortized over 15 years. Of course, since we don’t know what interest rates and wage rates will be after 2016, the numbers for the years after 2011 are estimates based on an extrapolation of recent numbers for these two variables (with a return towards trend values in the case of interest rates).
The picture that emerges from Figure 2 when interest payments are taken into account is substantially different from that of Figure 1 where a cash payment was assumed. The high nominal and real interest rates that were imposed by the Bank of Canada as part of its anti-inflation policies in the early 1980s and just before and after 1990 took a hard toll on individuals or their families desiring to purchase a residential property. Those who bought an average property in 1981 and 1982 (under these assumptions) needed 351 and 375 weeks of labour time to finance their home.
This compares poorly with the 186 weeks that were required for a purchaser in 1972. Similarly, throughout the 1987-1995 period, purchasers required more than 350 weeks of labour to finance their mortgage on an average Canadian home.
The peak was reached for 1990 buyers, who needed no less than 466 weeks of labour time to make all of their mortgage payments. Things improved after that, as the mortgage cost of purchasing of a residential property gradually fell all the way to 297 weeks in 2001, mainly as a result of stagnating nominal housing prices during that time period. However, ever since 2001, the mortgage cost of residential properties has been on an upward trend, with the exception of the 2009 downward blip.
Since 2007 (with the exception of 2009), purchasers of residential properties again necessitate more than 400 weeks (or eight years) of labour time to make all their mortgage payments. Looking at 2011, which is the last year based on hard numbers, 432 weeks are needed. Just as it was in the case of the cash cost of a residential property, this represents twice as many weeks of labour time needed to finance a mortgage as compared to the early 1970s.
Lack of fairness in mortgages
The impact of mortgage interest rates can be further assessed by Figure 3, which measures the evolution of the mortgage to cash cost ratio of purchasing a residential property in terms of labour time.
Take, for instance the scenario of someone buying a house in 1986; the mortgage rate in 1986 obviously has an enormous impact on this ratio, but since the mortgage, under the assumptions outlined earlier, need to be renewed in 1991 and 1996, the mortgage rates in these two years of renewal will also play a role.
Figure 3 clearly shows that the cost of buying a house through a 15-year mortgage, except for brief periods, has been systematically higher by 20 to 80 per cent than buying the same house at a cash price. Indeed, between all of the 1980 to 1992 period, the excess is 50 per cent or over.
In a fair world, one would expect the cash cost and the mortgage cost in terms of weeks of labour time to be the same and hence the ratio described in Figure 3 to be equal to unity. This, however, happens only in the early 1970s, although there is a tendency to get back there in the 2010s.
The reason fairness would require that this ratio be equal to one is that, as argued by the Italian economist Luigi Pasinetti in his 1981 book, Structural Change and Economic Growth: A Theoretical Essay on the Dynamics of the Wealth of Nations, a fair interest rate is such that the purchasing power of one hour of labour stays constant through time even when its monetary equivalent is lent or borrowed. This occurs when the nominal interest rate is equal to the growth rate of nominal wages.
A numerical example may help to grasp the notion of the fair rate of interest.
Suppose that the average wage is initially $20 an hour. Suppose furthermore that a borrower contracts a $20,000 loan. This person has thus borrowed the equivalent of 1,000 hours of labour-time. Suppose now that nominal wages have risen by 5 per cent, reaching $21 per hour a year later. If the rate of interest charged to the borrower is also 5 per cent, the borrower will have to reimburse an amount of $21,000 at the end of one year. Since the average nominal wage rate has now risen to $21 an hour, the amount given back by the borrower is still equivalent to 1,000 hours of labour-time. As long as the actual rate of interest is equal to the fair rate of interest, as defined above, the purchasing power that is being temporarily exchanged between the borrower and the lender remains constant in labour time. This is how Pasinetti interprets fairness, and this is why, nearly 30 years ago, my colleague Mario Seccareccia and I dubbed this the fair rate of interest.
Thus a fair mortgage rate is such that the cash cost and the mortgage cost of purchasing a house is the same in terms of weeks of labour time. Five-year mortgage rates are currently very low by all historical standards, but they are still relatively high when put in perspective with the growth rate of nominal wages.
In addition, these low mortgage rates certainly do not compensate enough, as obvious from Figure 2, for the high cash cost of purchasing a dwelling in Canada today. Pro-growth fiscal policies that could eventually lead to faster growth in wages, without interest rate increases, would further help in bringing mortgage costs towards cash costs. This is not unthinkable today as central bankers acknowledge the long-term negative consequences that their short-term inflation targeting policies may inflict.
Key conclusions
The data here demonstrate that the cash cost of the average residential property in Canada is much higher today than through most of the last five decades.
This conclusion could be challenged by some observers by arguing that most of the cost increase in residential units could be attributed to the desire of households to acquire ever bigger houses. For instance, newly-built houses in 1975 had on average 1075 square feet; in 2013 they had about 2000 square feet. Therefore, whether current households suffer from inter-generational inequity depends on whether one believes that the average size of houses is a free individual choice or, at least to some extent, is being imposed by the construction industry and society more generally.
Nevertheless, since 2006 the cash cost is higher than it ever was in terms of weeks of labour time at the average weekly wage. In 2015, the cash cost of a residential property is double the amount of weeks of labour time that was required during the whole of the 1970s.
Nevertheless, mortgages tell a similar story. Recent and current buyers are expected to pay through the years the equivalent of 420 to 450 weeks of labour time to finance their mortgages — that’s eight to nine years worth of labour time at the average weekly wage. By contrast, in the early 1970s only about 200 weeks of labour time were needed and only 15 years ago, around the year 2000, about 300 weeks of labour time were enough to purchase an average residential property.
Swings in the monetary policies pursued by the Bank of Canada have obvious consequences on housing prices and interest payments on housing mortgages. These swings help create enormous inter-temporal inequities. The amount of financial resources devoted to housing ownership across households of different generations, sometimes apart by less than a decade, can diverge by more than 100 weeks of labour time.
Of course monetary policy is not the sole cause of the fluctuating nominal housing prices. Whatever is the current cause of the rise of prices in the housing market, when computed as the mortgage cost in labour time in terms of the average weekly salary, residential properties, with the exception of the 1988-1991 period, are now clearly less affordable for middle-class Canadians than they were for the last five decades.
This affordability challenge has grown for nearly a decade. Current and recent buyers need to devote many more weeks of labour time to the financing of their home than their predecessors. No wonder so many young prospective buyers, especially those in major cities, feel that owning a residential unit is more like a long-distance dream.
Marc Lavoie is Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Broadbent Institute policy fellow. This research was financed by a grant that Mario Seccareccia and I obtained from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). Many thanks to our hard-working research assistants Najib Khan and Drew Penner, as well as to Jonathan Sas for his many suggestions.I see this in our future.
My post yesterday, “Why Millennials Are Leaving the Church Really”, was in response to Rachel Held Evans’ article, “Why Millennials Are Leaving the Church”. Later in the day my good friend, Hemant Mehta, The Friendly Atheist, wrote his own response, “Why Are Millennials Leaving Church? Try Atheism!”. You’ve got to read it.
I found it fascinating because it is evangelism pure and simple. A friend of mine called it proselytizing.
When I was a teenage Baptist and Pentecostal, we were made to do door-to-door evangelism. I hated it. Haaaaaaated it! Basically, what we were offering people was:
An answer to their questions of meaning (the gospel); A community (the church).
This open appeal to people to become atheists has the same feel. As atheism gains ground and adherence, atheism can now offer the same thing: answers and a community.
Did you know that there are now sunday assemblies for atheists? And it’s growing.
One of the things I suspect is going on with millennials leaving the church is that many people are suspicious of particular parties and official groups. They are hesitant to pledge their allegiance to any one vender of meaning. I know I won’t. So my question is, why quit one group just to join another? It’s back to my perpetual plea, why labels?
Even though I suggest atheism’s strength would be found in its resistance to organize, I still appreciate Hemant’s article. He isn’t necessarily offering an organization, but he is offering an intellectual and ethical alternative that many might want and even need. Many members of The Lasting Supper are atheists and agnostic. In fact, just yesterday, I interviewed ex-pastor now atheist author of “Hope After Faith”, Jerry DeWitt for our podcast. He’s a member of The Lasting Supper as well. I invite you to come join us. (See what I just did there? Ya, my own kind of evangelism I guess!)It's no secret that Teen Mom OG stars Farrah Abraham and Amber Portwood don't exactly get along — and in an exclusive interview with In Touch, the adult entertainer opened up about what she REALLY thinks of Amber's ex-fiancé, Matt Baier, getting hitched so soon after their split. Mind you, Amber has also moved on with Andrew Glennon and is expecting their first baby. In Touch reported last week that Matt married his girlfriend, Jennifer Conlon, in Las Vegas.
"Congratulations to Matt! I mean, to honestly say — all my congratulations to Matt for getting married, because the whole time he was dating Amber was bulls–t. He never really liked Amber," she revealed on Friday at Gossip Long Island's 20th anniversary celebration, where most of the exotic dancers were rocking sexy outfits from her new lingerie line. "Thank them for having me two nights in a row!" the mother-of-one quipped. "We brought some class, we brought some sass, and some of my lingerie line — a lot of the women tonight are wearing it, so I'm happy to be here and happy they chose me." You can purchase Farrah's lingerie at PulchraIntimates.com.
Matt first confirmed his new ~marital status~ in an interview with E! News. "She's not a public figure. So we kept our relationship private,” he revealed. "It was one of those situations where it just kind of felt like the right thing. We really get each other. We both have overcome a lot of stuff. It felt like the right thing to do. It just kind of happened that way.” It's nice to hear that everyone is happy!
Teen Mom OG airs on Mondays at 9 p.m. EST on MTV.
Love Teen Mom? Be sure to join our Teen Mom Facebook group to chat about all the latest updates and juicy gossip!
For more exclusive content, sign up for our In Touch newsletter!How do you boil water? Eschewing the traditional kettle and flame, MIT engineers have invented a bubble-wrapped, sponge-like device that soaks up natural sunlight and heats water to boiling temperatures, generating steam through its pores.
The design, which the researchers call a “solar vapor generator,” requires no expensive mirrors or lenses to concentrate the sunlight, but instead relies on a combination of relatively low-tech materials to capture ambient sunlight and concentrate it as heat. The heat is then directed toward the pores of the sponge, which draw water up and release it as steam.
From their experiments — including one in which they simply placed the solar sponge on the roof of MIT’s Building 3 — the researchers found the structure heated water to its boiling temperature of 100 degrees Celsius, even on relatively cool, overcast days. The sponge also converted 20 percent of the incoming sunlight to steam.
The low-tech design
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Staphylococcus aureus bacteria.32
Because crowding creates an environment conducive to the spread of disease, pigs on factory farms are fed antibiotics and sprayed with huge amounts of pesticides. The antibiotics and pesticides remain in their bodies and are passed along to people who eat them, creating serious health hazards for humans. Pigs and other factory-farmed animals are fed millions of pounds of antibiotics each year, and scientists believe that meat-eaters’ unwitting consumption of these drugs gives rise to strains of bacteria that are resistant to treatment.33
Environmental Hazards
Senior U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization official Henning Steinfeld reported that the meat industry is “one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems.”34
Each farmed pig produces about 10 pounds of manure per day.35 As a result, many tons of waste end up in giant pits, polluting the air and groundwater. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, agricultural runoff is the number one source of pollution in our waterways.36 In 2012, a North Carolina hog farm had to pay a $1.5 million in fines for violations of the Clean Water Act after illegally dumping waste into a stream leading to the Waccamaw River.37 And in the largest federally imposed pollution fine issued to date, pork producer Smithfield Foods paid $12.6 million for polluting the Pagan River with phosphorous-contaminated wastewater from its slaughterhouse.38
Raising animals for food also requires massive amounts of resources. Two-thirds of all agricultural land in the U.S. is used to raise animals for food or to grow grain to feed them.39 Pigs and other farmed animals are the primary consumers of water in the U.S.—a single pig may require up to 5 gallons of drinking water per day.40 In the “finishing” phase alone, during which pigs grow from 100 to 240 pounds, each hog consumes more than 500 pounds of grain, corn, and soybeans. This means that across the U.S., pigs eat tens of millions of tons of feed every year.41
What You Can Do
Stop factory-farming abuses by supporting legislation that abolishes intensive-confinement systems. McDonald’s, Chipolte and Target are just a couple of companies that have said they will stop buying from farms that use gestation crates.42 Smithfield Foods phased out the use of the crates in the US by the end of 2017 and plans to do the same for its international farms by 2022.43 In the meantime, voters in Florida, Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio and Rhode Island have banned the use of gestation crates.44 In Canada, the crates will be phased out of use by 2024.45
Stop giving your money to pig farms and slaughterhouses. Going vegan means eating for life— your life and animals’ lives. Visit PETA.org to order a free copy of PETA’s vegetarian/vegan starter kit.
References
1Cambridge Daily News, “New Slant on Chump Chops,” Cambridge Daily News, 29 Mar. 2002.
2Miguel Helft, “Pig Video Arcade Critiques Life in The Pen,” Wired, 6 Jun. 1997.
3America’s Test Kitchen Radio, “412: Pig Tales: A True Story of Smart Pigs, Dumb Farmers and The American Pork Industry,” WNYC, 17 Apr. 2015.
4Deborah Bracconier, “Wallowing in Mud Is More Than Just Temperature Control,” Phys.org, 2 May 2011.
5National Agricultural Statistics Service, “Quarterly Hogs and Pigs,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, 27 Sept. 2018.
6National Agricultural Statistics Service, “Livestock Slaughter 2017 Summary,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, April 2018.
7National Agricultural Statistics Service.
8David Jackson and Gary Marx, “Pork Producers Defend Gestation Crates, But Consumers Demand Change” The Chicago Tribune, 23 Aug. 2016.
9Ron Ketchem and Mark Rix, “Is Farrowing Crate Design a Constraint to Weaning Average?” National Hog Farmer, 10 June 2013.
10Graeme Taylor and Greg Roese, “Basic Pig Husbandry – The Weaner,” ThePigSite.com, 18 Apr. 2006.
11Tasha R. Gruhot et al., “An Economic Analysis of Sow Retention in A United States Breed-to-Wean System,” Journal of Swine Health and Production” 25(2017):238-246.
12MY Zang et al., “Effects of Confinement Duration and Parity on Stereotypic Behavioral and Physiological Responses of Pregnant Sows,” Physiology & Behavior, 179(2017):369-376.
13American Meat Science Association, “Pork Production: Farrow to Finish Process,” TheMeatWeEat.com, 9 Mar. 2017.
14Sam Brasch, “Is the GMO Debate Aimed at Pig Testicles? Modern Farmer, 20 Jan. 2015.
15“Progress Report: Castration of Pigs in the EU,” The Pig Site, 5 Dec. 2016.
16John C. Rea, “Care of Pigs from Farrowing to Weaning,” University of Missouri Extension, accessed 18 Nov. 2018.
17Ibid.
18Temple Grandin, “Welfare of Pigs During Transport Department of Animal Sciences, Colorado State University, Nov. 2014.
19A.J. Zanella and O. Duran, Pig Welfare During Loading and Transportation: A North American Perspective, I Conferência Virtual Internacional Sobre Qualidade de Carne Suína, 16 Nov. 2000.
20John Goihl, “Transport Losses of Market Hogs Studied Feedstuffs, 28 Jan. 2008.
21Dennis A. Shields and Kenneth H. Mathews Jr., “Interstate Livestock Movements U.S. Department of Agriculture, June 2003.
22Zanella and Duran.
23Ibid.
24Andrew Wasley et al., “Two Amputations A Week: The Cost of Working in A US Meat Plant,” The Guardian, 5 July 2018.
25Joby Warrick, “‘They Die Piece by Piece,'” The Washington Post, 10 Apr. 2001.
26Ibid.
27Temple Grandin, “2001 Restaurant Audits of Stunning and Handling in Federally Inspected Beef and Pork Slaughter Plants,” 2002 Meat Institute Animal Handling and Stunning Conference, Colorado State University: Department of Animal Sciences, 2002.
28Nuri Faruk Aykan, “Red Meat and Colorectal Cancer,” Oncology Reviews, 9(2015):288.
29R. Sinha et al., “Meat and Meat-Related Compounds and Risk of Prostate Cancer in a Large Prospective Cohort Study in the United States,” American Journal of Epidemiology, 1 Nov. 2009.
30M.B. Schulze et al., “Processed Meat Intake and Incidence of Type 2 Diabetes in Younger and Middle-Aged Women,” Diabetologia, 24 Oct. 2003.
31Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “CDC Estimates of Foodborne Illness in the United States,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 19 Aug. 2016.
32Ashley M. O’Brien et al., “MRSA in Conventional and Alternative Retail Pork Products” PLoS ONE 7 (2012).
33Timothy F. Landers, RN, CNP, PhD, et al., “A Review of Antibiotic Use in Food Animals: Perspective, Policy, and Potential,” Public Health Reports, 127(2012):4-22.
34U.N. News Service, “Rearing Cattle Produces More Greenhouse Gases Than Driving Cars, U.N. Report Warns” U.N. News Centre, 29 Nov. 2006.
35Beth Hoffman, “What The Pork? China, Pigs And Poop,” Forbes, 13 May 2014.
36Environmental Protection Agency, “Nonpoint Source: Agriculture,” Polluted Runoff: Nonpoint Source (NPS) Pollution, 18 Aug. 2017.
37Craig Jarvis, “Money from Hog Farm Prosecution Buys Land To Protect the Waccamaw River,” The News & Observer 31 Aug. 2018.
38David Bacon, “How US Policies Fueled Mexico’s Great Migration,” The Nation, 23 Jan. 2012.
39Daniel P. Bigelow and Allison Borchers, “Major Uses of Land in the United States, 2012,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Aug. 2017.
40Theo van Kempen, “Whole Farm Water Use,” North Carolina State University Swine Extension, July 2003.
41American Meat Science Association.
42Associated Press, “Pig Abuse Is Just Part of The Problem on Pork Farms,” CBS News, 31 July 2018.
43Elisha Sauers, “Smithfield Foods Delivers on Decade-old Promise To Eliminate Pregnant Sow Stalls in US,” The Virginian Pilot, 23 Jan. 2018.
44Sauers.
45Jennifer Jackson, “How Do Canada’s Welfare Standards Compete Worldwide?” Farms.com, 9 May 2017.WASHINGTON -- As he looked over his office's budget sheets alongside his administrative assistant, Steve Nolder, the director of the public defender's office in southern Ohio, was confronted with no good options.
It was early March. Sequestration had already been triggered, forcing his office to find an 11 percent reduction in expenditures. They had cut travel, gotten rid of cell phones, and stopped paying for expert witnesses, workforce education and training. They would keep using old computers despite promises of new ones. A receptionist had quit and wouldn't be replaced. A lawyer was set to retire that June without replacement. The entire staff was going to be furloughed for 17 days. Even after all that, they were in the hole.
"It was a pimple on the elephant's ass," explained Nolder.
The numbers couldn't be fudged. Nolder had to reduce staff. He looked around and studied his no-good options before concluding that the best path forward was to fire himself.
It was a solemn end to an 18-year run in the public defender's office. But the self-sacrifice helped save the jobs of three, potentially four, fellow lawyers who would have been let go if he himself hadn't fallen on the sword.
"They uprooted themselves and moved to this district to work in my office," Nolder explained of his decision in an interview with The Huffington Post. "And one of the curses or benefits of being in the legal community for as long as I have is hopefully you have established a reputation and, through that reputation, you maybe can do something else."
"I'm going to do criminal defense work," he said of his future plans. "That's all I have ever known. I don't have anything else in my DNA to do. And you know what, I'll be all right... I will be fine. I worry about the office. I hope they are fine, too."
As the effects of sequestration take hold, one of the most harmed professional groups has been federal public defenders. The federal public defender system has been forced to absorb an estimated $43 million cut this year alone. In Nolder's case, his office, which handled 1,100 cases last year alone (many dealing with drug, gun and child pornography crimes) was forced to reduce its budget by $308,000 in roughly six months' time. Unlike many other federal agencies, the majority of the budget for federal public defenders' offices goes toward salaries and rent, meaning that sequestration is having a direct impact at the human level.
In the Northern District of Texas, an appellate lawyer described by his boss as one of the "best and brightest" in the district is leaving the job he loves at the end of the month. Richard Anderson, the top federal public defender in the district, said an "outstanding" young lawyer with four children is leaving his office because he couldn’t afford a 25 percent pay cut.
"I have spent the last seven years really investing in the legal acumen of my office. To see that start to disintegrate..." Anderson said. "I have already moved from infinite rage to some sort of degree of quiet acceptance on my grief cycle, but I hope that articles will shine a light where we can get some relief."
Anderson called his budget "incredibly lean" and said that "almost all" of it was tied up in either salaries or rent.
The dramatic cutback with which Anderson and others have to contend in the wake of sequestration won't leave indigent defendants without legal representation -- the federal public defender system, which provides legal representation to such defendants accused of felonies, will go on. But it will be far more dependent on private attorneys with limited experience in federal court proceedings to pick up the slack through pro bono work, a development that could severely hamper the legal defense process.
"The sequester has hit the public defender program very hard," Dennis Terez, the top federal public defender for the Northern District of Ohio, told HuffPost last week. His office has been forced to swallow roughly 21 furlough days to make budget just for this fiscal year alone -- what he said is the average number of furlough days being applied throughout the industry -- even though the caseload remains the same.
"I've had to cut travel budgets, it's cut everyone's budgets," Terez said. "It's forced every defender to find money for benefits and salaries to avoid layoffs, but the problem is, nationwide, roughly 85 percent of every defender office [budget] is either salaries and benefits or rent -- and you can't change the rent."
"It's a little bit unpredictable. We don't quite know how this will get handled in every regard," Terez said. "But certainly it's a very, very serious problem."
And it's a problem being experienced throughout the country. Rene Valladares, the top federal public defender for Nevada, said that he has been forced to lay off several employees, in addition to implementing furlough days.
"Things, I gotta tell you, are really tough right now," he said. "It's unfortunate that this public defender decided to go ahead and resign, but can't blame him, I guess. Things are very difficult right now."
"One of the hallmarks that makes this a great system -- the federal system of justice -- is that the indigent are given representation that is quality representation," Valladares said. "That's under siege, that principle is under siege right now."
Federal public defenders in Northern Mississippi expect to face about 22 days of furloughs, but told a local newspaper they expect to ignore the mandate. In Maryland, federal public defenders are facing 15 days of furlough. In Peoria, Ill., three members of the public defender's office have been cut, while those who remain face 10 furlough days.
Courts, too, are feeling the pinch. The U.S. District Court in Los Angeles announced that it will close its clerk's office for seven Fridays over the next few months. Utah officials said they would limit Friday federal court openings beginning in April. In Nevada and several other districts, federal courts are "going dark" on criminal cases on Fridays, the day that many federal public defenders will be furloughed. The federal court in Washington, D.C., is planning to do the same beginning April 26, according to the Washington Post.
Friday, indeed, appears to be the day that some justice will rest.You may not remember, but I know you very well. I met you a long time ago when you came to my house with your smiling faces, your neat clothes, and your soft voices, and a Bible tucked neatly under your arm. You told me many beautiful stories of a "paradise earth," and a "righteous new system" which would be established shortly. You beguiled me; I listened and I let you teach me your form of Christ-dignity.
I loved you, I devoted most of my life to you, I was loyal and obedient, never realizing that one day I would come to disagree with everything you had to say. When I first met you and learned of the "paradise," little did I know that in order to get to that paradise, I would have to walk over the dead bodies of beloved family, cherished friends, and casual acquaintances, because they didn't want to be Jehovah's Witnesses. With your soft, sweet voices, and gentle manner, you convinced me that everything and everyone who did not agree with you was "evil." I came to believe that other churches were bad and of the devil, and so were their members. I became convinced that all the governments were wicked, including my own, and that I was not to support the country in which I lived. I believed you, I loved you, trusted you, and served you and never suspected that you were capable of deceiving me.
I loved you so much that I raised my precious children as Jehovah's Witnesses. I taught them that you were trustworthy, and true followers of God and Jesus. I trained them to believe your every word. How could I have known that in the future you would steal my own flesh and blood from my arms and prevent them from seeing me because I would come to disagree with you? I never noticed the fangs of oppression and tyranny that lurked behind those gentle smiles. I never knew that I would be expected to hand over my mind, soul, and spirit to you, and if I were to ever want them back, you would hold my children as hostages and no amount of begging and tears would release them from your grip because they had been raised to look at you as being God, rather than mere men.
When I came to you, I was young and pretty and impressionable, looking for a relationship with God, my Creator. But through slick words and empty speeches you convinced me that I was not really a child of God, that my duty was to the organization-that THEY would tell me what to do and how to think. Through years of domination and manipulation I began to accept the meager food that was being offered to me, and became willing to accept it as the true "spiritual" food from the Master, while all the time feeling the gnawing at my body. Finally, I discovered that I had been robbed of my joy, my love, my compassion, and my mercy, and it was replaced with legalistic doctrinal formula which provided me with fear, guilt, and anxiety to fill my hungry heart. When I said, "I want more than this," you slapped me with your soft little hand, which had now turned into an iron fist of oppression. Yes, you fooled me all along, your deception was because you had been fooled too, a long time ago, by others who had taken you captive to their dictatorial reign of terror. You convinced me that the words of men were the words of God because you really thought it was true. I believed you because you were gently, soft spoken, and carried the Bible tucked under your arm.
You told me that you had "freedom" and it was only later, when I tried to escape your brand of "freedom" that I discovered that the iron bars of the gate had been shut and I was at your mercy because, by this time, you had already gained control of my mind and my emotions. I cried and begged you to please let me go, and you said, with your firm, roaring voice, "not until I have stripped you naked" and you did. You stripped me of my dignity, my self-respect, my honor, and my FAMILY! You told all my family and friends that I was demonic, evil, an apostate, a spiritual fornicator, and good for nothing but total destruction by your angry God whom you had tried to pass off as a God of "love." They believed you, and they still believe you, because their eyes are blinded by the promise of "paradise" and they cannot "see" the Hell that surrounds them. The ever illusive "paradise" is held out to the gullible like a carrot in front of the nose of a rabbit, and causes them to sacrifice their family, friends, careers, education, hopes and dreams on the altar of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
Now I'm older, now I'm wiser, but now it is too late- life is fast slipping away. Through my tears, I cry out for my beautiful daughter and grandchildren, but you grip them tighter and tighter and tell them that YOU will be their "mother." And so you are, and so you are! I begged to recapture my honor and my dignity, but you laughed with your bright, shining teeth, and said, "No way, you're on your own." Somehow those soft, pretty words weren't soft and pretty anymore, but words of slander, abuse, hatred, and hostility- and you said them in such a way that others would think that you were righteous and I was evil. You lied about me, but no one will believe you LIED because they trust you-that's because you are soft spoken, gentle, and carry a Bible tucked neatly under your arm.
Gaila Noble?ARIZONASubmitted by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,
The Trump victory is very good news for the US - relative to a win for Hillary, which would have been an unmitigated disaster. So I’m happy he won.
Will Trump winning mean a real change in direction for the US? Unlikely. Don’t mistake Trump for a libertarian. He has all kinds of stupid notions—torture as official policy, killing families of accused terrorists, and putting on import duties. He has no grasp of economics. He’s an authoritarian. His cabinet choices, so far, are all neocons and Deep State hangers-on. He’s likely to treat the US as if it were his 100% owned corporation.
On the bright side, he has real business experience—although of the kind that sees government as a partner. I doubt he’ll try, or be able if he does, to pull up any agencies by the roots. He’ll mainly be able to set the tone, as did Reagan. But, hey, something is better than nothing.
THE POLITICAL FUTURE
A brief word on US political parties. I’ve said for years that the Demopublicans and the Republicrats are just two wings of the same party. One says it’s for social freedom (which is a lie), but is actively antagonistic to economic freedom. The other says it’s for economic freedom (which is a lie), but is actively antagonistic to social freedom. Both are controlled by members of the Deep State.
I still think that’s an accurate description of reality. But, in truth, it’s a little unfair to the Republicans. The creatures who control the Republican Party are one thing - and they were massively repudiated by the victory of Trump. Good riddance. But the people who gravitate towards the GOP are something else. To them, the GOP mostly represents a cultural club they belong to.
Rank and file Republicans don’t have any cohesive philosophy binding them together. They’re just sympathetic to “traditional” values. They like the picture postcard version of America. The 1950’s style Father Knows Best family. The world of American Graffiti. A house in the suburbs, or a small, neat farm. Thanksgiving dinners with relatives. The exchange of Christmas cards. Going to church on Sunday. The husband having a job that allows him to support the wife and kids. Chevrolets and Fords. A relatively small, non-predatory government. A friendly neighborhood cop. A basically decent and stable society, which doesn’t tolerate crime, or overly outlandish behavior, where social norms are understood and observed.
You get the picture. It’s a cultural thing, not an ideological or political construct. Unfortunately, it’s no longer a reality. It’s more and more just an ideal, about as dated as a Norman Rockwell painting on the defunct Saturday Evening Post.
The Democrats are quite different in outlook. They see themselves as hip and sophisticated, and see traditional values as “square”. They’re for globalism, not American nationalism. Forget the clean-cut Mouseketeers; the fat and loathsome Lena Dunham is the new role model. Political correctness rules. White men are automatically despised. Black is beautiful. Women are better than men. The very idea of America is in disrepute, and held in contempt. Multiculturalism overrules home-grown values. Etc. Etc.
You’ll notice that there was very little discussion about policy in this election. It was almost all ad hominem attacks, mostly pushing emotional hot buttons, not intellectual points. It’s all about a culture clash. It’s a non-violent civil war. These two groups no longer have very much in common. And they don’t just disagree, they hate each other.
Is a real civil war possible? Unlikely. The electorate is too degraded to actually get off their couches to fight, apart from the fact few know how to use a gun anymore. Besides, 25% of the US is on antidepressants or other psychoactive drugs; they’re too passive to want radical change. Almost half the country is on some form of the dole; they fear having their doggy dishes taken away. More than half the country is obese; fat people tend to avoid street fights. The median age in the US is 38; old people don’t usually get in fights. Anyway, everybody lives on their electronic devices, not the real world.
You’ll notice that voting for Trump and Hillary broke along cultural lines. The Republicans won the rural areas (which are dropping in population); the Democrats won the cities (which are growing). The Reps are white (and becoming no more than a plurality); the Dems have most of the so-called “people of color”, who used to be called “colored people” (and are becoming a majority). The Reps did better with males; the Dems better with females, who tend to see the world in softer and gentler shades. The Reps are favored by native-born Americans; the Dems are favored by immigrants, who often have very different values. The Reps represent the diminishing middle-class; the Dems represent the growing underclass. The Reps did better with older people, who are on their way out; the Dems did better with younger people, indoctrinated by academia and the media, who are on their way up.
None of this looks good for the future of traditional American culture. In fact, Hillary won the popular vote. That means, demographics being what they are, the Republicans are in more trouble next time. With current immigration and birth patterns, the constituency of the Democrats should gain about 2% every four-year election cycle in the future. Even more important, as we leave the eye of the storm that started in 2007, and go into the trailing edge of the economic hurricane, the Trump administration will be blamed. There will, therefore, be a radical reaction away from what it’s believed to represent in 2020.
It used to be the Reps and the Dems differentiated mostly on ideological grounds. Now it’s much more on cultural grounds. Allow me to identify the elephant in the room, and spell out the real nature of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic party is a cesspool filled with leftist social engineers, academics, busy-body pundits, the “elite”, cultural Marxists, race baiters, racial “minorities” who see race as their main identity, radical feminists and LBGT types, entitled underachievers, statists, the soft-headed, the envy-driven, the stupid, professional losers, haters of free markets, and people who simply hate the idea of America. I can’t imagine anyone of good will, or even common decency, being a member of today's Democratic Party. It needs to be flushed. But it will only get stronger in the near future, for many reasons.
But it’s an honest party—they generally say what they believe, even if it’s repulsive to anyone who values things like liberty. Interestingly, there are no Dinos—unless they’re Stalinists or Maoists who think the others aren’t going far enough. The party has absolutely no redeeming values.
A real battle for the soul of the country is shaping up. But I fear it won’t be heroic, so much as sordid. The knaves versus the fools. The Dems are the evil party, but the Reps are just the stupid party.
Why? Trump and the Trumpers have no ideology except a vision of a vanished world. They’re understandably angry, but don’t know what to do about it. They have no real program, except to say the Dems have gone too far. No coherent philosophy, just a nebulous belief that the Democrats are wrong. They’re justifiably fed up with the Establishment that gave them non-entities like Dole, McCain, and Romney.
Why did Trump win? Two reasons.
First, “Cultural Americans” know that their culture is dying, and their standard of living is declining. They sensed—correctly—that this would be their “last hurrah”, their last real kick at the cat. Trump is likely the last white male president. Unless a rabid statist like Tim Kaine is elected in 2020, with promises of a new and more radical New Deal. Or ongoing wars tilt the odds towards a general, most of whom are still white males. Second, don’t forget that Trump wasn’t the only protest candidate in the primaries. There was Bernie. His supporters know that Hillary and the Dem insiders stole it from him, and they’re still very unhappy. Many abstained from voting for Hillary because of the theft. A few probably voted for Trump out of spite. Or because they wanted to burn the house down. Nobody says this.
Perversely, they’ll get their wish. The Greater Depression will deepen under Trump, even if he makes the right moves. Which will play into the election of someone from the Democrat cesspool in 2020. So maybe the Trump victory isn’t such a good thing after all.
But let’s look at the bright side. All things considered, we’re in for some wonderful free (kind of) entertainment.The Philadelphia Flyers have acquired a third-round pick in the 2017 NHL Entry Draft from the Boston Bruins in exchange for C Zac Rinaldo, according to general manager Ron Hextall.
Rinaldo, 25 (6/15/1990), recently completed his fifth season in the Flyers organization. In 2014-15, he recorded a goal and five assists for six points in 58 games, along with 102 PIM.
Rinaldo was selected by the Flyers in the sixth round (178th overall) of the 2008 NHL Entry Draft and started his professional career in 2010 with the team’s American Hockey League affiliate, then the Adirondack Phantoms. He made his NHL debut with the Flyers during the 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
In 223 career regular season games for the Flyers over four seasons (2011-2015), Rinaldo recorded eight goals and 16 assists for 24 points, along with 572 PIM.
2015-16 Flyers full and partial season ticket memberships are now available and include the best prices, plus access to team events, an interest free payment plan option, and more. Call 215-218-PUCK or visit PhiladelphiaFlyers.com.Hillary Clinton is unleashing her biggest weapon on Bernie Sanders: Bill (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
THE MORNING PLUM:
The details are only just trickling in (I have not seen video posted anywhere), but multiple reports out this morning confirm that Bill Clinton dramatically escalated his criticism of Bernie Sanders at a New Hampshire rally late yesterday.
According to one account, Bill Clinton hammered Sanders’s supporters for unleashing misogynistic attacks against Hillary’s high-profile female supporters, describing them as “vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often, not to mention sexist, to repeat.”
Bill also mocked Sanders for claiming to lead a revolution, claiming: “When you’re making a revolution, you can’t be too careful with the facts.” Bill ridiculed Sanders’s relentlessly on-message criticism of our “rigged” political system and Clinton’s acceptance of Wall Street and corporate money, describing Sanders’s worldview as a “hermetically sealed box.” And Bill also revived the whole flap over whether the Sanders campaign had improperly accessed DNC data that was proprietary to the Clinton campaign.
Compared to what we’re seeing on the GOP side, this is still relatively tame stuff. But Bill’s broadsides nonetheless seem over the top.
Yes, there is a contingent of online Sanders supporters who aggressively go after those who express even a hint of skepticism towards him. But every successful campaign has its share of online supporters who do such things. Yes, Sanders is playing it a bit too cute in suggesting — without saying so outright — that Hillary just might be beholden to big contributors, and yes, it’s fair to ask tough questions about how Sanders’s revolution would actually work. But Bill really should avoid any overt, reductive mockery of the appeal of Sanders’s broad critique of our political system, which risks alienating Sanders supporters who are getting engaged in the political process, many no doubt for the first time in their lives.
Maybe the better move would be to figure out what it is about Sanders’s approach that is enabling him to make young voters feel that they have a stake in politics, and to learn from it. Meanwhile, the data flap was resolved in a manner that reflected well on both campaigns, with Sanders ultimately apologizing for what happened. Why dredge that up again?
It’s hard not to notice the echoes this carries of the 2008 battle between Hillary and Obama. At the time, Bill caustically argued (among many other things) that nominating Obama instead of his wife would “roll the dice,” and famously ridiculed the Obama candidacy as a “fairy tale.” Bill appeared to feel that Obama was largely getting a free pass from the press and that someone had to call this out, to force greater scrutiny of his candidacy. He may well feel the same way now about Sanders.
That impulse is understandable. But Bill Clinton knows the press will pounce on, and magnify, anything he says — fair or not, this is a factor that must be weighed — and if Hillary is still going to win the nomination, she’ll have to unite the party afterwards.
It’s still way too early to say whether Bill will ultimately go as hard at Sanders as he did at Obama in 2008. Hillary’s deep structural advantages probably still make her the heavy favorite for the nomination, so Bill may not feel a need to do that once she starts racking up wins in states that follow New Hampshire.
But one has to hope this latest episode is not a harbinger of more to come along the lines of what we saw in 2008. Hillary and her campaign have worked hard to avoid her being tagged as the establishment candidate who believes she’s entitled to a coronation. This story-line has been exaggerated in unfair ways. But if the goal is to dispel that narrative, it won’t be helpful to have an ex-president who also happens to be your husband angrily ridiculing and belittling the appeal of a spirited challenger who has engaged millions of young voters into the political process in a way you haven’t.
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UPDATE: In fairness, Bill Clinton’s 2008 “fairy tale” remark appears to have been aimed at Obama’s arguments about his opposition to the Iraq War, not at his overall candidacy.
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* TRUMP’S LEAD GROWS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE: The latest CNN/WMUR tracking poll finds 33 percent of likely New Hampshire GOP primary voters in New Hampshire back Donald Trump, with 16 percent backing Marco Rubio, 14 percent for Ted Cruz, 11 percent for John Kasich and the rest in single digits.
The polling averages show similar findings. If Rubio manages to say ahead of the others it will probably be a decent night for him. Still, the latest UMass Lowell Tracking Poll has Rubio and Cruz tied for second place (and Trump with a large lead), so we’ll see.
* SANDERS DOMINATES IN NEW HAMPSHIRE: The latest CNN/WMUR poll also finds Bernie Sanders leading Hillary Clinton by 58-35. The polling averages put Sanders up 15 points, and the UMass tracker has it at 16 points, so it looks like he’s heading for a big win.
The question is whether it will be enough to shift the dynamic in the contests in the much more diverse electorates that follow.
* BERNIE: I’M NOT QUESTIONING HILLARY’S INTEGRITY: On Face the Nation, Sanders was pressed on whether he is saying that Wall Street and corporate money has actively shaped Clinton’s actual policy positions, and he said:
“It’s just people are throwing millions ever dollars into the campaign, but there’s no reason why they’re throwing that money into the campaign. I think, you know, the American people know better. So, I have never impugned Secretary Clinton’s integrity. I like Secretary Clinton. But we have a corrupt campaign finance system.”
As I’ve noted, Sanders has steadily stopped just short of suggesting that Clinton has been corrupted by Wall Street cash, perhaps because he doesn’t want to be seen doing that.
* HILLARY’S PLAN TO STOP BERNIE: Politico reports that the Clinton campaign is actively taking steps to avoid a repeat of 2008, when Obama slowly amassed delegates against Clinton by racking up wins in caucus states:
Her Brooklyn-based brain trust is…investing heavily in caucus states like Idaho, Maine, Colorado and Minnesota to keep Bernie Sanders from quickly converting his popularity with young voters into an easy succession of victories that puts her in an unrecoverable hole….The campaign has made a strategic decision to spend big on organizers…in the caucus states, according to people briefed on the campaign’s strategic blueprint.
If true, the Clinton camp’s plan for stopping Bernie doesn’t only turn on winning big in the more diverse states, particularly in the south, though that is a big part of it.
* RUBIO’S RIVALS SMELL BLOOD IN WATER, MAYBE: The Associated Press reports that after Rubio’s stumbles in Saturday night’s debate, the trio of governors running for president see an opportunity to halt his rise by humbling him in New Hampshire:
At the heart of the battle between Rubio and Chris Christie, John Kasich and Jeb Bush is whether the freshman Florida senator has the experience and policy depth to serve as president — or whether he’s simply a well-spoken lightweight….Without a strong showing, each will face enormous pressure to drop out from Republican Party leaders eager to rally around a single candidate who can challenge Cruz and Trump.
Right now, it looks like all they can hope for at best is that Rubio is relegated to third place, however.
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and gain a foothold in the city, as the Russian Air Force is not conducting airstrikes against residential areas in the city of Palmyra,” the statement reads.
Palmyra was seized by IS in 2015, however in March this year Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air support, managed to liberate the city.
Overnight Saturday, the Syrian Army, backed by Russian air strikes, managed to repel several attacks on Palmyra, killing up to 300 jihadists, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
Also on Saturday, terrorists reportedly entered some of Palmyra’s districts forcing the Syrian troops to withdraw from some of their positions. According to AP, citing the activist-run Palmyra Coordination network, jihadists gained footholds in the northern and northwestern districts of Palmyra.
According to the Russian Center for Reconciliation, the terrorists are receiving support from jihadists coming from Iraq.
“Earlier [Russian] intelligence spotted a transfer of up to 5,000 IS-militants to the areas of Raqqa and Deyr ez Zor from Mosul, Iraq,” the statement says.
In October, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that terrorists “could flee from Mosul and go to Syria.”
Read more
Meanwhile, IS has claimed through its news agency Amaq, that the jihadists seized the city. In particular they claimed IS has control of the ancient castle in Palmyra, which overlooks the city.
In an interview with RT, award-winning British journalist Martin Jay alleged that some of the fighters now attacking Palmyra might indeed have come from Iraq.
"Mosul in the early months of [the] campaign was quite open and there were many so-called ratlines, those were corridors for ISIS fighters to leave the city. I think in the first few weeks of the campaign when it was first announced by Prime Minister Abadi in Iraq, many fighters fled and moved to different areas across the border in Syria," Jay said.
He noted that the fresh battle for Palmyra could take "quite some time" and in fact become a "prolonged" one. To prevent Russian aircraft from helping Syrian government forces, terrorists might also go deep into residential areas and take people there hostage. using them as shields.
"That's the tactic that worked for them from the very early days, you know, use civilians as buffers against air strikes." Jay also noted that Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) might use the attack on Palmyra [listed as UNESCO heritage] as a PR tool since "the world cares a great deal [more] about Palmyra than it probably does about Aleppo, and ISIS knows this."
"So, with a relatively simple infrastructure, few cameras and a few activists tweeting, it [ISIS] can get maximum PR effect by destroying Palmyra and that's what is happening, that's why it is significantly important," the British journalist concluded.Moore supporters. Getty Image
Because it's not bad enough he's reportedly leading in the polls in Alabama, where we're pretty sure we don't want to live, and he's a God-spouting bigot who fetishizes the 10 Commandments and thinks homosexuality should be illegal and believes Sharia law is taking over the country, and he's a serial child molester in denial who insists people oppose him in the Senate because "they don't want to hear about God" and in an unhinged speech at a Baptist church just blamed liberal, gay, bi, trans, socialist elites - wait, all of 'em? - who "want to change our culture" by putting man above God and also "want to keep everything the same" - wait, what?!? - for his crimes....because all this wasn't enough, it turns out that Roy Moore co-authored a legal "textbook" based on courses that reflected a Gilead-like world view, celebrated the concept of "Biblical patriarchy," condemned "the heresy of feminism," and argued women shouldn’t hold public office because God needs them to make babies. Of course he did.
For at least a decade, dating back to 1999, Moore served on the “faculty” of the so-called “Witherspoon School of Law and Public Policy,” which wasn't in fact a school but a series of audio and visual lectures to men by men, and a study guide. It was run by Vision Forum, a Texas-based evangelical organization headed by Doug Phillips; it closed in 2013 after Phillips was sued by a woman (not his wife) who said he'd emotionally and sexually abused her in a relationship since she was 15. Huh. Among the lectures was William Einwechter's “What the Bible Says About Female Magistrates.” Noting all this ladies-leaving-the-kitchen nonsense started with the suffrage movement, he cites the "Biblical truth" that women are the "weaker vessel" and should not hold jobs or political office. “She’s not a warrior. She’s not a judge. She’s a woman. Created by God. Glorious in her place and in her conduct," he says, ending with a quote from pastor J.H. Vincent, “The world is in such pressing need for mothers - motherly women - that none can be spared for public life.”
Roy Moore joined these lofty ranks with a class called “Law and Government: An Introductory Study Course," which reiterated the Vision tenet that the Bible is the source of “law and liberty" and the only "sure foundation" for making ethical decisions. In the study guide, uncovered by Think Progress, Moore recounts his fight over a Ten Commandments monument, laments the newly mandated marriage equality, and cites the "blessing" that is Witherspoon's "restoration of our Nation - One Nation Under God.” Moore also praises Doug Phillips and his ability to "round up these young men that are going to make a difference in our nation.” And they did: They managed to time travel - backwards. Moore's lesson was recorded in 2008.
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Now that Moore's scholarly achievement has come to light, it's encountered that most modern marvel - Amazon reviews. Available in paperback starting at $50, it has not fared well, earning a one-star rating - there's no zero - from 79% of critics. Some of their comments are brutally brief: "Hateful... pathetic... a patriarch pedo's daydream... literally garbage... should be illegal... Like ISIS but more Jesus." Others got right into it. series was very helpful as it is on tape and I am no longer allowed to read words because God did not intend for me to use my eyes for anything other than watching my children with my sister-wives to make sure they (And the children! And the sister-wives who are children!) do not fall into the fires of perdition or the furnace. Thank you Patriarch Moore (for) putting this into the talking words (so) we can listen while darning and plowing and the like!" Another: "This book gives you someone else to blame for your own failure besides brown people. And let's face it. You're already angry at women for laughing at the size of your hands...This book will also will fit nicely on the shelf of the house trailer between copies of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Art of the Deal,' so there's that."
Update: Weird. In the time it took to write this, all the reviews disappeared except a glowingly Christian one. Also the price went up to $74.85. Must be one of those conspiracy things. Moore's earlier book "So Help Me God" is still there, though it didn't do so swell either; one reader calls him a judicial tyrant. Don't forget bigot, serial child molester, and hellishly depressing sign of the utter degradation of this country's right-leaning political discourse.
Fetishizing the 10 Commandments: "It is what it is." Getty ImageNobody in Boston thinks we're going to lose. We're in a tight race. We had a 4-5 point bounce after our convention and it evaporated when they had theirs. Now they have a 4-5 [point] bounce. It's going [to] evaporate in September. We feel good about the map. We're up with advertising in Wisconsin and I think North Carolina is going to come off the board. On Ohio, they've been spinning for months now that it's out of reach.
There was a Columbus Post-Dispatch poll last week that had it 45-45.
That's a more accurate picture of the state of the play there than any of the spin. PPP has these polls that just put chum in the water for the media. Sometimes I think there's a conscious effort between the media and Chicago to get Republicans depressed.TRENTON — Wall Street analysts at Moody’s Investors Service today lowered their outlook on New Jersey’s debt from stable to negative, saying the state remains hamstrung by rising costs and “a sluggish economic recovery” despite Gov. Chris Christie’s efforts.
The analysis by Moody’s warns that public workers’ retirement benefits and other costs are climbing rapidly, and that revenue is not growing fast enough to bridge the gap.
Although Moody’s gives Christie credit for taking a “proactive approach” to control pension and health benefit liabilities, the overall assessment was dire for the Republican governor at a time when his advisers are pushing for a 10 percent tax cut.
“The state will face challenges in improving its very weak liquidity position, due to the state's sluggish economic recovery, which has hindered revenue performance,” Moody’s analysts wrote in a note to investors today.
The state will have little flexibility in coming budgets because Christie and state lawmakers agreed to increase the state’s contribution to the insolvent pension and health benefits funds for public workers, the report notes. This year’s budget included a $1.7 billion payment; next year it is set to rise to $2.4 billion.
On the bright side, “job growth has approximated (the) U.S. rate for 11 months, suggesting improved economic stability,” Moody’s said. But on the other hand, this year’s “revenue collections remain below projections, despite stronger than expected year-over-year growth to date.”
The state Treasury Department reported today that November tax collections exceeded Christie’s forecast by $17 million, or 1 percent. For the first five months of the budget year that began in July, revenue is running $98 million, or 1.2 percent, behind Christie’s estimates for his $33 billion budget, however.
A spokesman for the state Treasury Department said that Moody's review was "flawed" and that recent developments "have laid the foundation for even greater gains in the state’s economy."
"The uptick in the state’s tax revenues that we saw in November is just one of a growing number of positive signs for New Jersey’s economy," said Bill Quinn, the spokesman. "Moody’s also noted that over the last year, the state has posted a record of eleven consecutive months of job gains in line with the national average and has reduced its overall unemployment rate by 1.2 percent. With the last three years of increases in annual pension funding, the state is also acting responsibly in dealing with its long-term liability issues."
The credit-rating agency did not downgrade New Jersey’s debt, but warned that it could do so if there is “slower-than-projected revenue growth” or “a significant increase in the state's debt position.”
Moody’s downgraded New Jersey’s bond rating to Aa3 in 2011. A further downgrade likely would raise the state’s borrowing costs.
RELATED COVERAGE
• N.J. tax revenue surpasses Chris Christie's forecast in November
• Chris Christie, Democratic lawmakers to tangle over tough state budgets
• Moody's cuts N.J. bond rating by one notch, citing slow economic recovery, retirement costs
• More PoliticsCowboys fans and the Cowboys front office take a certain pride in the amount and quality of undrafted free agents (UDFAs) that regularly make the roster in Dallas, as the Cowboys have traditionally been a good place for college free agents who went undrafted.
Over the years, their success with UDFAs has earned the Cowboys a reputation for signing undrafted free agents who develop into key contributors.
"We’ll continue to take a lot of pride in that," Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said. "It’s a priority for us. If you end up getting the top five or six guys that you’re after that you would have taken [in the draft], then it’s like having three more, five more, six more seventh-round picks. We think that pays off for us."
Over the last six years, 18 UDFA players made the Cowboys' opening-day roster. Here are the Cowboys' UDFAs who survived training camp to make it onto the initial 53-man roster.
2010: OC Phil Costa, S Barry Church, S Danny McCray, FB Chris Gronkowski.
, S, FB Chris Gronkowski. 2011: RB Phillip Tanner, OC Kevin Kowalski, OLB Alex Albright, K Dan Bailey
2012: OG Ronald Leary, WR Cole Beasley, RB Lance Dunbar
2013: S Jeff Heath
2014: QB Dustin Vaughan, CB Tyler Patmon, DT Davon Coleman, OT Donald Hawkins
2015: OG La’el Collins, WR Lucky Whitehead
You could take this as a sign of the Cowboys scouting department’s quality, who seem to be able to land an eventual starter from the UDFA ranks almost every year. Conversely, you could also take it as a sign of weak depth across the roster, where undrafted free agents take up slots that other teams might be able to fill with draft picks.
Be that as it may, this year is likely going to be very tough for undrafted college free agents to make the roster, especially since the Cowboys had six picks on the final day of the draft, four of which were in the sixth round. And those sixth-rounders were drafted with at least one eye looking to avoid a bidding war for their services had they become UDFAs. But regardless of their draft status, they’ll be just as intent on making the roster as the UDFAs are.
Unlike last year with La’el Collins, nobody from this year’s UDFA class is a roster lock. Of the 14 UDFAs initially signed, two have already been released (DT Jason Neill, DE Caleb Azubike).
The key for all the remaining UDFAs is to find a way to impress the coaches and scouts heading into training camp. The easiest was to do this is by creating "wow" plays that help a player get noticed and make him stand out versus the other UDFAs and versus veteran players. Unfortunately for this UDFA class, the "wow" plays have been few and far between so far, but here are five UDFAs that may have already created some buzz that could help separate them from the rest of the UDFA class heading into mandatory minicamp.
The Cowboys front office was very excited about DT Rodney Coe, but he hasn’t really stood out at OTAs so far. With Maliek Collins out injured, the Cowboys will get a lot of opportunity this week, in camp, and in preseason games to figure out whether they were right to be excited about Coe.
, but he hasn’t really stood out at OTAs so far. With Maliek Collins out injured, the Cowboys will get a lot of opportunity this week, in camp, and in preseason games to figure out whether they were right to be excited about Coe. While rookie CB Anthony Brown took first-team snaps as the nickel corner in OTAs, CB Jeremiah McKinnon was part of the second-team rotation behind him, where he made that all-important "wow" play: McKinnon turned heads when he notched an interception in OTAs off Dak Prescott. He’s also hanging out with veteran Cowboys players at the Texas Motor Speedway, and Bryan Broaddus called him a young CB to watch out for on a recent radio show. Whether an endorsement by Broaddus is the kiss of death for an UDFA or actually means something remains to be seen, but at least his name keeps popping up.
was part of the second-team rotation behind him, where he made that all-important "wow" play: McKinnon turned heads when he notched an interception in OTAs off Dak Prescott. He’s also hanging out with veteran Cowboys players at the Texas Motor Speedway, and Bryan Broaddus called him a young CB to watch out for on a recent radio show. Whether an endorsement by Broaddus is the kiss of death for an UDFA or actually means something remains to be seen, but at least his name keeps popping up. The Cowboys had WR Andy Jones with a "draftable grade" and gave him the highest signing bonus of all UDFAs. While he has been the most consistent of the down-roster receivers, but it doesn’t look like he’s impressed enough to unseat any of the veteran receivers yet.
with a "draftable grade" and gave him the highest signing bonus of all UDFAs. While he has been the most consistent of the down-roster receivers, but it doesn’t look like he’s impressed enough to unseat any of the veteran receivers yet. Praise from Broaddus for OT Ryan Mack:
His technique and finish have been impressive in the two practices that I have had a chance to see. He is going to get plenty of work at training camp and these preseason games to develop. Mack has been lining up on the right side, but his movement skills could allow him to see some action on the other side.
OG Boston Stiverson, who played next to second-round pick Cody Whitehair at Kansas State, has been getting some chatter as a potential guy for the last open spot on the O-line.
Let us know in the comments which other UDFAs you think have a good chance of making the roster this year.Hours before President Trump is scheduled to meet with Republican senators on Capitol Hill, he rekindled his feud with a GOP senator from Tennessee who has criticized the administration, saying Bob Corker “couldn’t get elected dog catcher.”
“Bob Corker, who helped President O give us the bad Iran Deal & couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Tennessee, is now fighting Tax Cuts,” Trump posted on Twitter.
The president also repeated his claim that Corker, who will not seek re-election next year, decided not to run because Trump didn’t endorse him.
“Corker dropped out of the race in Tennesse when I refused to endorse him, and now is only negative on anything Trump. Look at his record!,” Trump tweeted, misspelling Tennessee.
Corker later turned to twitter himself to fire back at Trump.
“Same untruths from an utterly untruthful president. #AlertTheDaycareStaff,” Corker wrote.
In an interview with CNN, Corker rebuked Trump as “harmful to our nation” and said the president is “unable to rise to the occasion.”
“I think the things that are happening right now that are harmful to our nation, whether it’s the breaking down of … relationships we have around the world that have been useful to our nation,” Corker said. “But I think at the end of the day, when his term is over, I think the debasing of our nation, the constant non-truth telling, just the name-calling … I think the debasement of our nation will be what he’ll be remembered most for, and that’s regretful.”
Trump then returned to the social messaging site to blast Corker once again, resurrecting the moniker “liddle’ Bob Corker” he used in a tweet earlier this month.
“Sen. Corker is the incompetent head of the Foreign Relations Committee, & look how poorly the U.S. has done,” Trump posted. “He doesn’t have a clue as the entire World WAS laughing and taking advantage of us. People like liddle’ Bob Corker have set the U.S. way back. Now we move forward!”
Their tit-for-tat attacks erupted earlier Tuesday after Corker appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and said he stands by his comments that the White House is an “adult day care center” and that Trump’s leading the United States into “World War III.”
“I don’t make comments I haven’t thought about,” he said on the show.
The senator said he hopes the president stays out of the debate over tax reform.
“What I hope is going to happen is the president will leave this effort, if you will, to the tax-writing committees, let them do their work and not begin taking things off the table that ought to be debated in these committees at the proper time,” Corker told ABC.
Corker’s comments come as Trump intends to sit down with GOP senators during a lunch on Capitol Hill later Tuesday to discuss the tax reform package.
Corker blasted Trump’s visit as a “photo-op.”Toronto’s industrial rock band 22HERTZ, created by Ralf Muller, is set to encode a copyright of the band’s new single into the Bitcoin blockchain. The song, mixed by Yoad Nevo, will be hashed and attached into an OP_RETURN function – a standardized feature that allows data to be passed to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Following the trace of Muller’s former heavy metal band Point Blank, 22HERTZ released their first album in 2013. Motivated by the commercial success of the previous album, 22HERTZ began to work on a new single with Yoad Nevo. However, the band encountered problems while trying to issue a copyright for the single.
The overly charged copyright turned out to be a certificate with a title of the song, without any information regarding the lyrics or the melody. Muller continued to search for alternative ways to issue a copyright for the song until he thought of encoding it in the Bitcoin blockchain.
Ralf Muller spoke to Cointelegraph about the encoding of the copyright.
Cointelegraph: How and why did you decide to copyright the song to the Bitcoin blockchain?
22HERTZ: Two words, free and absolute. In Canada, it costs $50 CAD a pop for one song and all you get is a certificate mailed to you with the title of your work on it. How this would ever help you in court regarding lyrics or a melody is disheartening. I contacted their support to ask this question and they replied, “I can’t answer that because I am not a lawyer.” I got inspired when I read an article a few months back when someone hashed a book into the blockchain, first time ever apparently.
CT: Images, texts, and digital documents can be encoded to the Bitcoin blockchain by encoding hex values to bitcoin addresses. Is this what the band plans to do?
22HERTZ: No not really. I don’t know much about that method and wouldn’t want to burden the blockchain with a few megabytes of song data if that were even possible. I’m going the hashing route with the OP_RETURN feature. Less bloat and as effective in proving a file existed in time.
CT: The Bitcoin blockchain’s OP_RETURN limits data storage to 80 bytes. Other databases are far more efficient to store non-currency data. Why did the band still decide to encode it to the Bitcoin blockchain?
22HERTZ: Other databases might be more efficient to store non-currency data but are not as secure as the Bitcoin blockchain with all the petahash of power the network has. Once you encode a hash in the OP_RETURN and block upon blocks get written on top, it is basically impossible to go back and change anything, this to me is incredible.
CT: The band’s online store accepts bitcoin and offers discounts. Is this to support bitcoin? Or because other payment platforms are difficult to deal with?
22HERTZ: Anything to help destroy the greatest form of evil on this planet, the Federal Reserve System. Traditional payment systems are very easy to use but yes there are fees, and you are not helping the evolution of anything. I’m not into ‘business as usual’.
CT: Surprisingly, not a lot of musicians are accepting bitcoins for sales of albums, merchandise, etc. Do you think this could change over the years?
22HERTZ: Yes. Once more and better infrastructures are in place, I can’t see how other bands won’t at least add a bitcoin option. It’s just a matter of time for people to learn about bitcoin and compare it to our current banking system. Good information like this takes time to spread over a planet of over 7 billion people, especially when competing for attention with such things as sports, reality shows, etc.
Data Storage In The Bitcoin BlockChain
Transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain are more flexible than it seems. Each transaction contains a two-part script – challenge script which describes how a coin can be redeemed, and a response script, which is provided by the transaction redeeming the payment that has a signature to prove if the private key corresponds to the public key.
A transaction in the Bitcoin blockchain is verified by combining the two scripts into a validation script. If no errors occur during the process of verification, the transaction is verified.
Due to the ability of bitcoin transactions to store data in a script, new methods of storing strings or texts in bitcoin transactions were discovered. As different methods began to emerge, the core developers of Bitcoin standardized it to a feature named it “OP_RETURN” during the 0.9.0 release of Bitcoin Core.
The OP_RETURN function allows a “user defined sequence of up to 40 bytes,” which means that small data like texts, digital documents and even images could be encoded into the Bitcoin blockchain.
Storing data or assets in the Bitcoin blockchain is inefficient, as the core developers of bitcoins stated, "storing arbitrary data in the blockchain is still a bad idea; it is less costly and far more efficient to store non-currency data elsewhere.” However, as Muller mentioned, the “petahash of power the network” makes it impossible for anyone to change the information encoded in the blockchain. This could be used as an advantage to storing contracts, copyrights, and small data.#1 - This is Mr X the Call of Duty caster. He loves a selfie.
#2 He enjoys having a beard
#3 He Loves A Liftie (Selfie in a Lift (Elevator for the US among you))
#4 Like really loves a Liftie
#5 No really
#6 A lot
#7 Sometimes he shares a Liftie it with a friend
#8 Sometimes with Benson
#9 Sometimes with a group
#10 Mostly Alone
#11 Nothing FaZe's Him....
#12 Not even Benson's leg
#13 He's a hit with the ladies
#14 He's Got Famous Friends
#15 But they don't seem pleased to be involved
#16 He enjoys public transport
#17 Trains..
#18 and more trains
#19 He also likes planes
#20 And Buses
#21 But he likes to drive
#22 Sometimes in a vest
#23 Sometimes with his dog
#24 He likes a drink
#25 But he doesn't smile much
#26 Unless he's got company
#27 Sometimes it gets too much
#28 Although you think you can be as cool as Mr X
#29 You think how hard could it be?
#30 But it's just not possible
#31 You'll never, ever, ever, be this cool.
Images courtesy of Mr X's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
Black and white. Deep.Bushy.Cup holderMulti-taskingHoodlyfeSurprised by his own face.Double-liftieTracksuitHi again BensonWe were also surprised with what he was wearing.Spread'emProbably Benson. Can't guarantee it.And other bearded men...Not more sefliesDreaming of 1st placeHiding from Benson?ShockingDoes it feel like he's watching you yet?Frequent FlyerSlumming itSharpRippedDon't be shocked. He's yours.Nice earringsCheer up mateMan or woman?HideawayBack in the carEven when workingCool shades broWe salute you Mr X
Like this kind of stuff? Follow and Tweet us @Dexerto for news, features and more!ON THURSDAY March 31st Richard Muller of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory gave evidence to the energy and commerce committee of America's House of Representatives on the surface temperature record. Without having yet bothered to check, Babbage can say with some certainty that this event will be much discussed in the blogosphere—as, oddly enough, it should be.
Here's the short version of the reason why: a new and methodologically interesting study, carried out by people some of whom might have been expected to take a somewhat sceptical view on the issue, seems essentially to have confirmed the results of earlier work on the rate at which the earth's temperature is rising. This makes suggestions that this rise is an artefact of bad measurement, or indeed a conspiracy of climatologists, even less credible than they were before.
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Now here's the much longer version.
There are two topics which, more than any other, can be guaranteed to set off arguments between those convinced of the reality and importance of humanity's impact on the climate and those not so convinced. One revolves around the question of how reliable, if at all, statements about average global temperatures before about 1500 AD are. This is the so-called “hockey stick” debate. The amount of computer processing power and data storage capacity devoted to endless online discussions of the hockey stick— the subject featured in a great deal of the brouhaha over the “climategate” e-mails—must, by now, have the carbon footprint of a fair-sized Canadian city, which of course would worry one side of the argument not a whit.
The second touchy topic is the instrumental record of the world's temperature over the past 100 years or so. This is a more genuinely interesting subject, for two reasons. First: Consider a person who looks at all the non-hockey-stick evidence and arguments for thinking people are changing the climate (we won't rehearse them now, but here's a relevant article from The Economist last year). Imagine this person then saying “you know, that radiation balance and basic physics and ocean heat content and all the rest of that stuff looks pretty conclusive—but because I can't say for sure whether it was warmer in 1388 than it was in 1988 or the other way round I'm going to ignore it all.” This would probably not be a person you would take very seriously.
(It is because of this that the wiser sceptical voices in the hockey-stick debate do not claim that uncertainties over what, if anything, can reliably be said about mediaeval temperatures invalidate the scientific case for a strong and worrying human influence on climate. They say instead that there are a variety of statistical and other flaws in some of the reconstructions of mediaeval temperature, that some of the scientists responsible for some of these reconstructions have not behaved well, and that if that is typical of climate science then climate science in a whole is in a bad way. Thus the hockey stick becomes a sort of meta-, and indeed metastasising, argument.)
If, on the other hand, you imagine a person who has looked at all the other relevant material going on to say “You know, this is all very well—but there doesn't seem to be any conclusive evidence that the world has actually been getting warmer in a significant or surprising way over the past decades,” you might well think hmm; if that's the case then he has a point. Evidence that the world really is warming does seem pretty apposite to the whole issue. Being able to trust the records of what thermometers spread out over the world have actually measured and the procedures by which those records are combined into a series of average global temperatures matter rather more than the hockey-stick.
Another reason is that mediaeval data (from tree rings and the like) at issue in the hockey stick debate are necessarily sparse and patchy, and coming up with really robust answers to all the relevant questions on the basis of them may well prove impossible. The data on which the contemporary surface temperature record is based, though, is rich. There are a great many temperature records in archives around the world. If you can choose records that are demonstrably reliable and combine them in an appropriate way, you should be able to get a pretty solid answer. This thus seems like an argument that could conceivably end in agreement on an important issue.
Indeed, most climate scientists would say that it already has. There are three different combinations of instrumental temperature records that seek to show average surface temperatures back to 1900 or earlier. Two are American, with one produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and one by NASA; the other one is British, with data from the Met Office and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (which was the epicentre of climategate). They used many of the same raw data, but the ways in which they adjust them to remove presumed artefacts and then combine them differ. Yet they come up with very similar answers, and when they publish their figures with error estimates they come within each others' margins of error. The fact that three different groups agree in this way would normally seem to justify relying on the result.
But there are many ways in which climate science is not normal, one of which is that it matters a great deal with respect to some very expensive policy decisions. Various criticisms of the methodology and probity of the temperature records have been made, though much more often in the blogosphere than in the scientific literature. Erring on the side of extra caution is not a bad idea, and various efforts are underway to develop, corroborate and better to underpin the work on temperature records that has been done to date. One such effort is the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature programme, which Dr Muller heads.
Fearless physicists
Dr Muller is an astrophysicist, not a climate scientist, and was indeed seen by some as being a bit of a sceptic, in the unfortunate negative usage of the word. He is strongly spoken in his criticism of some of the behaviour revealed in the climategate e-mails, and talks admiringly of some of the amateur or non-credentialed scientists who have mounted critiques of published climate science.
He also has a sort of intellectual fearlessness most often seen in physicists; when applied to other fields of endeavour this can look uncannily like a form of arrogance, perhaps because that is often what it is. The initials of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project could be read in this light, and indeed they were so interpreted by some climate scientists, who got rather bit peeved at the idea that interlopers should presume to claim a priori they were the BEST. Any arrogance they may be prone to, though, doesn't invalidate the fearless physicists' insights. Dr Muller's beloved mentor, Luis Alvarez, was quite right when he and his son argued that the death of the dinosaurs had less to do with the environmental or evolutionary challenges palaeontologists concentrated on and more to do with the damn great meteorite or comet impact for which Alvarez père et fils had just found dramatic and unexpected evidence. On the other hand Dr Muller's subsequent variation on the Alvarez's now broadly accepted contribution, which led to an unsuccessful search for a distant planet that might be directing killer comets at the earth on a regular basis, has as yet come to naught.
The Berkeley approach seems based on the idea that coming out of physics, not climate science, was going to be a strength not a weakness. Rather than look at carefully (and similarly) selected subsets of the data it would look at everything available, just as astrophysicists frequently seek to survey the whole sky. Rather than using the judgement of climate scientists to make sense of the data records and what needed to be done to them, it would use well designed computer algorithms. Put together under the aegis of Novim, a non-profit group that runs environmental studies, the team gathered up a bit over half a million dollars—including $100,000 from a fund set up by Bill Gates and $150,000 from the Koch foundation, whose animosity towards action on climate change made the Berkeley project look yet more suspicious to some climate-change activists—and got to work. There was also support from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Lab, where Dr Muller and some of his team work. It is probably fair to assume that Steve Koonin, an undersecretary of state at the energy department with whom Dr Muller has served as one of the “Jasons”, a group of particularly intellectually fearless scientists which provides blue-sky and sometimes far-out advice to the defence department, and who has also produced a report for Novim, had an unofficial eye on what was going on.
Dr Muller's testimony was not exactly the unveiling of his team's first results—you can find him saying much the same in a seminar on the web— but it was a particularly high-level early outing. It was also a strikingly robust defence of the record as others have interpreted it. Calling the three extant groups “excellent”, Dr Muller described preliminary work by the Berkeley team on the overall magnitude and course of recent warming that backed them up. Instead of picking a relatively small number of weather stations to look at, this work simply took 2% of all the records the Berkeley group has access to at random. The results look very like what the other three teams have seen. The Berkeley team says that it has run such 2% experiments a number of times now, and the results are robust. The earth has warmed by about 0.7°C since 1957, just as the other teams claimed. Adjustments made to the data on a site-by-site basis which have had some suspicious sceptics hopping mad seem to have made no appreciable difference.
The Watts and wherefores
Dr Muller also, more controversially, reported on results that pertain to a specific point made by climate sceptics; that the temperature record is contaminated because many of the stations used to compile it are in inappropriately located. This idea is particularly associated with Anthony Watts, a former television weatherman who runs an extremely popular website catering largely to a climate-sceptic crowd. Mr Watts has led an impressive crowdsourcing movement devoted to checking out the meteorological stations that generate climate data in America. This has found that a really surprising number of the instruments concerned are not sited in the way that they should be, being inappropriately close to buildings, tarmac and other things that could cause problems.
A compendium of Mr Watts's concerns was published early last year by the Science and Public Policy Insitute, which specialises in airing doubts about climate science and policy, under the title “Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?” Dr Muller's answer to that question in front of Congress was pretty clearly no. The Berkeley team compared the data from the American sites Mr Watts thought were worst situated and the sites he thought best. It found no statistically significant difference in the trends measured in the two different categories, though the warming trend in the better sites is slightly stronger.
This analysis echoes one carried out last year by scientists at NOAA, which when looking at a subset of Mr Watts's data found much the same thing
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place. No more nights in some company's sterile studio... All we needed to do was play our music and follow our hearts. Well, it never quite worked out that way. We stayed in the divide and conquer mode, a process that no one ever seems to be able to stop to this day.[3]
By Cahoots (1971), producer John Simon observed that "Robbie didn't... consciously intimidate him... but when you met Robbie he was so smooth and urbane and witty, whereas Richard was such a gee-golly-gosh kind of guy." The influence of Manuel's increasing use of heroin may have also contributed to the diminution of his songwriting abilities.[4]
Throughout 1972, Manuel's alcoholism was one of a variety of factors (including Robertson's own writer's block) that began to impede The Band's recording and performance schedule. Years later, Robertson opined that "he scared us to death... we didn't know what the next day might bring, what would come out of this monster that had seeped out of the woodwork."[5] Although Jane Manuel lamented that "people thought it was amusing to watch this guy drowning," the Manuels briefly separated during this period but reconciled before the impending birth of their second child, Josh.[6] According to roommate Mason Hoffenberg (who roomed with the musician in 1972–1973 at the request of Grossman), Manuel had "stopped [using heroin] and got into this drinking thing... I'm supposed to head off all the juvenile dope dealers up here who hang around rock stars. So I answer the phone and say Richard's not here. He's not allowed to answer the phone. And I go around privately and tell them to leave him alone because he's really going to kill himself. But if they actually come over to the house, he can't say no. He's brilliant, that guy. An incredible composer. But we just sit around watching The Dating Game, slurping down the juice, laughing our asses off, then having insomnia, waking up at dawn with every weird terror and anxiety you can imagine. The four other guys in the Band are serious about working and he's really hanging them up. They can't work without him and there's no way to get him off his ass. He feels bad about it, he's just strung out."[7]
In 1973, the group once again followed the lead of Dylan by relocating to Malibu, California. Before leaving the Hudson Valley, they convened at Bearsville Studios to record an album of vintage rock and roll cover songs (many of which were seldom performed by The Hawks) entitled Moondog Matinee in homage to Alan Freed's radio show. Although Manuel was initially reluctant to perform, the album elicited some of his finest vocal performances, including renditions of the Bobby "Blue" Bland R&B standard "Share Your Love with Me," The Platters's "The Great Pretender," and a tongue-in-cheek version of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's obscure "Saved." Helm had this to say about Manuel during this period: "[H]e was drinking pretty hard, but once he got started, man: drums, piano, play it all, sing, do a lead in one of them high, hard-assed keys to sing in. Richard just knew how a song was supposed to go. Structure, melody; he understood it."[8]
Back with Dylan [ edit ]
Manuel, left, with Bob Dylan and the Band in 1974
The Band gradually resurfaced on the live circuit. Following a warmup show in Osaka, Japan, in July 1973, they played to receptive audiences at the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen and on a double bill with the Grateful Dead at Jersey City's Roosevelt Stadium two days later. In the autumn, the group backed up Dylan on Planet Waves, his first album of original songs in three years, before being enlisted to serve as his backup group on his first tour in eight years.
The forty concerts of the Bob Dylan and the Band 1974 Tour, from January 3 to February 14, 1974, were meandering musical marathons featuring two sets of Dylan backed by The Band, two Band sets, and a Dylan acoustic set. The ensuing live album from the tour, Before the Flood, reveals that Manuel was still capable of reaching the falsetto on "I Shall Be Released".
The Last Waltz [ edit ]
The Band continued performing throughout 1974, supporting Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young alongside Joni Mitchell, Jesse Colin Young and The Beach Boys on a grueling summer stadium tour. By 1975, Robertson had expressed his dissatisfaction with touring and was acting in an increasingly parental capacity, as the move to Malibu and his refusal to allow the group to join Bearsville Records had seen him take the managerial reins on a de facto basis from an increasingly diffident Grossman. According to Helm, Manuel (who lived in a variety of rented houses throughout the period, including properties owned by Goldie Hawn and Keith Moon) was now consuming eight bottles of Grand Marnier every day on top of a prodigious cocaine addiction, factors that ultimately precipitated his divorce from Jane Manuel in 1976. While living in the Hawn house, Manuel attempted to commit suicide (by self-immolation and shooting himself in the head with a BB gun) on at least two occasions.[9]
During this period, he developed a kinship with the similarly despondent Eric Clapton and emerged as a driving force behind the sessions that make up the guitarist's No Reason to Cry (1976). The album was recorded at The Band's new Shangri-La Studios, where Manuel lived for about a year in a bungalow that had once served as the stable for Bamboo Harvester, the horse that portrayed the titular character on the 1960s sitcom Mister Ed. Manuel gave Clapton the song "Beautiful Thing" (a 1967 Band demo that Danko helped him finish) and provided vocals for "Last Night."
Manuel in Hamburg, 1971
On the group's final full-fledged tour in the summer of 1976, Manuel was still recovering from a car accident earlier in the year; several tour dates were subsequently canceled after a power-boating accident near Austin, Texas that necessitated the hiring of Tibetan healers in a scenario reminiscent of Robertson's pre-show hypnosis before their first concert as The Band at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom in April 1969. The quality of the shows was frequently contingent upon Manuel's relative sobriety. As he could no longer sustain the high vocal register of "Tears of Rage" or "In a Station," his most notable contributions were confined to impassioned, raging versions of the prophetic "The Shape I'm In," "Rockin' Chair" and "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)."
The Band played its final show as its original configuration at Winterland on Thanksgiving Day of 1976. The concert was filmed in 35 mm by Robertson confederate and longtime Band fan Martin Scorsese for the documentary The Last Waltz. Manuel can be heard, but barely seen, singing "I Shall Be Released," surrounded by guest stars. While Manuel's famed sense of humor and warm, congenial nature emerged in the interview segments, so did his shyness, deferential attitude – and inebriation. Initially the group only intended to end live performances as The Band, and each member was initially kept on a retainer of $2,500 per week by Warner Brothers. However, by 1978, the group had drifted apart.
Session work, attempted comeback and continued struggles with substance abuse [ edit ]
Taking advantage of this new solace, Manuel moved to Garth Hudson's ranch outside Malibu. He entered an alcohol and drug rehabilitation program, becoming clean and sober for the first time in years in August 1978. He also was eventually remarried to his longtime girlfriend, Arlie Litvak. Having initially becoming enamored of Manuel after hearing "Lonesome Suzie," the Toronto-born, 21-year-old Litvak became acquainted with the singer on the 1974 tour before moving into the Moon house in 1977. In 1980, he contributed electric piano and clavinet to Happy Traum's Bright Morning Stars and background vocals to Hudson's Music for Our Lady Queen of the Angels.
By 1980, Danko and Manuel had begun to tour clubs regularly as a semi-acoustic duo. These concerts would continue into the Band reunion era and often included fellow Woodstock habitué Paul Butterfield as a special guest. Along with Hudson, Manuel played on several instrumental cues composed by Robertson for the soundtrack of Raging Bull (1980). Manuel and Hudson also contributed to "Between Trains," a new song by Robertson that appeared on the soundtrack of The King of Comedy (1983) and the original soundtrack of Kent State, a 1981 television film based on the Kent State shootings. In 1981, he played little-publicized gigs in L.A. area clubs with The Pencils, an ensemble that included vocalists/ multi-instrumentalists Marty Grebb and Terry Danko, founding Blues Image percussionist Joe Lala and former Beach Boys drummer Ricky Fataar. Although he continued to grapple with writer's block, Manuel wrote a new song, "Was That Any Way to Say Goodbye," with the younger Danko and Grebb.[10][11] A year later, he contributed piano to Willie Nelson and Webb Pierce's 1982 remake of "In the Jailhouse Now" (a country hit for the latter in 1955) and background vocals to "Rivers of Tears" on Bonnie Raitt's acclaimed Green Light.
The Band reformed in 1983 without Robertson, who permanently stopped touring after The Last Waltz. Instead, guitarist and Helm protege Jim Weider augmented the returning four members along with a variety of irregular additional musicians, including the Cate Brothers. Having reclaimed some of his vocal range lost in the years of drug abuse, Manuel performed old hits such as "The Shape I'm In", "Chest Fever" and "I Shall Be Released" with new conviction alongside personal favorites such as Cindy Walker and Eddy Arnold's "You Don't Know Me" and James Griffin and Robb Royer's "She Knows."
By the time of the band's reformation, Danko, Helm and their families had already moved back to the Woodstock area from Malibu and Manuel returned with his wife in the spring of 1984. In poor health and fearing that he had contracted AIDS from decades of promiscuity and drug abuse, he contemplated making a Robertson-produced solo album and resumed using cocaine, heroin and alcohol. On one occasion, Manuel absconded with journalist and old friend Al Aronowitz's record collection in a midnight burglary to fund his addictions. Following a detox stint at the behest of Albert Grossman, Manuel enjoyed several months of sobriety despite failing to vanquish his drug use. He undertook a successful solo residency (centered around "his favorite Ray Charles songs" and "Tin Pan Alley classics") at The Getaway, a club midway between Woodstock and nearby Saugerties, New York. Guests such as Danko and Weider frequently sat in.[12] During this period, Manuel also co-wrote a new song, "Breaking New Ground," with Gerry Goffin and Carole King.[13] However, he ultimately "fell off the wagon with a thud" in the spring of 1985.[14]
In addition to their other activities, Manuel and Danko toured throughout 1985 with "The 20th Anniversary Tribute to The Byrds," a tribute group led by founding Byrds Gene Clark and Michael Clarke that also included former Flying Burrito Brothers and Firefall member Rick Roberts, former Beach Boys guitarist Blondie Chaplin and 1968-1969 Byrds bassist John York. Several concert promoters began to shorten the band's name to "The Byrds" in advertisements and promotional material. As the band continued to tour in 1985, their agent decided to shorten the name to "The Byrds" permanently, eliciting displeasure from co-founders Roger McGuinn, David Crosby and Chris Hillman. Although Michael Clarke continued working with a similar group, Clark heeded their complaints and folded the group.[15]
Throughout this period, Manuel continued to participate in several projects in addition to his road work, including the recording of the Ethiopian famine relief charity single "Tears Are Not Enough" by the ad hoc Canadian supergroup Northern Lights. The song was eventually included on the We Are the World album. Along with Hudson on keyboards, Manuel also contributed background vocals to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers's "Best of Everything" (co-produced by Robertson) on Southern Accents.
In a March 1985 interview with Ruth Albert Spencer of the Woodstock Times, he expressed equivocation toward The Band's professional direction at a time when the group was relegated to playing theaters and clubs as headliners and support slots in larger venues for onetime peers such as the Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills and Nash: "I sobered up and I pay a lot closer attention when I realize what we threw away. We didn't really throw it away, we benched it and in just this last year and a half I've seen millions of dollars go by... doors open but we haven't taken advantage of it. That's why I'm irked to the point of just saying, 'Fellas, this is it, I'm going on with my own career.' So I've been planning how to catapult this whole thing with myself into a position where I can remain occupied all the time... and have some work at all times, because it's the down time that drives me crazy. I get nuts when I'm not working. When there's nothing to look forward to, when there's no work. Not that I won't play with the Band anytime, I'm there a thousand percent whenever, whatever the Band is, 'cause it's certainly not one person. The Band is five people and anything less than four is just a taste of what the Band is." [16]
Death [ edit ]
On March 4, 1986, after a gig at the Cheek to Cheek Lounge in Winter Park, Florida (a suburb of Orlando, Florida), Manuel died by suicide.[17] He had appeared to be in relatively good spirits at the concert but ominously "thanked [Hudson] profusely for twenty-five years of good music and appreciation" as the latter musician packed his keyboards and synthesizers to be shipped to the next venue after the show.[18] Danko (who also struggled with substance abuse) confronted Manuel about his alcohol use after the show.[19] The Band eventually returned to the Langford Hotel, down the block from the Cheek to Cheek Lounge, and Manuel talked with Helm about music, people and film in Helm's room. According to Helm, at around 2:30 in the morning, Manuel said he needed to get something from his room. Upon returning to his room, he awoke his wife, Arlie, who observed that "he was all pissed off about something"; Manuel claimed that his frustration stemmed from the quality of the piano at the venue. When Arlie enjoined him to come to bed, he lay down with his clothes on. After she resumed sleeping, it is believed that he finished one last bottle of Grand Marnier before hanging himself in the bathroom sometime before 3:30.[19] Arlie Manuel discovered her husband's body along with the depleted bottle of liqueur and a small amount of cocaine the following morning. He was buried a week later in his hometown of Stratford, Ontario.
At the end of March, Danko declared, "I can't believe in a million years that he meant for that to happen. There was just no sign... I have to think this was just a goddamned silly accident."[20] A blood toxicology report indicated that Manuel was drunk and had ingested cocaine within 12 to 24 hours of his death.[21]
Posthumous recognition [ edit ]
Although Manuel died before The Band recorded their final three albums, two songs featuring him on lead vocals, recorded in the 1980s, were included on the first two of these albums: "Country Boy," on Jericho (1993), and "She Knows," on High on the Hog (1996).
In 1994, Manuel was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of The Band. In 2015, he was inducted into the New York Blues Hall of Fame.[22]
In 2002, the Japanese label Dreamsville Records released Whispering Pines: Live at the Getaway, which contains selections from a solo performance by Manuel at The Getaway in October 1985.
Robbie Robertson's "Fallen Angel" (1987), Ronnie Hawkins's "Days Gone By" (1995) and The Band's "Too Soon Gone" (1993) are all tributes to Manuel.[23]
Eric Clapton's 1986 album, August, features his tribute to Manuel, entitled "Holy Mother." The San Francisco–area group The Call, who had collaborated with Hudson and Robertson, dedicated the video for their 1986 single "Everywhere I Go" to Manuel. Counting Crows recorded the song "If I Could Give All My Love (Richard Manuel Is Dead)," released on their 2002 album Hard Candy. The Drive-By Truckers' song "Danko/Manuel" was released on their album The Dirty South in 2004.
Head of Femur included "Song for Richard Manuel" on their 2005 release, Hysterical Stars. In 2008, the Michigan roots quartet Steppin' In It released the album Simple Tunes for Troubled Times, which contains the song "The Ghost of Richard Manuel," while Isaac Gillespie's album 1971 features "Richard Manuel the Pacifier." Ray Lamontagne referred to the singer during his performance on the BBC program Songwriter's Circle. In 2012 Black Prairie released A Tear in the Eye Is a Wound in the Heart, which includes the song "Richard Manuel". In a 2016 interview on his "WTF" podcast, Marc Maron and Roger Waters discussed their mutual love for The Band, with Waters ruminating on the beauty of Manuel's voice.
An article about Manuel and Rick Danko by Allen St. John was published on Forbes.com on April 19, 2012.[24]
Discography [ edit ]
References [ edit ]4 Acting Tips on Creating a Character from ‘The Snow Geese’ Star Victoria Clark
Victoria Clark is mostly known for her work in musicals like “Sister Act” and “The Light in the Piazza,” for which she won a Tony. But now she is fulfilling her dream of acting in a play on Broadway with Sharr White’s “The Snow Geese,” currently running at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
Clark plays Clarissa, who is staying at the family hunting lodge with her recently-widowed sister Elizabeth (Mary-Louise Parker), husband Max (Danny Burstein), and nephews Arnold (Brian Cross) and Duncan (Evan Jonigkeit), who is about to go off to fight in World War I. “I love this woman, Clarissa,” says Clark. “I think she’s a wonderful character and very complex.”
In order to do this play, Clark had to take a temporary leave from playing the Fairy Godmother in “Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” which she will return to in January. “It was [hard to leave ‘Cinderella’] because that’s a real family there. Great people. And it’s a very fun place to go work because the music is so joyous,” she says. At the same time, “The Snow Geese” is less physically demanding, since she doesn’t have to wear heavy costumes and two mic packs and worry about keeping her voice in shape. In fact, this role requires her to sing out of tune for a scene in which Clarissa puts a hymn on the phonograph and sings along.
“Her faith is strong and those hymns sustain her. She can’t sing in tune, but her heart is in it,” Clark says. “It’s really challenging because my whole life I’ve sung. It’s hard to find the right balance of singing something that’s very heartfelt, but without making fun. The fact that she puts on the hymn and sings, that’s only made possible by the fact that everyone else is out of the house or asleep upstairs. For me that moment is about having the space to be who I am without being guarded.”
We spoke to Clark about what it takes to create a character, including researching a role, working with other actors, and more.
Find your own language.
Before the house lights go down, Clark and several other cast members are already on stage, preparing breakfast for the first scene. The family eats at 5 a.m. before the brothers go on a hunt. In the pre-show, there is room for improvisation. “I really love that part of the show because once the house lights go down I’m already in it. I’m already there,” she says. “And it’s nice to improv in that world without Sharr’s language. Just to find our own language. I think that’s really useful for actors.”
Research.
“I never leave a part when I’m doing it. I dream about it. I think about it all the time,” Clark says. She does extensive research for her roles. For this role, that meant reading up on the time period and making a family tree that goes back a few generations. “It’s extremely important that I know when that house was built. Did my dad work on it? Whose phonograph is that? Whose records are that? When I plump the pillow in the preshow, where did we get the pillow? Whose pillow? How much of my own stuff is in that house?” she says. She is currently reading “Little Women”—because of the language and because in her mind, Clarissa’s dad’s family came from the Boston area as did Louisa May Alcott’s—and books about etiquette, which is extremely important to Clarissa.
“For me, it’s been the marvelous way to keep my head in the game with acting. It’s unlimited the amount of research you can do because it’s all based on your imagination,” Clark says. “You really immerse yourself in the period so when you walk on set, I know where every piece of furniture came from and I understand my relationship and I understand the times that I’m living in. So that makes you feel safe. If you feel safe, then you can take risks… Before you know, it you have a character.”
Let your costars work in their own way.
It is mentioned in the play that Max and Clarissa had a daughter, Anastasia, who died, but a lot of their history is not in the script. She and Burstein, who have worked together before, let each other develop their own process. They did decide together how old Anastasia was when she died and what she died from after doing more thorough research. (They decided she was six-years-old when she died of polio). Beyond that, they didn’t discuss much. “Even if you and I decided as actors this and this and this, it doesn’t really matter if I have my own story and you have your own story as long as the story is vivid,” she says. “The audience won’t know if it’s something we both [came up with together] if it’s backstory.”
Find the joy.
Even in a depressing play like this one, it’s important for Clark to bring joy into her work whenever possible. “There is joy to be found in every character and that’s why I go to the theater,” she says. “I want to see people find their joy... There is so much joy in this cast. We are very close, and we are telling a very intense story but there are these moments in every single scene where they break out and I think that’s what levitates the play. Sharr White did a good job finding that, and I think that’s real—those eccentric moments where people find and do things even on the most horrible days. There is joy. There is joy every day.”Nb: Downloading Torrents is not a linear process. Completion of a file is done in a disorderly manner, and according to an irregular rate. Which leads, in the context of this project to a rearrangement of the full temporal continuity of initial video and sounds.
TPC is based on a data interception software. It reveals, through a simple diversion, different aspects of exchange platforms, such as the global and multi-situated nature of Peer-to-Peer networks (P2P), the potential for viral transmission, and alternative social models. Its purpose is to make available for aesthetic exploration the pre-existing potentials of Peer-to-Peer architectures.The video installation of TPC relies on an automated system that constantly downloads the most viewed torrents. The intercepted data is immediately projected onto a screen, after which it is discarded. Depending on the exhibition space, the installation involves one to five computers, each one monitoring specific categories of files. This allows the system to visualize fragmentary files received and sent all over the world.The live performance of TPC relies on an automated system that downloads a selection of torrent files (movies, mp3) selected by the performer. This system is an instrument in itself, producing specific temporal and formal structures, from parameters defined by the performer. The performance lasts the amount of time required to download a group of files. The choice of the downloaded files may be related to the local or actual context. (Place, local cultural context, political, economic, etc.)ACTIVISTS - this is the ship you're looking for.
As bidding stands, the Sea Shadow might be a bit of a bargain, too.
Just $50,000 will get you the ship that inspired the radar-evading vessel that was the base of evil media mogul Elliot Carver in the 007 film Tomorrow Never Dies.
media_camera The Sea Shadow used a SWATH hull design. Below the water are submerged twin hulls, each with a propeller, aft stabilizer, and inboard hydrofoil all of which allowed her to remain very stable in rough seas. Picture: Courtesy of the U.S. Navy
Although it's likely to go for a bit more than $50K. The Sea Shaadow cost the US Defence Department - or more specifically, its research arm DARPA - a whopping $195 million to develop.
Bid on the $195 million Sea Shadow stealth ship now!
That was back in 1984, but the world didn't see the Sea Shadow for nine years. That's because it was loaded with the type of stealth technology that made the US Air Force's F-35 Lightning II so famous.
So, what do you get when you buy a $195m stealth ship from the US military?
Apart from the fact that it looks like the kind of thing the inventor of the word "awesome" was looking at when he first said "awesome", not a lot.
Because sadly, you have to scrap it.
"The ex-Sea Shadow shall be disposed of by completely dismantling and scrapping within the USA," the description on the sale item reads.
"Dismantling is defined as reducing the property such as it has no value except for its basic material content."
media_camera Despite her sleek looks and staggering cost Sea Shadow only had 12 bunks on board, a microwave oven, a table and a fridge, which might all go some way to explaining why the Navy was untimely forced to sell her for scrap on gsaauctions.gov. Picture: Courtesy of gsaauctions.gov
So basically, you get 499 tons of scrap metal. If it were all prepared steel, that's roughly $3m worth, so it's unlikely to go for $50K.
Oh, you also get to keep this rusty barge that houses it, and you don't have to scrap it.
But it does make a much bigger target for whalers.
Originally published as Activists, your ship has come inYou know, we could just leave you with the image above and be done here, but its backstory is almost as cool. Researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology have built a 1,500-pound X-ray camera that can shoot ten million frames a second and then pointed it at a nearby flash of lightning to try and learn more about it. How did they know where the lightning would strike? Well, in true scientific fashion, they caused it themselves! This was done by shooting rockets into thunderstorms, with attached wires directing the flow of energy down into their target zone. The imagery produced from the X-ray sensor is actually extremely low-res -- a 30-pixel hexagonal grid is all you get -- but it's enough to show that X-ray radiation is concentrated at the tip of the lightning bolt. What good that knowledge will do for the world, we don't know, but we're sure it'll provide nice fodder for the next round of superhero empowerment stories.Ashes
Click here to pre-order Brennen and Rin, and other new Ashes products! And be sure to try out these new cards in our Ashes deck builder!
So far we've previewed Brennen and the Blackcloud Ninja (and of course Rin and his Fury, but we'll talk about that later this week). This week we'll look at 2 other cards found in The Children of Blackcloud, Poison and Crimson Bomber.
Crimson Bomber is a versatile card. For only 2 you get a 3-attack-value ally. The "ally" part is important in a deck that runs all ceremonial dice. This means that if three damage from an attack or if his stellar Ability, Detonate 3, would be useful, you can bring the bomber back in the future using the Ceremonial Dice Power Ability.
I can tell you the Detonate 3 ability will definitely have its uses, helping Brennen deal with swarming units. But just as often, the 3-attack value will be exactly what you need to finish the opponent off. Or you could even extend its damage output to 5 by using Brennen's Spirit Burn ability to destroy the exhausted Bomber who just attacked, putting it in your discard pile, freeing up a battlefield slot, and allowing you to do it all over again!
Poison is pretty simple. Whoever controls the unit you attach Poison can only pass main as their main action if they want to keep the Poisoned unit around. They can still take a side action, but any action other than pass will deal 1 damage to the attached unit. It may take a bit, but ultimately your opponent will have to take actions they didn't want to take, or lose whatever unit you most wanted to get rid of! This spell will eventually get rid of any unit for 1, the model of efficiency.
Today's two cards make up just a small part of how Brennen's deck controls the battlefield, and combined with Brennen's Spirit Burn ability, you'll soon see The Children of Blackcloud will rarely want for ways to deal with units!
Come back next week to see some of the spells Brennen likes to keep around, but first, this Thursday we'll look at a few of Rin's best friends!
Thanks for reading!
Bob
Click here to pre-order The Children of Blackcloud, The Frostdale Giants, and even extra dice! Get Lulu Firststone or Dimona Odinstar FREE with each Ashes deck purchase, or buy them separately!
Rin/Brennen Previews:
Brennen: Blackcloud Ninja
Rin: Rin's Fury
CommentsApple has reportedly recruited Tesla's former VP of Vehicle Engineering, Chris Porritt, to work on "special projects" at the company —possibly to replace Steve Zadesky, the one-time head of Apple's electric car project, codenamed Titan.
Tesla's Model 3.
"Special projects" is the banner under which Project Titan operates, Electrek noted on Tuesday. It's also a skunkworks label under which other Apple projects have been developed —Apple Watch hires were assigned the same way. Porritt, however, is deeply rooted in the automotive world, having once been a chief engineer with Aston Martin.With Zadesky gone, Porritt would be the one of the most senior car experts at Apple, and hence a candidate for taking over Project Titan. While at Tesla, he's said to have worked on the Model S, X, and 3. Some of his Aston Martin credits include the One-77 and the iconic DB9.The executive reportedly didn't make the leap directly from Tesla to Apple, as there were a few months in between. His new title is "Special Projects Group PD Administrator," said to be a deliberately obscure title.At least some high-level Apple engineers will be working under Porritt. One of these is Emery Sanford, a person who allegedly worked directly with Zadesky, and who has dozens of Apple patents to his credit.Apple and Tesla have been engaged in a job poaching war for some time. Typically, though, Apple has only been able to recruit engineers, not top executives.If reports are accurate, the company still has some ways to go before an "Apple Car" hits the road. Reports have suggested that the first model will only be ready in 2019 or 2020, and may not be self-driving, even though Apple is thought to be developing that technology.Former City Harvest Church investment manager Chew Eng Han says he attended two of Sun Ho’s concerts and believed "100 per cent" in the Crossover Project, even donating S$1 million towards it.
SINGAPORE: The High Court on Friday morning (Sep 16) heard the appeal of Chew Eng Han, who was sentenced to six years' jail last November for his part in misappropriating S$50 million of City Harvest Church funds.
Chew, who served as the church's investment manager, argued he should be acquitted because "there was no misappropriation". He said the sentencing judge had "gravely erred" in his ruling, and used a flawed definition of misappropriation.
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Though Chew conceded that the S$50 million - set aside for the church’s investments and building-related expenses - had instead been channelled towards the secular music career of Sun Ho, who is the wife of CHC founder and senior pastor Kong Hee, Chew argued the sentencing judge had "automatically" assumed this had been done with dishonest intent.
Chew said this cannot be the case, because "the church had not been deprived", but rather benefitted, from the channelling of funds toward "a church purpose" - Ms Ho's music career,known as the Crossover Project.
"The logic is Sun becomes a megastar, (holds more) concerts... then she can evangelise,” Chew said, adding that he had attended two concerts himself and believed "100 per cent" in the Crossover Project, even donating S$1 million towards it.
Having done so, it is "illogical for me to want to cause loss to the church," he said.
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CHURCH’S FUNDING OF CROSSOVER PROJECT A ‘SECRET’: CHEW
Chew also told the court the funding of the Crossover Project had been a "secret". This was not because the six conspirators knew or thought that it was illegal to use church funds in this way, but because "Kong Hee was afraid of being exposed for rigging Sun Ho's success".
"Kong's guilt should not be automatically imputed to others,” Chew said. Pointing to an e-mail Kong wrote to co-accused John Lam in January 2005, Chew said he had been "brainwashed" into supporting the Crossover Project as Kong regularly played up Ho's success.
Chew said Kong had explicitly told board members that no church monies were used, in a bid to “avoid public controversy”. Justice Chan Seng Onn said such a lie “gives me a sense he was trying to deceive (the members)”.
"Kong's guilt should not be automatically imputed to others,” Chew said. He added that Kong regularly played up his wife’s success, pointing to several e-mails “typical of the news that we received (about Sun)”.
“I need our members to be super proud of her and realise that we do have a singing diva in our midst”, Kong wrote in an e-mail in January 2005.
"I thought she was a megastar,” Chew said. In reality, the church had bought up unsold copies of Ms Ho’s albums, the court heard. "If this was a conspiracy, it is the worst thought-out conspiracy ever,” Chew said.
"It looks that way to me too,” Judge of Appeal Chao Hick Tin responded, prompting laughter from the public gallery.
DON’T TAR SHARON WITH THE SAME BRUSH: LAWYER
The High Court heard the appeal of CHC finance manager Sharon Tan on Friday afternoon. Tan was found guilty of seven charges and sentenced to 21 months in prison, the lightest jail term among the six.
Her lawyer Paul Seah pointed out Tan had never held a key leadership role in the church, and that prosecutors had “never made a case that she was tied up in the conspiracy to use the sham bonds to fund the Crossover Project”.
Mr Seah said Tan was “kept out of the loop in key discussions”, and whenever she was pulled in to help with financial planning, her role was simple – “to provide facts and figures”.
“The trial judge erred in tarring Sharon with the same brush as the other co-accused”, Mr Seah said, adding that Tan had no motive or intent to cause harm to the church, and was acting on the instructions of the church’s leaders.
The appeal continues on Monday.A liberal Milwaukee County board member with ties to Big Labor is taking a page out of the Internal Revenue Service playbook.
County Supervisor David Bowen, who worked with Service Employees International Union-affiliated officials on the county’s newly implemented “living wage” law, is calling for a county audit of Supportive Homecare Options Inc., one of three private firms contracted with the Milwaukee County Department of Family Care.
Bowen is making the request even though Family Care officials review budget documents every year and have found no financial inconsistencies with Supportive Homecare Options’ records, sources say.
Sally Sprenger, owner of Supportive Homecare Options, has been an outspoken critic of Bowen’s taxpayer-funded wage increase since the very beginning, mainly because the millions in added costs are projected to exhaust the reserves of Family Care by 2019, jeopardizing the jobs of her company’s nearly 1,200 employees.
During close to eight months of collective bargaining negotiations, Sprenger also hasn’t caved in to SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin’s demands that she require her entire workforce to join the union.
Click for more from Watchdog.orgA Canadian space firm has taken the first steps toward realizing the idea popularized in the 1970s by Arthur C. Clarke -- a giant elevator that would carry astronauts up into the stratosphere. Thoth Technology Inc has been granted both U.S. and U.K. patents for such a structure, which,
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to work it out. Local currency – respect – is earned through generosity, talent, and self-sufficiency.
No number of mass shootings will convince my neighbors that guns should be banned, because the greater the tragedy, the greater their desire for the means to protect themselves. Theirs is an argument of values, not statistics. But listening to them, taking their concerns seriously, understanding the needs that guns meet for them and prioritizing those needs in policy? Now we’re talking.
Deep empathy with gun owners isn’t a distraction from gun control. It’s a prerequisite for implementing it successfully.
Blair Braverman is a nonfiction writer currently living in northern Wisconsin, and the author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice CubeThe Brazil-born striker took his tally for the season to 19 goals with a left-footed volley and a game-deciding penalty, as Diego Simeone's men eked out a vital win
Atletico Madrid pulled three points clear of Barcelona at the top of La Liga courtesy of a battling 3-2 victory over Levante at the Vicente Calderon.Andreas Ivanschitz put the visitors ahead after just a minute of action but the Rojiblancos levelled matters through Diego Godin on the half-hour mark.Diego Costa then volleyed Atletico into the lead early in the second half and although Pedro Rios restored parity, the Brazil-born forward took his Liga tally for the season to 19 goals with a penalty.The Rojiblancos had gone into the game level on points and goal difference with Barcelona, meaning that by bettering the Catalans' result against Getafe on Sunday, they would reach the winter break on top of the table. Consequently, the target was another resounding victory.However, an expectant Vicente Calderon was silenced with less than 60 seconds of the game elapsed, withslotting home left-footed after making a wonderfully-timed run into the area and then taking a through-ball in his stride.One would have anticipated an immediate Atletico backlash but Diego Simeone's men appeared stunned by an incredibly adventurous start from their visitors, who looked set to deservedly double their advantage 11 minutes in until Thibaut Courtois pulled off a stunning save to deny David Barral.However, Atletico slowly but surely began to take control of the game and it was a sign of just how far forward that they had advanced when centre-halfrose at the near post to head home a floated cross from Juanfran right on the half-hour mark.The hosts could have taken the lead five minutes later but Keilor Navas did wonderfully well to get to save at the feet of Diego Costa.Levante then lost Ivanschitz to injury as Atletico continued to pour forward, with David Villa going close with a deflected effort.The Rojiblancos were unable to find a way through before the break, though, and could even have conceded right on the stroke of half-time, but Barral fired wide after beating Courtois to a through-ball.It proved a costly miss because Atletico moved in front just over a minute after the restart, withappearing at the back post to beat Navas with a low, left-footed volley from Gabi's deep free kick.Atletico seemed poised to coast to a comfortable win at that point butlevelled matters in sensational style in the 56th minute, pouncing on a mistake by Koke before driving past Filipe Luis and then unleashing an unstoppable 20-yard drive past Courtois.The home side pressed for a winner but they didn't look like they had run out of ideas when Ruben Garcia clumsily felled Juanfran in the area, thus allowingto decide an enthralling encounter in Atletico's favour with a penalty that Navas will feel he should have saved.Levante's frustration at being denied a deserved point spilled over in the dying seconds when Juanfran, who had been struck by Tiago during an off-the-ball incident in the first half, was sent off for lashing out at Filipe Luis.Diego Costa then missed a great chance to complete his hat-trick but there was no taking the shine off a win that will send them into the winter break at the very least level on points with reigning champions Barca.Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) compared the GOP’s battle to pass the bill to repeal and replace ObamaCare to the Titanic.
Lieu tweeted the sentiment Tuesday, referring to a Politico report that Republican Party leaders were tapping into savings to win lawmakers’ votes for the bill.
“This is like adding deck chairs to the Titanic,” he tweeted.
This is like adding deck chairs to the Titanic. https://t.co/ILANOlX2HG — Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) June 28, 2017
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Senate Republicans announced earlier Tuesday that they would be delaying the vote on the bill to repeal and replace ObamaCare to next month after five GOP senators said they would oppose bringing the bill to a vote.
Nine GOP senators have now said they would oppose the bill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.) said the party would take the coming weeks to work on the bill and resolve differences among senators.In this, first part of a new audio series, we look at the decline of the Irish language from the Tudor Conquest of the 1500s to the Great Famine of the 1840s.
(Click on the links to listen)
The Irish language from Tudor conquest to the famine
Contributors, in order, are Padraig Lenihan and Neil Buttimer, questions by John Dorney
Here we trace the decline of the Irish language from a dominant postion in the 1500s, to its catastrophic collapse after the Great Famine of the 1840s. In the intervening period, it had also come down in social stature. While Irish was the language of the native elite in the 1500s, by the early 19th century, it was spoken principally by the poor in the rural west.
Although the absolute number of Irish speakers, at four million people, may have been the highest ever, the language had retreated completely from the east of the country and collapsed even in the west after the 1840s.
Explanations for decline
Contributors, in order, Padraig Lenihan, Neil Buttimer, Fearghal McGarry
Here we ask why the Irish language first lost its pre-eminent position in Ireland and then declined almost to the point of extinction. Factors often cited are the famine of th 1840s, emmigration and the introduction of English-speaking compulsory National Schools in the 1830s. However, Irish had already lost its grip in much of the country by then.
Padraig Lenihan argues that factors such as the dispossession of the native elite, and the de-coupling of the language from social prestige were key factors. Fearghal McGarry notes that by the early 20th century, in Monaghan as in many other rural areas, the language was confined to the very elderly.
Irish in comparison
Contributors in order; Neil Buttimer and Padraig Lenihan.
While not absolutely unprecedented, the near death of Irish was very unusal for a modern European language. Here we look at the decline of the language by comparison with other minority languages.
Second Part- The Irish Language, A Phoenix from the Flames?
About the Contributors
Padraig Lenihan is historian of early modern Ireland and author of Confederate Catholics at War 1641-49, Conquest and Resistance: War In Seventeenth Century Ireland, 1690, Battle of the Boyne, and most recently, Consolidating Conquest, Ireland 1603-1727. He teaches in the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Neil Buttimer is an Irish language scholar. He has lectured in the Department of Modern Irish of University College Cork since 1982.
His research and teaching are in medieval Irish tradition, pre-Famine Gaelic Ireland and contemporary cultural policy.
He has published The heritage of Ireland (with Colin Rynne and Helen Guerin, eds), 2000. Cork history and society: interdisciplinary essays on the history of an Irish county (Dublin: 1993), and Catalogue of Irish manuscripts in the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Dublin: 1989 ).
He also wrote a chapter of the New History of Ireland on the Irish language since 1921.
Fearghal McGarry is a senior lecturer in Modern History at Queens University Belfast. He has written a series of books on Irish republicanism including; Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War, Frank Ryan, Eoin O’Duffy a Self Made Hero and The Rising, Ireland Easter 1916 and edited the collection, Republicanism in Modern Ireland.
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Written by: John_Dorney on 14 September, 2010. on 7 May, 2012.
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Greater Manchester Police has embarked on its second Twitter Day, vowing to post every single incident it responds to in 24 hours.
It began at 5am today and the force expects to tweet more than 3,000 incidents as they happen.
It became the first force to do it in 2010, generating huge interest in police work.
Chief Constable Sir Peter Fahy hopes the latest exercise will show the demand on his force on his officers remains the same even though the number of bobbies has been slashed because of budget cuts.
Throughout the day, GMP’s Facebook page will be ‘taken over’ by officers providing details of how cases are investigated.
9.30am update:
See the posts here:
Video updates will be uploaded from officers working on complex investigations such as sex cases.
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now
Updates will also come from police custody units and response teams, who deal with 999 calls.
Sir Peter said: “Since we held our first Twitter day in 2010 the force has shrunk by 1,400 officers and it has become more of a challenge to maintain the service to the public.
“Four years ago, people were surprised by the range of incidents we have to deal with and these have not changed. More of our work is about protecting vulnerable people, targeting those who abuse them and dealing with the consequences of entrenched social problems.
“We have a tremendous workforce that every day shows great dedication, patience and compassion. Our staff have great concern about the consequences of further reductions that we will face over coming years. We will need greater support from the public and continued changes to the way we work to get through this.”
Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner Jim Battle: “Twitter day gives the public an insight into a typical busy day for Greater Manchester Police. I’m sure the public will be surprised with the number of calls, the range of complex issues police deal with daily and how effective police officers are in protecting the public and our communities.
“Giving the public an insight into a day in the life of GMP will strengthen their support for officers and staff, who do extraordinary work in difficult circumstances. It also reinforces the case to government that investment in policing is essential and cutting police budgets is reckless.”
To follow what happens during the 24 hours people should check out the Twitter accounts @gmpday14_1, @gmpday14_2, @gmpday14_3 and @gmpday14_4 or use the hashtag #gmp24 to see the activity unfold.The Bank of England could launch new measures to regulate buy-to-let mortgages as it outlines its findings in an investigation into lending standards.
A regulatory branch of the Bank will report the findings on Tuesday. It is expected that the Prudential Regulatory Authority will introduce measures to allay ongoing fears that a rise in interest rates could trigger a property crash.
It comes a week after George Osborne, the Chancellor, told MPs it was "very likely" that the Government will let the Financial Policy Committee, a separate regulatory body, take direct action to restrict landlords and protect the stability of the property market. If passed, these will take effect later this year.
The Chancellor has also imposed a new 3pc stamp duty "surcharge" on buy-to-let properties and second homes that will come into action next month.
The Bank previously said that the FPC "stands ready to take action if necessary" on the interest-only loans in its December financial stability report.Share
Notorious hacker-friendly hangout 4chan.org has long been the source of many of the Internet’s most famous memes. But now the site’s founder, 23-year-old Christopher Poole (aka “moot”), has made meme-making his official business with the beta launch of Canv.as.
Canvas, which is currently available by invite-only, allows users to upload content — for now, only image files — and discuss items uploaded by fellow users. Similar to 4chan, other users can then upload their own, often heavily-Photoshopped, versions to the site. More casual Canvas-ers (or at least those without a copy of Photoshop) can use in-site drag-and-drop icons, like “LOL,” “WTF” or smiley faces, to add to the conversation. The content is then categorized by most-popular, newest or “random,” and tabs let users browse the site based on this criteria. “Our goal,” writes Poole on the Canvas blog, “is to create the best place to share and play with images.”
While images are the only type of content users can upload at the moment, Poole tells Techcrunch that other types of content, including video, audio and rich text, will eventually be integrated.
Unlike 4chan, however, Canvas requires people to create accounts, and the content is archived. But the accounts are anonymous, and require very little information to set up. Whether or not the added level of online posterity will prevent Canvas becoming the Anonymous clubhouse that 4chan is remains to be seen.
While Canvas may lack the fleeting nature of 4chan, it does provide something new: the ability to see the evolution of a meme, from original to its 10,000th remix. This is part of what Canvas is all about. “Content creation as a collaborative process,” Poole tells Mashable. “It’s not just the product that’s interesting — it’s that process.”
Canvan is currently only available to a few thousand users, but more will reportedly become available soon. So if you think you have the next Pedobear up your sleeve, perhaps Canvas will become your new outlet for Internet infamy.Fashionably late, even to her own funeral: Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor's service delayed by 15 minutes at her request
Elizabeth Taylor managed to be fashionably late for her own funeral after leaving strict instructions in a parting request.
The Hollywood icon was buried yesterday on a quiet hill outside Los Angeles in a small private ceremony that started 15 minutes after schedule.
'She even wanted to be late for her own funeral,' her publicist said.
Sombre: Close family of Elizabeth Taylor arrived at Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks and Mortuaries in California yesterday for Elizabeth Taylor's private funeral service
Small gathering: Only close family attended the event, with a public memorial service being planned for a later date
Firm friends: Dame Elizabeth Taylor will be laid to rest in the same cemetery as her close friend Michael Jackson, who died two years ago
The short service attended by no more than a few dozen family and close friends.
Close in life to Michael Jackson, Taylor is now even closer to the singer in death as she was buried in the same mausoleum building where he was laid to rest in 2009.
As a convoy of five black stretch limos swept the mourners through the main entrance of the Forest Lawns Memorial Park cemetery in Glendale, they were watched at a respectful distance by a phalanx of the world’s media - including circling helicopters - but only a handful of fans.
The 79-year-old actress only died of heart failure on Wednesday but a combination of her Jewish faith – which she adopted in 1959 and which demands speedy burial – and her family’s evident desire to avoid a media circus for once in her life ensured her burial took most people by surprise.
It was not clear who exactly was inside the blacked out limos but it would have included Taylor’s four children from three of her seven husbands - Michael and Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd and Maria Burton – as well as most if not all of her 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Time to say goodbye: Taylor died on Wednesday of heart failure
There had been speculation that she would be buried next to her parents – and close to Marilyn Monroe – at a more centrally-located Los Angeles cemetery at Westwood Village.
It had also been mooted that she might be laid to rest in Wales in a grave belonging to the family of her late husband Richard Burton.
Burton’s family had said they were hoping to honour the agreement the twice-married couple had made to be be buried together at a cemetery in Pontrhydyfen, near Port Talbot.
Memorial service: Preparations were under way earlier in the day ahead of the ceremony
Media pack: Journalists and cameramen gather at the scene
Last resting place: Taylor's funeral is taking place at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California
Document: Taylor's death certificate has been released
Particularly given that Burton is actually buried in Switzerland - for tax reasons – it seemed a forlorn hope that as glamorous a star as Taylor would end her days under the grey skies of south Wales.
But, even so, the London-born actress had a sort of homecoming yesterday.
Set in 300 acres of gently wooded hills, Forest Lawn has a definite English feel – albeit a Hollywood version – with mock Tudor office buildings, a Scottish chapel called 'Wee kirk o’ the heather' and a medieval gothic-style Great Mausoleum that was hailed by Time magazine as the 'New World’s Westminster Abbey'.
The mausoleum, was yesterday’s funeral service was held under tight security, contains a 'court of honour' where the cemetery’s most prestigious residents are inducted as 'immortals' by Forest Lawn’s 'council of regents'.
The cemetery is already packed with first division Hollywood names including Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and Jean Harlow.
Away from home: Richard Burton's grave in Celigny, Switzerland
Together again? There had been speculation Taylor, pictured in 1983, would be buried with her ex-husband Richard Burton in Switzerland
Jackson, another superstar who lived almost his entire life in the public eye, was also buried there with little pomp and ceremony.
The speed of the funeral arrangements also meant, thankfully, that a threatened picket by the rabid anti-gay activists of a group calling itself the Westboro Baptist Church never materialised.
Woody McBreairty, one of the few fans who had been able to get to the cemetery in time, said it was 'entirely appropriate' she should find privacy at last.
'This is her ride into the sunset and I think her family wanted her to do it with great dignity,' he said.
Mr McBreairty, who lives near Taylor’s home in Los Angeles’s Bel Air neighbourhood, said he used to see her occasionally and she was always'mobbed'. She had often wanted to go out with her family to local restaurants but was unable to do it, he said.
He added: 'I came because I knew this would be my last chance to pay a tribute to her. The term ‘movie legend’ is thrown around a lot but she gave genuine meaning to it. And she was probably the greatest beauty known to man.'
Other fans – and fellow stars - will get the chance to mourn the actress at a memorial service, whose date has yet to be announced.
Poll What was your favourite Elizabeth Taylor film? National Velvet Cat On A Hot Tin Roof Butterfield 8 Cleopatra Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? What was your favourite Elizabeth Taylor film? National Velvet 7284 votes
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof 8735 votes
Butterfield 8 1903 votes
Cleopatra 12304 votes
Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? 4717 votes Now share your opinion
Berta Judt had been waiting for the bus only to find herself one of the few members of the public to see the funeral cortege.
'They only announced this on the news two hours ago so nobody would have had time to get here, especially if they had to get off work,’ said the retired office worker.
'I’m definitely a fan. I remember being a 15-year-old girl and reading those old film magazines and seeing her gorgeous face on the cover. We all aspire to that.'
Goddess of the silver screen: Taylor playing the title role in one of her most famous films, CleopatraLast year, as the summer heat broke, a congregation of climate scientists and communicators gathered at the headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a granite edifice erected in the heart of Washington, to wail over their collective futility.
Year by year, the evidence for human-caused global warming has grown more robust. Greenhouse gases load the air and sea. Temperatures rise. Downpours strengthen. Ice melts. Yet the American public seems, from cursory glances at headlines and polls, more divided than ever on the basic existence of climate change, in spite of scientists’ many, many warnings. Their message, the attendees fretted, simply wasn’t getting through.
This worry wasn’t just about climate change, but also stem cells. Genetically modified food. Vaccines. Nuclear power. And, of course, evolution: Challenging scientific reality seems to be an increasingly common feature of American life. Some researchers have gone so far as to accuse one political party, the Republicans, of making "science denial" a bedrock principle. The authority attributed to scientists for a century is crumbling.
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Share this story: On climate and so many other scientific issues, the way we communicate polarizes audiences. We can do better. "While the public accepts the science on most topics, a few issues have become polluted with cultural debris."
It is a disturbing story. It is also, in many ways, a fairy tale. So says Dan M. Kahan, a law professor at Yale University who, over the past decade, has run an insurgent research campaign into how the public understands science. Through a magpie synthesis of psychology, risk perception, anthropology, political science, and communication research, leavened with heavy doses of empiricism and idol bashing, he has exposed the tribal biases that mediate our encounters with scientific knowledge. It’s a dynamic he calls cultural cognition.
Kahan rarely declines a speaking gig, and he came to the Washington meeting only to end up detonating the audience’s basic assumptions. First of all, he said, sitting on stage, thin, angular, his broom head of hair askew as always, there’s no credible evidence showing a decline in trust. Second, climate skeptics are convinced that scientists are on their side. They believe in science.
Their confusion, Kahan said, is a "consequence of distrust of a different sort"—fueled by cultural affiliation and fed by peers. What climate scientists have said didn’t create that confusion, so "nothing they say is going to dissipate that."
The crowd grumbled and barked. During the Q&A, Gavin A. Schmidt, now director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, stood up. An editor of a leading science blog and TED talker, Schmidt is known for his public outreach.
This is a "slightly nihilistic notion," he said to Kahan: that it "doesn’t matter what you say, everything is determined by culture wars."
"No, no," Kahan protested.
Granted, people have different backgrounds, Schmidt continued. "But it isn’t the case that what we say makes no difference. That what we say has no difference. That’s patently not true."
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Kahan slumped in his chair. That hadn’t been his point. Of course what scientists say matters. But they do not, as they imagine, whisper into the public’s ear. Scientists are so rigorous in their everyday work, yet when it comes to the public, those practices shrivel.
"There are more things that are plausible for what’s going on than are true," Kahan pleaded. "The only way to make progress is to use empirical methods to rip from the sea of the plausible the thing that actually matters. Otherwise we drown in storytelling."
For years, Kahan has sluiced that sea, pulling up inconvenient truths that expose the roots of scientific conflict. Far from a nihilist, he’s doing more than just showing off the problem. He’s trying to solve it.
For more stories like this one, follow @ChronicleReview on Twitter and sign up for the weekly Review newsletter.
Kahan inhabits an odd position: one of the best-known unknown academics in the country. Influential in criminal law, in recent years he’s become a vital bridge between the social and physical sciences, a lodestar in the science of science communication, a nascent field that tackles the gap between what scientists and the public know. He’s a public intellectual, his work closely followed by political elites, yet he remains a creature of draft papers, not TED talks. He practices what he preaches: Scientific communication is not about polish; it’s about process.
When it comes to the role of science in political debates, Kahan is no Pollyanna. While the public gladly accepts scientific advice on most topics—there’s no political debate about the public-health merits of pasteurization—a few issues, like climate change, have become polluted with cultural debris. This pollution defies education and intelligence, he’s shown; such smarts make people even more talented at rearranging facts to fit their views.
Like any good origin story, you could peg the start of cultural cognition to one point, more than a decade ago, when Kahan was struggling to understand debates over concealed-carry laws and their effects on gun violence. There was a deep divide among scholars and the public on how to interpret the evidence, and empirical research seemed unlikely to resolve the question. Something deeper was driving the public discussion.
At the time, two prominent models vied to explain how the public formed its opinions: One followed classical economics in assuming that the public was rational, weighing facts before drawing a conclusion; the other, from cognitive psychology, assumed irrationality, our minds riddled with biases that compromise our judgment. Neither seemed to describe the conflicts Kahan saw.
Then he met Donald Braman. At the time, Braman was an anthropology graduate student, and Kahan was a widely cited authority on criminal law. A lean marathoner, Kahan cut a distinctive path around Yale, zipping through campus on a scooter and walking his cat, Ann Richards, on a leash. (Richards remains a fixture in Kahan’s slides, and is known for surprising office guests from her cat tower.)
Braman pinged his ethnographic work to Kahan, who quickly responded: "Do you want to collaborate?" It’s a frequent question from Kahan, who ignores cant or status in favor of good, productive talk. He’ll host a post from a high-school science teacher on his blog, and one of his first questions to me, when conversation veered to the problems of science journalism, was: "Do you want to write a guest post on it?"
Braman also sent Kahan the work of Mary Douglas, an anthropologist who, several decades earlier, had developed a cultural theory of risk assessment. Social norms, above all else, informed how people judged risks, she said. The public divided along two spectra: one measuring their support of social structure, running from egalitarian to hierarchical; the other, their devotion to individualism or communitarianism. The scales combined for four essential "worldviews."
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Kahan looked past controversy over Douglas’s work—in particular, a 1982 book she co-wrote that attacked environmentalists (whom she saw as extremely egalitarian and communitarian, and motivated by contempt for industrial society)—and saw a powerful tool. He had already dipped into psychological research showing how we engage in "motivated reasoning," shaping facts around our beliefs, especially in situations that threaten our identities. Perhaps the worldviews described by Douglas were shaping those biases and causing conflict? A believer in free markets might balk at climate change, given the predominant warming narrative aimed at curbing economic growth; an egalitarian-communitarian, meanwhile, would find the centralized authority demanded by nuclear power unbearable.
This sounded good to Kahan and Braman, who is now an associate professor of law at George Washington University, but these were stories. To get anywhere, they’d have to hold Douglas’s theories up against real-world measures. First, using responses from an existing survey that seemed to measure worldviews, they found that those views could explain a participant’s position on gun control more completely than any other fact, be it religion, fear of crime, geography, political ideology, or party. The hierarchs and individualists opposed gun control, while the egalitarians and communitarians supported it.
Senior legal scholars immediately objected, the start of a long line of smart people affronted by Kahan’s findings. Their protests boil down to a gut reaction: "This couldn’t possibly apply to me!" There are many exemplars of the genre, with The New York Times’s Paul Krugman providing an excellent case this year, skewing Kahan’s work to fit his belief that Democrats value science more than Republicans do. Few people can admit that they let their cultural values trump facts. Could you? "We get a lot from our communities," Braman says. "They help us think through problems." This was Douglas’s basic insight, and it explains why campaigners have spent decades arguing over cultural fault lines. The notion that truth can’t resolve a factual debate—it’s threatening.
Douglas, however, was also troubled, and evasive on what questions might elicit worldviews, a vagueness, Braman says, that also "allowed her to apply the theory to whatever she wanted." Douglas (who died in 2007) told them she had not meant to describe fixed personality traits; to her, worldviews were fluid. At work, you may behave like a hierarchical individualist, but in your softball league, you may turn communitarian. The work is fine, she eventually told Kahan, but it’s not cultural theory as she intended it. They should get a new name.
Undeterred, Kahan and Braman held focus groups on divisive topics. Sparks from those yielded statements for their first original survey, which respondents rated for agreement: "Society as a whole has become too soft and feminine." "People should be able to rely on the government for help when they need it." The study showed that, in addition to guns and abortion, issues like nuclear power and global warming broke along worldview lines. Subsequent experiments would reaffirm that. Accepted scientific facts—that nuclear waste can be stored safely; that global warming is human-caused—were not reliably getting through those cultural filters.
This was in 2005, when a narrative had begun to form about a Republican war on science. A vast divide seemed to be opening up on topics like evolution, stem cells, and climate change. Kahan was the first to look at it diagnostically, says Edward W. Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. This wasn’t just about the Republicans, and Kahan’s work moved the field away from blaming conservatives. "It encouraged us," Maibach says, "to look at our own practices as being the problem."
Many scientists continued unaware, however, content to dwell in the idea that if members of the public just got the right information, they would change their minds on climate change—the information-deficit model, as it’s called. As one researcher told me, geoscientists have often thought "like Englishmen talking to foreigners: The solution is to talk more slowly and more loudly." That began to change in 2009, when a batch of stolen emails from climate scientists gave contrarians a new outlet for criticism; misconstrued, the letters could make it seem that the researchers were being underhanded in how they handled their data. The backlash had begun.
That incident, in part, prompted the National Academy of Sciences to convene a symposium, in 2012, on the science of science communication. Kahan was a featured speaker. All the ideas you have about how the public understands science aren’t working, he told the audience, as leaders of the scientific establishment shifted uncomfortably behind him. It’s time to test your assumptions.
It was a bold talk, a coming-out moment.
Kahan is the son of scientists: his mother a microbiologist, his father a pharmaceutical chemist at Merck. Born near Harvard, he spent his first few years in New York City and then moved with his mother to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he cultivated a love of skiing and a Midwestern practicality and openness. He read The Brethren, a book on the Supreme Court, and thought he’d really like to be a clerk. He was interested in how people, as a rule, knew what they knew— society, as he often says, isn’t "sufficiently astonished by how amazing it is that people can recognize what’s known." Studying law provided one way to explore that.
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At Harvard Law, he was known as a mild communitarian, a former classmate, Sheryll D. Cashin, told me. He got a reputation for his restless intellect, but most of all Cashin remembers his appeal during elections to the Law Review to cut down on "chicanery." He cared about fairness, she says, and that, in a testosterone-saturated environment, helped him emerge as the consensus choice for president. Kahan had his choice of Supreme Court clerkships, and he joined Thurgood Marshall, drawn to his deep sense of justice. A proud moment for Kahan came in Marshall’s dissent in Payne v. Tennessee. By overturning a precedent on victim-impact statements with limited new evidence, he wrote, the court was making plain that its currency was not reason, but power. His office is decorated with Marshall photos, and he named his first child after the justice.
Kahan found his way, in 1993, to the University of Chicago, one star in a constellation of ambitious young law professors: Elena Kagan, Lawrence Lessig, Cass R. Sunstein, Tracey L. Meares, Anne-Marie Slaughter. The behavioral economist Richard H. Thaler was there, too, and the ferment was about undermining notions of rationality that drove Chicago’s traditional law-and-economics approach. The New Yorker even ran a story about the divide between "old" and "new" Chicago. Kahan, it noted, cast a write-in vote for Bernie Sanders in the 1996 presidential election, and had a bumper sticker in his office that read: "SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM."
The new faces at Chicago were interested in social norms and how they intersected with criminal law, particularly in their crime-plagued city. Kahan worked closely with Meares on how constitutional theory might better consider the rights of communities over individuals, like the desire of public-housing residents to let police search their buildings without a warrant in response to deadly gunfire, an idea that found the two scholars facing off against the ACLU—risky for untenured professors. Kahan also gained notoriety for his support of public shaming as an alternative punishment to prison for low-level crimes, and he was perplexed by the heated response he got: Why so much resistance?
But the neat boxes provided by the behavioral economists didn’t work for him. His work would go on to resist their excesses, their emphasis on irrationality, as much as it would reject the classic Chicago school. When people subvert facts to fit their worldviews, they are using reason. "It’s not about too little rationality—it’s too much!" Kahan says. Meares remains close to Kahan, and while she was surprised with how his work shifted, she sees his goals as fundamentally the same: "It’s understanding how to give people a voice and how to get people to listen to each other."
Kahan left for Yale in 1999. Meares inherited his office, and he left behind two gifts: a Toy Story mousepad and his bumper sticker.
It’s not easy running Kahan down; letters disappear deep into his inbox, lost forever. Interview him at a conference, and the only free time involves following him to his hotel room as he tosses belongings into a worn roller bag. He’s often perched on his blog and Twitter account, and was an early adopter of digital preprints; many of his papers sit for years online before he publishes them. The reward of original thinking is endless demand: He has collaborations with Boston’s Museum of Science, the Nature Conservancy, the producers of the television show NOVA, the Annenberg Foundation, and Sencer, a science-education research group, among others.
"The amount of work he does in a day is just embarrassing to the rest of us," Braman says. "He doesn’t intend this, but it’s just brutally humiliating." Kahan wrote a book on the norm of reciprocity but lost interest and never published it. He has bouts of frustration when debating researchers who have not kept up with best statistical practices; if you should know better, he’ll let you know it. He still spends much time on the law: He built a
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enzui (insert name of move) - This means the move is down to the back of the head. Thus, an enzui lariat is a lariat to the back of the head, an enzui knee is a knee to the back of the head, and an enzuigiri is a kick to the back of the head.
geigeki dropkick - Cutting your opponent's flying move off by dropkicking them in midair
gyakuebigatame - boston crab
gyakukataebigatame - 1/2 crab
gyaku suihei chop - This matchs reverse horizontal chop. These are the knife edge chops used by Rikidozan, Genichiru Tenryu, etc.
haragatame - stomach hold
hizajujigatame - kneebar. This has also been called a cross knee scissors.
ipponzeoi - a judo throw where your opponent is behind you with their stomach to your back and you throw them over your shoulder by pulling their arm in a whipping motion. There is also a gyaku (reverse) ipponzeio that Sasaki does, which is the same thing except it starts off with both men facing opposite directions (ie back to back).
kataebigatame - any form of a cover where one leg is hooked
kaitenebigatame - sunset flip
kenka kick - running front kick to the face. The same as Chono's Yakuza kick.
manjigatame - an abdominal stretch with one leg over the opponents head. In other words, an octopus.
nadare shiki no (insert name of move) - This is when both wrestlers are on the turnbuckle (typically the person doing the move is standing on the middle rope and the person having the move done to them is sitting on the top turnbuckle) and one does a move like a Frankensteiner, suplex, brainbuster, etc. where both people are sent flying through the air until they crash into the canvas, apron, or arena floor. So a nadare shiki no Frankensteiner is the same as what we call a Frankensteiner off the top and a nadare shiki no brainbuster (since the Japanese call a verticle suplex a brainbuster) is the same as what we call a superplex. Technically, nadare shiki no means an avalanche style move, I assume because the Japanese think the way the wrestlers come crashing down from a high point reminds them of an avalanche (a real avalanche, not a Tenta move).
nagesuteru German suplex - Throw away German suplex. This is the Vader move that's sometimes called a wheelbarrel suplex where he picks his opponent up around the waist so he's facing the mat and hs his legs in between Vader's waist. Then he suplexes him backwards (but not into a bridge or it would be a German suplex hold).
nenbutsu powerbomb - Jinsei Shinzaki's Buddhist prayer powerbomb
nodowa otoshi - choke slam
rakudagatame - camel clutch
rolling (insert name of move) - This depends on what type of move it is.When a wrestler holds onto their opponent and does the same move two or more times in a row, for example a German suplex, doublearm suplex, etc. they call it rolling. I assume it's called rolling because you have to roll yourself and your opponent to get back to your feet so you can do the move again. This can also be called locomotion, so a rolling German suplex and a locomotion German suplex are exactly the same move. Many moves where the wrestler performing them does a 360 degree rotation are also called rolling moves. It can be a somersault like on a rolling guillotine leg drop or a spin like on a rolling savate.
sankakujime - triangle choke. Basically it's a headscissors where one of the opponents arms is also trapped inside the lock.
sasorigatame - scorpion deathlock/sharpshooter
senkai shiki no falcon arrow - When Hayabusa turns while holding his opponent in verticle suplex position before dropping them down onto their back tombstone style
suichoku rakka shiki no (insert name of move) - This means verticle drop. Basically, you hold your opponent in a verticle position and do a move where you make them fall straight down onto their head. Thus, a suichoku rakka shiki no brainbuster is the same as what we call a brainbuster, a verticle suplex set up where you suplex them straight down onto their head.
suisha otoshi - a watermill suplex. This move was brought to Japan by Salmon Hashimikov. It looks like a back body drop except it starts out with the wrestler performing tucking their head under the opponents arm or in between their legs and scooping them up onto one shoulder.
swandive shiki no (insert name of move) - This is when a wrestler stands on the ring apron and slings themselves up to the top rope then jumps off the top rope and gives their a missile kick, huracan rana, etc.
taigatame - Any form of a cover where neither of the opponent's legs are hooked. In other words, a body press or lateral press
tetsubo shiki no dobitski corbata - slingshot over the top rope into a spinning headscissors
uchujin plancha - springboard plancha
udehishigigyakujujigatame - cross arm bar. This has also been called a cross armbreaker.
ura STF - reverse spinning toe hold facelock
uraken - Typically a spinning backfist, but it's called an uraken as long as it's some version of a backfist
SENTENCES
Otto! Tanaka wa chidaruma no jyoutai ni narimashita! Monosugoi shuketsu desu! - Oh no! Tanaka's become a bloody pulp! He's bleeding profusely!
SLANG
Fun predominantly slang terms for people wondering what those crazy guys and gals are screaming in the ring. If you find any of these terms offensive, blame Keith.:P
bacchi gateru - the heavens will it that you be cursed, oh foul thing!
bakayaro - stupid fucker!
busu - ugly woman
busu na - she's fucking ugly!
chi chi - tits
chikkushoh - goddamn it!
chin chin kokoro - you can't get it up/you've got a small dick
hara ga tatsu - I'm pissed off!
himo - pimp
ike - fucking go!
ikuzo - here I go!
ippai oppai - breasts
ippatsu sasero - fuck you!
joro - prostitute
kono yaro - you fucker!/hey fucker
kusai - you stink!
kuso - shit
kutabre subeta - fuck you, bitch!
manko - pussy
o-mae - I don't like you (with meaning of contempt)
o-mae ra - I don't like any of you (with meaning of contempt)
shine - God wills it that you drop dead!
sore wa sugoi - That was awesome!
yamero - You'd better give up!
yamete - I give up!
yaro - not a good person
zakenayo - fuck you!
This dictionary is certainly far from complete. It also might not be 100% accurate because there is usually more than one way of translating a given word and more than one meaning for each word. My goal in creating this list is to increase the number of Japanese words that all of us can comprehend. So, if you have any additions or corrections please submit them to me for addition to the list. Of course, everyone who helps out will be added to the credit list that follows.
Credit: The Kanji Dictionary by Mark Spahn & Wolfgang Hadamitzky, Japanese: The Spoken Language Part 1 by Eleanor Harz Jorden with Mari Noda, Keith Watanabe - Manami Toyota Rules!, Nelson's Kanji Dictionary, Kenkyusha's New Collegiate Japanese-English Dictionary, Chris Martinez, Miko Kubota - Michiku Pro, Kim Chang Won, Glenn Tsunekawa - nCo web site, Zul, Jeffrey's J/E Dictionary, Roosevelt Cooper, Adam JarmuschImage copyright Kiira Motors Image caption Kiira Motors now hopes to attract partners to help mass produce the bus
A solar-powered bus described by its Ugandan makers as the first in Africa has been driven in public.
Kiira Motors' Kayoola prototype electric bus was shown off at a stadium in Uganda's capital, Kampala.
One of its two batteries can be charged by solar panels on the roof which increases the vehicle's 80km (50 mile) range.
The makers now hope to attract partners to help manufacture the bus for the mass market.
Africa Live: BBC news updates
Can Africa lead the way on renewable energy?
Africa's new breed of'solar-preneurs'
Kiira Motors' chief executive Paul Isaac Musasizi told BBC News that he had been "humbled" by the large and positive reaction to the test drive.
Image copyright Kiira Motors Image caption Solar panels on the roof of the bus will top up the vehicle's battery
People have been excited by the idea that Uganda is able to produce the concept vehicle, or prototype, and Mr Musasizi said he wanted it to help the country "champion the automotive, engineering and manufacturing industries" in the region.
He also hopes that it will generate employment, predicting that by 2018, more than 7,000 people could be directly and indirectly employed in the making of the Kayoola.
But backing from international companies, which make vehicle parts, is essential for the project to take off.
The vision is that by 2039 the company will be able to manufacture all the parts and assemble the vehicle in Uganda.
The 35-seat bus is intended for urban areas rather than inter-city use because of the restrictions on how far it can travel.
If it is mass produced, each bus would cost up to $58,000 (£40,000), which Mr Musasizi says is a a competitive price.
Kiira Motors grew out of a project at Uganda's Makerere University, which is now a shareholder in the company, and it has also benefitted from government funding.Dear Abby Distilled
1. Wake up and smell the coffee.
2. M.Y.O.B.
3. If she’s as intelligent as you say she is, she already knows.
4. See a therapist.
5. Call animal control.
6. Call the cops.
7. Quit blaming yourself.
8. Laws vary state to state. See a lawyer.
9. Give back the ring.
10. There is no polite way of asking, so don’t.
11. Count the silver again to be sure, and next time, use plastic.
12. He’s married.
13. If she can afford “a sports car and designer clothes,” she can afford to help out with the rent and groceries.
14. Tell that “sweetheart of a man” that he has three days to get off the sofa and find a job, or he’s out the door.
15. No one can make you feel like a doormat unless you ask to be treated like one.
16. Call it quits and learn from your experience.
17. Tackiness comes in all forms, as you witnessed for yourself.
18. Don’t drink and drive.
19. Next time, ask for separate checks.
20. Ask yourself: would I be better with him or without him?
21. Accept the fact that you will never get back your grandmother’s jelly dish, and learn from the experience.
22. The law was on your brother-in-law’s side. Next time, get it in writing.
23. Put the paintings up for awhile, then stow them in the closet. If Aunt Beryl asks about her portraits of Muhammad and Groucho, tell her you rotate the artwork in your house.
24. Good luck. You’ll need it.A coalition of groups including the Ecology Action Centre, SumOfUs and Greenpeace wants the the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board to revoke its recent decision to grant approval to Shell Canada Ltd.'s plan to drill off the coast of Nova Scotia.
On Wednesday, the groups delivered a petition with more than 233,000 signatures and protested outside the office of the petroleum board.
Last month, the board authorized a Shell drilling plan in the Shelburne Basin, which is about 250 kilometres southwest of Shelburne. Initially, the plan had a 21-day timeframe to contain subsea blowouts, but the approved plan was shortened to between 12 and 13 days.
Environmental groups say that timeline is too long and falls short of the U.S. requirement of 24 hours for drilling in the waters off Alaska.
About a dozen people attended today's protest. They want want Shell's drilling program to be stopped.
"It's just unacceptable for the regulator to be saying safety is too expensive. Their job isn't to keep this job profitable for Shell. Their job is to protect the public and they're failing in that duty right now," said Greenpeace's Alex Speers-Roesch.
The head of the petroleum board disagrees.
"I think that the regulations that are in place and the regulations that we enforce are very stringent, very robust," said CEO Stuart Pinks.
Shell says there is an "extremely low" probability of a blowout and there are multiple mechanisms in place to prevent one. The company also recently told the Nova Scotia legislature's resource committee that they have immediate response capability at the drill site in the first hours of any incident.
Shell began its drilling program on Oct. 23.
A representative from the fishing industry also attended the protest. The fishing industry is concerned the project is taking place too close to some of the province's most lucrative fishing grounds.Some customers were charged despite the game's delay
It's not news that Forgotten Empires is taking more time to finish Age of Empires: Definitive Edition (the game was delayed to 2018 almost a month ago), but there is more to that story than the typical "Sorry for the wait" and "Thanks for understanding" messages. It's a good upate, though. Mostly.
It seems that some pre-orders were "mistakenly charged ahead of schedule" and, as a result, the studio needs to issue refunds. Anyone affected by the errant charge will get their money back and Rise of Nations: Extended Edition on Windows 10 for free. Expect to hear more "within the next week."
Lastly, everyone who pre-orders will be invited to the Age of Empires closed beta, with sign-ups available over here. That should help pass the time until launch. That said, all pre-orders, charged or otherwise, were canceled as part of the refunding process. So if you still want in, you'll need to reorder.
"We're dedicated to treating this 20-year-old classic with the respect it deserves as a hallmark of video game history," said the developers, "and we're so happy to have your support in doing everything we can to make that happen."
Age of Empires: Definitive Edition Pre-order Update [Age of Empires]
You are logged out. Login | Sign upMario Balotelli feels joining Liverpool was the worst decision he has ever made and has taken aim at Brendan Rodgers and Jurgen Klopp in the process.
The striker left AC Milan in favour of a move to Anfield in 2014, but failed to make an impact at Anfield.
Balotelli spent last season on loan back at Milan before exiting the club for Nice on deadline day and he is delighted to have left the Premier League side.
"Joining Liverpool was the worst decision of my life. Apart from the fantastic fans and some player with whom I have an excellent relationship, I did not like the club," Balotelli told Canal+.
"I had two coaches at Liverpool, Rodgers and Klopp for a bit, I did not like their methods and their personality. I never really felt well there.
"I am nothing like Zlatan [Ibrahimovic] for example. You could confront Zlatan with lions and he would still be calm. If you surround him with good people, he will still be calm. That's the way he is.
"But I need to be more relaxed and have surroundings that work for me."
Balotelli, 26, started his Nice career by scoring the opener in Sunday's Ligue 1 encounter with Marseille and he remains full of ambition for the near future.
"It is not too late for me to win the Ballon d'Or," he added.
"I think I could have already won it by now, but I might be able to win it within two to three years by working hard and staying serious.
"Over the past two years, my work ethic has increased from 10 per cent to 80 per cent. I have really started working hard over the past two years."Alexandros Michailidis / SOOC
Ξεκίνησε κλασικά, λέγοντας «δεν είμαι ομοφοβικός» και συνέχισε αποδεικνύοντας το αντίθετο συγκρίνοντας τους γκέι με κτηνοβάτες και με ζώα, λέγοντας: «Καλά, ο Ομπάμα μπορεί και να τους παντρεύει αν θέλει. Και στη Γερμανία έχουν αποφασίσει να κάνουν οίκο ανοχής για κτηνοβάτες, θέλει ο άλλος να πηγαίνει με σκύλο με γάτα, με καμήλα, με καμηλοπάρδαλη. Επειδή λοιπόν το κάνουν στη Γερμανία, θα θέλω εγώ να παντρεύεται ο άλλος καμήλα;»
Ο άνθρωπος που είπε ζωντανά στην τηλεόραση (στο debate του Σεπτεμβρίου) ότι δεν έχει καμία καταδικαστική απόφαση εναντίον του, ενώ έχει επειδή είχε συκοφαντήσει χωρίς αποδείξεις, και που επίσης παρουσίασε τρολ έκθεση μαθητή στο ντιμπέιτ ως πραγματική, χτες χρησιμοποίησε το ψεκασμένο επιχείρημα της «νομιμοποιημένης κτηνοβασίας» που διακινείται από διάφορα ρατσιστικά, πατριωτικά σκουπιδομπλογκ.
Μάλιστα αναβάθμισε το hoax (που συνήθως λέει πως η κτηνοβασία είναι νόμιμη στην Γερμανία / Ολλανδία / Δανία ή όπου αλλού) ισχυριζόμενος ότι δεν είναι μόνο η κτηνοβασία νόμιμη στη Γερμανία αλλά και ο γάμος μεταξύ ανθρώπων και ζώων.
Ποια είναι η απόδειξη για αυτό; Το Psekasmenos.gr; Το ευφάνταστο μυαλό του Πάνου Καμμένου; Κάτι τρίτο; Είναι απίστευτο, αλλά τα τελευταία χρόνια έχει χρειαστεί να γράψω 3 (τρία!) ξεχωριστά άρθρα που διαλύουν το μύθο και ξεσκεπάζουν τα ψέματα περί νομιμοποίησης της κτηνοβασίας ή/και της αιμομιξίας σε χώρες της Κεντρικής Ευρώπης. Κι όμως, ακόμα και τώρα, πολιτικοί της δεξιάς δικαιολογούν τη στάση τους χρησιμοποιώντας εμφανώς επινοημένες «ειδήσεις»: Πριν τον Καμμένο, πέρσι ο Νεράτζης της ΝΔ είχε πει: «Υπάρχουν κόμματα στην Ολλανδία που αναγνωρίζουν την παιδοφιλία. Τι θα κάνουμε, θα το υιοθετήσουμε κι εμείς; Υπάρχουν επίσης οίκοι ανοχής που επιτρέπουν την κτηνοβασία! Τι θα κάνουμε, θα το υιοθετήσουμε και εμείς;». Για να καταλήξει ότι «το σύμφωνο συμβίωσης δεν μπορεί να βρει θέση σ' εμάς».
Πολλά θα συγχωρεθούν στον Αλέξη Τσίπρα. Η επιλογή του Καμμένου και της νοοτροπίας του, και η ανάδειξή του σε συγκυβερνήτη δεν θα είναι ένα απ' αυτά.
Για την ιστορία, το πιο γνωστό «άρθρο» περί κτηνοβασίας στην Κεντρική Ευρώπη (ποτέ δεν θα διαβάσεις στα πατριωτικά μπλογκ για τυχόν κρούσματα κτηνοβασίας που έγιναν στην ελληνική ύπαιθρο φυσικά!) ήταν το παρακάτω άρθρο, του κυρίου Χειλαδάκη στις 20 Ιουλ 2015, που αντιγράφτηκε και αναρτήθηκε από πολλές ιστοσελίδες και blogs. Όμως το άρθρο περιέχει αρκετές ανακρίβειες, και το συμπέρασμα που βγάζει ο αναγνώστης, είναι εντελώς εσφαλμένο.
Τα ellinika hoaxes κατέρριψαν τον αστικό μύθο:
Το παραπάνω άρθρο που είναι γεμάτο ανακρίβειες, αναπαράχθηκε κατά κόρον από ιστοσελίδες, blogs, αλλά και χρήστες στο facebook. Το άρθρο της Die Welt πραγματικά υπάρχει αλλά έχει ημερομηνία 13.09.2014 (έχει σημασία) και αν το διαβάσει κανείς δεν θα βγάλει τα ίδια συμπεράσματα με το άρθρο του κυρίου Χειλαδάκη. Διαβάστε το ΕΔΩ
Μετά την απαγόρευση της κτηνοβασίας, εκτός των άλλων χωρών και στη Γερμανία [όχι μόνο δεν επιτρέπονται γάμοι, αλλά έχει ρητά απαγορευτεί με νόμο], υπήρχαν φόβοι να μετατραπεί η Δανία σε σεξουαλικό προορισμό για κτηνοβάτες. Έτσι η Δανία άλλαξε την νομοθεσία της και ψήφισε νόμο κατά της κτηνοβασίας στις 21.04.2015 με 91 ψήφους υπέρ και 5 κατά.
Την αλλαγή του νόμου, την χαρακτήρισε καλά νέα η οργάνωση PETA, και τη δημοσίευσε σε άρθρο στη σελίδα της. Διαβάστε το άρθρο ΕΔΩ
Σύμφωνα με τα παραπάνω στοιχεία οι ισχυρισμοί και τα συμπεράσματα στο άρθρο του κηρίου Χειλαδάκη στις 20 Ιουλ 2015, δεν γίνεται να είναι αληθείς. Η Ευρώπη δεν είναι υπέρ της κτηνοβασίας και σε ελάχιστα κράτη δεν απαγορεύεται ρητά.
Η κτηνοβασία «αναμένεται να ψηφιστεί σαν νόμιμη και από το κοινοβούλιο της Δανίας», μας αναφέρει ο κύριος Χειλαδάκης, αλλά βλέπουμε πως στην πραγματικότητα η Δανία έπραξε ακριβώς το αντίθετο. Ψήφισε νόμο κατά της κτηνοβασίας 3 μήνες πριν το άρθρο του.
Έτσι οι ισχυρισμοί και του παραπάνω άρθρου με τίτλο “ΕΜΠΡΟΣ, ΓΙΑ ΜΙΑ ΕΥΡΩΠΑΙΚΗ ΕΝΩΣΗ ΤΗΣ…ΚΤΗΝΟΒΑΣΙΑΣ” είναι ανυπόστατοι και καταρρίπτονται.
[+] Άσχετο, σχετικόYou never heard of the Millenium Falcon? It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.
I've been working on a parser combinator library called trifecta, and so I decided I'd share some thoughts on parsing.
Packrat parsing (as provided by frisby, pappy, rats! and the Scala parsing combinators) and more traditional recursive descent parsers (like Parsec) are often held up as somehow different.
Today I'll show that you can add monadic parsing to a packrat parser, sacrificing asymptotic guarantees in exchange for the convenient context sensitivity, and conversely how you can easily add packrat parsing to a traditional monadic parser combinator library.
To keep this post self-contained, I'm going to start by defining a small packrat parsing library by hand, which acts rather like parsec in its backtracking behavior. First, some imports:
{-# LANGUAGE RecordWildCards, ViewPatterns, DeriveFunctor #-} import Control.Applicative import Control. Monad ( MonadPlus (.. ), guard ) import Control. Monad.Fix ( fix ) import Data. Char ( isDigit, digitToInt, isSpace )
Second, we'll define a bog simple parser, which consumes an input stream of type d, yielding a possible answer and telling us whether or not it has actually consumed any input as it went.
newtype Rat d a = Rat { runRat :: d -> Result d a } deriving Functor data Result d a = Pure a -- didn't consume anything, can backtrack | Commit d a -- consumed input | Fail String Bool -- failed, flagged if consumed deriving Functor
Now, we can finally implement some type classes:
instance Applicative ( Rat d ) where pure a = Rat $ \ _ -> Pure a Rat mf < *> Rat ma = Rat $ \ d -> case mf d of Pure f -> fmap f ( ma d ) Fail s c -> Fail s c Commit d' f -> case ma d' of Pure a -> Commit d' ( f a ) Fail s _ -> Fail s True Commit d'' a -> Commit d'' ( f a )
including an instance of Alternative that behaves like parsec, only backtracking on failure if no input was unconsumed.
instance Alternative ( Rat d ) where Rat ma < |> Rat mb = Rat $ \ d -> case ma d of Fail _ False -> mb d x -> x empty = Rat $ \ _ -> Fail "empty" False
For those willing to forego the asymptotic guarantees of packrat, we'll offer a monad.
instance Monad ( Rat d ) where return a = Rat $ \_ -> Pure a Rat m >>= k = Rat $ \d -> case m d of Pure a -> runRat ( k a ) d Commit d' a -> case runRat ( k a ) d' of Pure b -> Commit d' b Fail s _ -> Fail s True commit -> commit Fail s c -> Fail s c fail s = Rat $ \ _ -> Fail s False instance MonadPlus ( Rat d ) where mplus = ( < |> ) mzero = empty
and a Parsec-style "try", which rewinds on failure, so that < |> can try again.
try :: Rat d a -> Rat d a try ( Rat m ) = Rat $ \d -> case m d of Fail s _ -> Fail s False x -> x
Since we've consumed < |> with parsec semantics. Let's give a PEG-style backtracking (< />).
( < /> ) :: Rat d a -> Rat d a -> Rat d a p < /> q = try p < |> q infixl 3 < />
So far nothing we have done involves packrat at all. These are all general purpose recursive descent combinators.
We can define an input stream and a number of combinators to read input.
class Stream d where anyChar :: Rat d Char whiteSpace :: Stream d => Rat d ( ) whiteSpace = ( ) < $ many ( satisfy isSpace ) phrase :: Stream d => Rat d a -> Rat d a phrase m = whiteSpace *> m < * eof notFollowedBy :: Rat d a -> Rat d ( ) notFollowedBy ( Rat m ) = Rat $ \d -> case m d of Fail { } -> Pure ( ) _ -> Fail "unexpected" False eof :: Stream d => Rat d ( ) eof = notFollowedBy anyChar satisfy :: Stream d => ( Char -> Bool ) -> Rat d Char satisfy p = try $ do x < - anyChar x <$ guard ( p x ) char :: Stream d => Char -> Rat d Char char c = satisfy ( c == ) lexeme :: Stream d => Rat d a -> Rat d a lexeme m = m < * whiteSpace symbol :: Stream d => Char -> Rat d Char symbol c = lexeme ( char c ) digit :: Stream d => Rat d Int digit = digitToInt < $> satisfy isDigit
And we can of course use a string as our input stream:
instance Stream [ Char ] where anyChar = Rat $ \s -> case s of ( x:xs ) -> Commit xs x [ ] -> Fail "EOF" False
Now that we've built a poor man's Parsec, let's do something more interesting. Instead of just using String as out input stream, let's include slots for use in memoizing the results from our various parsers at each location. To keep things concrete, we'll memoize the ArithPackrat.hs example that Bryan Ford used in his initial packrat presentation enriched with some whitespace handling.
data D = D { _add :: Result D Int, _mult :: Result D Int, _primary :: Result D Int, _decimal :: Result D Int, anyCharD :: Result D Char }
If you look at the type of each of those functions you'll see that _add :: D -> Result D Int, which is exactly our Rat newtype expects as its argument, we we can bundle them directly:
add, mult, primary, decimal :: Rat D Int add = Rat _add mult = Rat _mult primary = Rat _primary decimal = Rat _decimal
We can similarly juse use the character parse result.
instance Stream D where anyChar = Rat anyCharD
Now we just need to build a D from a String. I'm using view patterns and record wildcards to shrink the amount of repetitive naming.
parse :: String -> D parse s = fix $ \d -> let Rat ( dv d -> _add ) = ( + ) < $> mult < * symbol '+' <*> add < /> mult Rat ( dv d -> _mult ) = ( * ) < $> primary < * symbol '*' <*> mult < /> primary Rat ( dv d -> _primary ) = symbol'('*> add < * symbol')'</> decimal Rat ( dv d -> _decimal ) = foldl'( \b a -> b * 10 + a ) 0 < $> lexeme ( some digit ) anyCharD = case s of ( x:xs ) -> Commit ( parse xs ) x [ ] -> Fail "EOF" False in D {.. } dv :: d -> ( d -> b ) -> b dv d f = f d
Note that we didn't really bother factoring the grammar, since packrat will take care of memoizing the redundant calls!
And with that, we can define an evaluator.
eval :: String -> Int eval s = case runRat ( whiteSpace *> add < * eof ) ( parse s ) of Pure a -> a Commit _ a -> a Fail s _ -> error s
Note that because the input stream D contains the result directly and parse is the only thing that ever generates a D, and it does so when we start up, it should be obvious that the parse results for each location can't depend on any additional information smuggled in via our monad.
Next time, we'll add a packratted Stream type directly to Parsec, which will necessitate some delicate handling of user state.
The small parser implemented here can be found on my github account, where it hasn't been adulterated with unnecessary spaces by my blog software.
P.S. To explain the quote, had I thought of it earlier, I could have named my parsing combinator library "Kessel Run" as by the time I'm done with it "it will contain at least 12 parsecs" between its different parser implementations.Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said Tuesday that he is “very confident” that the FBI will find no wrongdoing in its investigation of donations to his 2013 campaign and his personal finances. (Win Mcnamee/Getty Images)
The surprise news of an FBI inquiry into Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has uncomfortable parallels to an FBI security review of his friend and political patron Hillary Clinton’s email system, but Clinton allies said it is unlikely to do her lasting harm.
McAuliffe (D) said Tuesday that he is “very confident” that the FBI will find no wrongdoing in its investigation of donations to his 2013 campaign and his personal finances. He said his reaction to news of the probe, which may have been underway for a year, was “shock.”
McAuliffe has many things in common with Bill and Hillary Clinton, his political benefactors and close friends. Along with overlapping business, political and social spheres, he shares their history of prodigious Democratic fundraising and financial dealings that have drawn scrutiny.
And now he shares the unwelcome news that the FBI is looking into the propriety of decisions or actions taken in his name.
“When you put the word FBI with anything or anyone, the optics aren’t good,” joked John Morgan, a longtime friend and donor to both Clinton and McAuliffe.
Clinton friends and supporters said they are concerned for McAuliffe but not, at this point, for Clinton.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with Hillary Clinton,” McAuliffe said Tuesday, adding that the inquiry also would not hamper his effectiveness as governor.
“If you haven’t done anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about,” he told reporters.
The three-decade friendship between McAuliffe and the Clintons has been marked by favors done and received on both sides. McAuliffe is in a position this year to bestow a big one — delivering a key swing state for Hillary Clinton in the presidential race.
What little is known about the FBI investigation into McAuliffe has a familiar ring, with parallels to criticism of Clinton fundraising during Bill Clinton’s presidency and afterward, through the Clinton Foundation.
Neither the foundation nor the presidential campaign is a target of the probe, an official told The Washington Post on Monday. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing investigation.
CNN first reported the inquiry, saying that investigators are looking into a six-figure contribution that Chinese businessman Wang Wenliang made to McAuliffe’s campaign through his U.S. businesses.
But a federal official told The Post that federal investigators are looking broadly at donations to McAuliffe and at his personal finances.
Attorneys for McAuliffe’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign carefully reviewed all donations, the governor said.
McAuliffe hosted a fundraiser for Clinton and state Democratic parties at his McLean home last month, and he is helping scramble donors nationwide to help her gird for a bruising general election contest with Republican Donald Trump. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton helped raise money for McAuliffe’s 2013 campaign in Virginia, a kind of graduation to elected office for a famously energetic Democratic fundraiser and operative who helped elect others.
Morgan, who hosted a big fundraising party for McAuliffe at his Florida home in 2013 and whose law firm donated $107,000 to McAuliffe the same year, said his old friend was “fastidious” about ensuring that donations to the Democratic National Committee were proper when he served as party chairman.
He predicted that the FBI inquiry would come to naught.
“On a scale of one to 10 of things to be worried about, I’m at a minus-five on this,” he said.
Other Clinton friends and political allies said there is some concern that the inquiry could drag on without resolution, inviting comparisons with the seemingly endless special prosecutor inquiries into various Clinton financial and fundraising operations. Hillary Clinton has dismissed many of those as evidence of Republican political skullduggery.
The McAuliffe probe is being run by a different part of the FBI from the inquiry into whether government secrets were compromised by the private email system Clinton used for her government work at the State Department. She has said she never intentionally sent or received classified information and has predicted the inquiry will show no wrongdoing.
Both inquiries, however, introduce what one Clinton backer called the “fear of the unknown” into Clinton’s presidential run.
“Nobody wants to wake up on a Monday and find out they are the subject of an FBI investigation,” said one longtime Clinton and McAuliffe friend. “And nobody wants to have those kinds of questions close to a presidential campaign.”
Clinton did not address the McAuliffe matter in campaign remarks Tuesday, and her campaign headquarters had no immediate comment on the development.
The Republican National Committee sent reporters a list of news articles detailing the many layers of personal and professional links between McAuliffe and the Clintons, whose New York house he helped them buy as they left the White House with heavy legal debt in 2001.
“Please see a refresher on how closely linked the Virginia governor is to the Clintons and the controversial fundraising practices he stewarded in the 1990s that practically placed a ‘for sale’ sign on the White House and set a new low for ethics in government,” a RNC spokesman wrote.
The Trump campaign has concluded that the email inquiry is a lose-lose proposition for the candidate he now calls “Crooked Hillary.” Any criminal prosecution would obviously be a blow to her presidential chances. But even if she and close aides are cleared, Republicans can claim a whitewash by a Democratic attorney general.
The federal inquiry includes a period before McAuliffe was elected and when he was serving as an unpaid director for the Clinton Foundation. Wang has also donated to the foundation, giving $2 million.
Many details of the federal probe, including what prompted it, remain unclear, and one official said there is skepticism among prosecutors about whether it will lead to charges.
That official said investigators have been scrutinizing McAuliffe’s finances — including personal bank records, tax returns and public disclosure forms that date back many years — and are interested in foreign sources of income.
It may concern a $120,000 donation to McAuliffe’s gubernatorial campaign from West Legend Co., the New Jersey affiliate of Rilin Enterprises, a Chinese firm led by Wang.
Wang’s donations attracted interest because he is closely linked to the Chinese government, both as a member of the National People’s Congress and as a contractor entrusted to build China’s embassies.
Foreign nationals are prohibited under federal law from making
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rules Republicans are using to avoid a Democratic filibuster and pass their bill with a bare majority, the plan has to save as much money as the House bill did: $119 billion.
So any increased spending on Medicaid or tax credits must be offset with more revenue somewhere else. One possibility that has been discussed would be keeping the various Obamacare taxes that the House bill repeals for a little while longer. Those taxes would be collected for a few more years, bringing in more revenue, before they were finally repealed.
Some more moderate senators have said they’re receptive to that idea. But some of their senior colleagues have countered that Republicans have run for years on rolling back Obamacare’s taxes on the wealthy and health care industries. They can’t delay.
“In my view, it would be inappropriate, after spending the better part of a decade railing against Obamacare’s burdensome, job-killing taxes, for us to then turn around and say that some of them are fine so long as they’re being used to fund Republican health care proposals,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the chair of the powerful Finance Committee, said on the Senate floor this week. “It’s very simple: We need to repeal all of the Obamacare taxes.”
6) Or will they lower the Medicaid spending caps even further?
If enough Republicans insist on repealing Obamacare taxes immediately, there aren’t many other places to find savings. The other option under discussion would be to ratchet down spending caps the House bill places on Medicaid even further — which is to say, to further reduce spending on health care that helps the very poor.
The House didn’t just phase out Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion; it restructures the whole program’s financing, instituting a spending cap. The House bill is expected to cut federal funding by $834 billion over 10 years, for a program that is the nation’s single biggest insurer, covering about 70 million people.
One important feature of the Medicaid spending cap is the metric used to increase the cap over time, because health care costs are projected to keep growing. The House bill used a metric tied to the health care costs that consumers pay, with a small additional boost for the elderly and disabled people covered by the program.
Some Senate conservatives want to use a metric that would cut spending even more, perhaps one based on historical Medicaid growth. That would save more money in the bill and might eliminate the need to delay any repeal of the taxes — but it would also slash even more deeply a huge safety net program.
More moderate Senate Republicans are already nervous about the House bill’s Medicaid cuts and would likely balk at cutting even more from the program.
"I want to be sure going forward that the per capita program works," Portman told reporters.
7) How much of Obamacare’s insurance regulations will they repeal, or let states waive?
The House bill allowed states to waive two of Obamacare’s insurance rules: the prohibition on health insurers charging sick people more than healthy people and the requirement that plans cover certain essential health benefits. The CBO projects that while this would lower premiums for some younger, healthier people, it would also lead to sicker people being priced out of insurance in states that sought the waivers.
Furor over that potential harm to patients with preexisting conditions is fueling activist outrage over the bill.
Senate Republicans will have to first figure out if those waivers comply with their budget rules, which are supposed to restrict the bill to spending and revenue changes. If they do comply, then senators have to decide if they want to keep the waivers, alter them, or get rid of them entirely.
Some Senate conservatives are pushing to invert the waivers: make waiving (or rather repealing) the Obamacare regulations the default nationwide, but then allow states to opt in to the rules if they want.
But other Republicans are already uncomfortable with the House waivers, particularly the eroding of protections for people with preexisting medical conditions that Obamacare provided. They would likely object to rolling back those protections even further.
“I support having the preexisting conditions [protections] as part of the Senate bill,” Sullivan told reporters this week. “No waivers.”
8) What are they willing to do to stabilize Obamacare’s markets in the next few years?
Whatever plan Senate Republicans come up with, they will likely include a transition period of a few years, to move from Obamacare to the new GOP health care system.
In the meantime, they need to make sure Obamacare’s insurance markets are stable. The Trump administration is making that difficult, by threatening to cut off crucial Obamacare subsidies that reduce out-of-pocket costs that poorer Americans have to pay for their health care. If Trump stopped the payments — which he could do by ending an ongoing lawsuit — it could cause these markets to collapse.
Senate Republicans have discussed approving the subsidies in their bill, which would eliminate the legal issue at the heart of the lawsuit and neuter Trump’s threat. They could also ask the administration to make formal assurances that the payments would continue.
But beyond that, none of the options are very appealing to them. Health plans say Obamacare’s individual mandate helps stabilize the market, so the Senate could decide to keep the law’s penalty for not purchasing insurance for a few years.
Some senators have said they’d be willing to keep policies they don’t like for a while to ensure the market’s stability. But, as with the tax repeal issue, others say Republicans have run for years on repealing provisions like the mandate. They must do it now.
9) Should they automatically enroll uninsured people into catastrophic coverage?
One idea has been floated that wasn’t raised at all in the House negotiations: automatically enrolling uninsured people in some kind of catastrophic coverage.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), who chairs the important health committee, has suggested making auto-enrollment a condition for states that want to waive the Obamacare insurance rules, according to CNN. Thune has told reporters that he has tried to start a conversation about the concept, though the big unanswered question is how exactly it would work.
The merits, for Republicans who are interested in auto-enrollment, is it would help bring more people into the insurance pool, which could help spread costs around more and lower premiums.
It would also help cover more people — right now, many Republicans are clearly troubled by the CBO’s projection that the House bill would lead to 23 million fewer Americans having health insurance in 2026.
“We’re trying to get more covered people, who could later opt out, but obviously that changes the risk pools and hopefully brings premiums down,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the No. 2 Republican, told reporters. “I think it’s worth discussing.”
To other Republicans, this sounds like overreach — the federal government enrolling you in a health insurance plan, unless you decide to opt out. On most of these questions, moderates are the skeptical ones. Here, it’s conservatives.Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) on Monday asked a federal judge to uphold the state’s ban on providing benefits to same-sex couples employed by local or state governments because it will save the state money, Michigan Live reported.
In June 2013, Judge David Lawson issued a preliminary injunction keeping the state from enforcing the ban and wrote in the order that the plaintiffs had a good chance of winning in federal court.
In the motion, Snyder’s office argues that the ban helps the state save money and does not violate the rights of government workers, according to Michigan Live.
“Public Act 297 is a logical and cohesive part of the effort to reduce costs and to address the fiscal insecurity of local governments that has increased exponentially over the past five years,” the state’s attorneys wrote in the motion. “It is not singular and does not target same-sex couples.”
Since the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act last year, multiple federal judges have ruled against state bans on same-sex marriage.We already knew U.S. Rep Pete Sessions was vulnerable. Hillary Clinton won his district last year, causing many Democratic eyebrows to raise. Now comes this report from McClatchy, which shows that The National Republican Congressional Committee brought in more than $35 million in the first quarter of 2017—and Sessions’ seat is one that this fundraising arm of House Republicans is looking at spending money on.
Here’s a portion of the report; Stivers is the chairman of the NRCC, Steve Stivers.
“Defending incumbents is a prong of the three-part strategy Stivers laid out for approaching the midterm elections, a plan that also includes raising “a ton of money, which we’re on track to do,” and expanding the Republican map, including into House districts held by Democrats that also supported Trump last November. The committee is targeting 36 congressional districts for now.”
Stivers told the newswire that the NRCC brought in more online donations in the first quarter of this year than it did in all of 2015, a spike that he attributed to Trump. Sessions has served as the representative of the U.S. House’s 32nd District since 2003, which was created after the state added another two seats after a population spike evidenced in the 2000 Census. Between that point and 1997, he was the representative of the 5th District.
In 2010, he was the head of the NRCC—a year that Republicans gained 63 seats. He sailed to victory last year with 71.1 percent of the vote. He won in 2014 with 61.8 percent, and 68.3 percent in 2012.In the 2017 season, the Rays improved their win total from 68 wins in 2016 to 80 wins in 2017. Part of this can be contributed to the improvement of key players such as Corey Dickerson, Steven Souza Jr., Kevin Kiermaier, and Mallex Smith. The progression of these core outfielders in the upcoming seasons will be vital to the success of the team. Lets take a look at how these players, all entering or in the prime of their careers, had significantly improved seasons this past year.
At the age of 27 and entering his 5th season, Kevin Kiermaier had his best year yet in his short MLB career. In his 2017 season, Kiermaier hit.276 with 15 HRs and a.338 OBP, all career highs. This is up from his career worst 2016 season in which he hit a career low.246 and had 12 HRs. In addition to his hitting, Kiermaier has shown he is one of the best defensive CFs in the MLB and that he is indeed a five-tool player. Although injuries have derailed his last two seasons, Kiermaier is definitely capable of hitting.280 with 20+ HRs next season if he continues on this upward trend.
After tearing it up in Colorado in 2014 hitting.312 with 24 HRs, Corey Dickerson had a very disappointing start to his Rays career hitting.245 with 24 HRs. However, Dickerson had a bounce back season in 2017 raising his average to.282 and adding 27 HRs. Although his defense lacks and he best fits as a DH who can occasionally fill in to play in the outfield, Dickerson has proven that he is one of the best and most underrated hitters in the league. At the age of 28, Dickerson is capable of improving and has the potential to hit.300 with 30+ HRs next season if he too continues to improve.
Steven Souza Jr. had a power surge last season, hitting a career high 30 HRs, up from his previous career high of 17 HRs hit in 2016. Souza has improved his power every year in the major leagues so there is no reason why at the age of 28 he can't hit over 30 HRs next season. Despite hitting.247 in 2016, Souza Jr. dropped his average to.239 in 2017. If he can maintain his power and raise his average to around.250, Souza Jr. will become a household name in the MLB.
Lastly, Mallex Smith was a pleasant surprise for the Rays last season in his 2nd season in the MLB. After hitting.238 in his rookie season with the Atlanta Braves, Smith hit.270 with the Rays with a.329 OBP and 16 SB in 81 games. At the young age of 24, Smith has laid a good foundation for further success and may be a fixture in the Rays outfield for many years to come. Smith will get an opportunity to shine as he is currently slated to be a starter in the Rays stacked outfield.
With four good established outfielders who are all on an upward trend, the Rays hope they will have similar success developing their young infield core. Since their infield is so young with tons of potential, the Rays will be a very exciting offensive team mixed with established players and young, hungry prospects with something to prove.
Who do you think will improve the most next season?HOUSTON -- Rockets owner Leslie Alexander left his courtside seat during live game action to yell at referee Bill Kennedy in the final seconds of the first quarter in Houston's 105-99 series-clinching Game 5 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder on Tuesday night.
As Kennedy stood watching a play, Alexander got up from his seat next to the national television table. Rockets legend Hakeem Olajuwon tried to grab the owner's arm, but he kept walking. Alexander stood behind Kennedy for less than five seconds before walking away. Kennedy did turn his head as Alexander reversed course.
Editor's Picks Rockets win series highlighted by Beverleyâs battles with Westbrook While this series was in part about two MVP candidates, it also created another great rivalry between Patrick Beverley and Russell Westbrook.
It appeared Alexander was complaining about a call that wasn't made before he sat back down.
Alexander, who is normally mild-mannered during games, declined to discuss much about the scene, only saying at halftime he "can't talk about it" and that he was "upset, really upset."
After the incident, NBA spokesman Mike Bass issued a statement saying that "an investigation is underway."
The league also denied the media's request to speak with the game officials through a pool reporter regarding the incident.
Rockets star James Harden said he didn't see the occurrence but was amused when told about it after the game.
"He's just the coolest guy on Earth,'' Harden said. "I would have probably ran over there and tried to help him.''Where It's At
Brian Wilson explains what's behind his musical new direction to journalist Tom Nolan sometime around November, 1966.
"About a year ago I had what I consider to be a very religious experience. I took LSD, a full dose of LSD, and later, another time, I took a smaller dose. And I learned a lot of things, like patience, understanding. I can't teach you, or tell you what I learned from taking it. But I consider it a very religious experience."
If one tries to locate the two LSD trips that Brian refers to in the above quote, using his biography as a guide (as it is the sole source available for this type of thing), one finds that Brian's first LSD trip had to take place prior to April 6, 1965 (the first recording date for "California Girls"). This locates Brian's first LSD trip well over a year and a half prior to Brian's quote to Nolan and therefore not likely one of the LSD trips that influenced Brian's spiritual musical direction (note that David Leaf's SMiLE DVD Beautiful Dreamer completely misses the boat by solely referencing the first trip).
Brian's biography places his second LSD trip as having taken place months prior to the end of the year. This would likely place the second trip somewhere around October, 1965, about a year prior to Nolan's interview with Wilson. The biography notes that the acid for this trip was "Strong stuff....which I understood to be an extremely potent dose." This description jibes with the "full dose of LSD" Wilson described for Tom Nolan making Brian's second LSD trip an important SMiLE related event.
The biography describes Brian's third, and final, LSD trip as "four hours of enlightenment and spirituality" which would indeed indicate that a "smaller dose" of acid was ingested this time around. Wilson's third LSD trip, then, is another important SMiLE related event; most likely the event from which Brian Wilson "learned a lot of things, like patience, understanding."
Keeping the above in mind here's a time line of SMiLE that explains things logically. This time line shows SMiLE to be a totally consistent and focused piece of art. There are no contradictions! We start with Brian's second LSD trip.
The Out-Of-Sight!
SMiLE Time Line
Brand new Out-Of-Sight vision to help you see just Where It's At!
(Keith Badman's book THE BEACH BOYS is a gas, and helped make this thing easy.)
Months before late December 1965
Brian Wilson takes acid for the second time, an "extremely potent dose."
This LSD trip serves up a "horror movie" that begins with the sound of sirens from nearby fire trucks. Brian imagines being consumed by flames and dying. "...I was bathed in flames, dying, dying, and then the screen inside my brain went blank. I visualized myself drifting back in time. Getting smaller and younger." Brian relives arguments he'd had with his father. He continues to drift back in time. "I continued getting smaller. I was a baby. An infant. Then I was inside the womb. An egg. And then, finally, I was gone. I didn't exist."
Did Brian Wilson lose his ego during this experience? Was this ego-death? Only Brian knows for sure. But in any case it seems likely that such questions must have entered Brian's mind at this point.
When asked about the Pet Sounds song "Hang On To Your Ego" and "ego" Brian responded, "Yeah. I had taken a few drugs, and I had gotten into that kind of thing. I guess it just came up naturally."
Brian may have "gotten into that kind of thing" by reading books. Brian appears to have been interested in subjects like psychology, philosophy, religion, and the psychedelic experience. Books on Eastern philosophy and the psychedelic experience, in particular, often point to the loss of ego, or ego-death, as the key to a better way of living.
"Studying metaphysics was also crucial, but Koestler's book really was the big one for me."
~Brain Wilson
November 1, 1965
Recording "Trombone Dixie." At this session Brian also records "In My Childhood," which will eventually be re-titled "You Still Believe In Me." The title "In My Childhood" may be related to Brian "drifting back in time" to his childhood during his second LSD trip.
December 20, 1965
"Barbara Ann" single is released.
Several days before Christmas 1965
Brian suffers what he considers an acid flashback in the Pickwick Bookstore. It is a totally unexpected experience.
"I couldn't even remember why I'd gone to the store. It was spooky. I walked into the store anyway. The clerk, who knew me, said hello and mentioned that he was crazy about "Barbara Ann," which was all over the radio."
[Similarly, Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE begins with "Gee," another doo wop classic, coming over the radio.]
"Moving slowly into the aisles, I concentrated on reading the book titles and their authors....I paged through books..."
[Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE offers up the musical equivalent of this by presenting snippets of various songs by various composers.]
"I stared at the pages, tried to read, but the letters all vibrated on the pages and I couldn't make sense of anything."
[The sound effects that precede "I Wanna Be Around" on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE may be a musical depiction of this sort of thing.]
"Then I saw the books melting down the shelves, dripping like wax down the side of a candle."
[The ending of "You Are My Sunshine" may be a musical depiction of this visual.]
"The room began to spin. I was in the center of a giant spinning top. Turning, turning, turning. The moment was completely surreal."
[The opening section from "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" seems like a musical representation of this.]
"As the buzz subsided into a manageable burned-out sensation, I remembered Loren once explaining that hallucinations were comparable to Zen riddles, mysteries full of meaning. What had mine meant? I had driven to the bookstore, looking for what? Inspiration? Instead, I'd seen books melting, unable to grasp the knowledge contained in them.
If that was a riddle, I wanted to know the solution."
January 1966
Brian seeks guidance from his astrologer regarding the direction for his next album. Brian tells her "about the hallucination I'd had in the bookstore last December, presenting it as a riddle." The astrologer gives advice that resonates well with Wilson. "If I wasn't able to find inspiration for songs outside myself, as in books, then I had to look someplace else. I had to look inward. I had to write about the spirituality I felt in my heart."
We can infer from the above that Brian was looking to books for inspiration and thinking in terms of albums and riddles.
The song "In My Childhood" effectively becomes "You Still Believe In Me" at this point as Brian now knows the musical direction he'll take for his next LP, Pet Sounds.
January 7, 1966
The Beach Boys begin a tour that takes them to Japan and will end in Hawaii on January 29th.
January 10, 1966
The photos of the Beach Boys in Samurai outfits are taken at Samurai Studios in Kyoto, Japan. Some of these pictures will eventually adorn the back cover of Pet Sounds. Perhaps the Samurai's connection to Zen and its riddles played some part in the decision to use the pictures.
February 1966
Sometime during this month, Brian meets Van Dyke Parks at a party held at Terry Melcher's house.
Brian notes in his biography that Parks "...spoke in funny, poetic, often beguiling torrents." And one wonders if Wilson, already thinking in terms of albums and riddles (see January 1966), had Parks pegged as a potential lyricist for this sort of thing right from the start.
February 7, 1966
Recording sessions are held for "Let Go Of Your Ego" AKA "Hang On To Your Ego." The ego-loss idea is related to LSD but it is also a major component of Eastern philosophies. Brian also noticed the relationship between ego and humor.
"It explains that people attach their egos to their sense of humor before anything else."
~Brian Wilson on THE ACT OF CREATION
During the recording session for "Ego" Brian mentions the comedy album How To Speak Hip. The album includes the following:
'"Like in Zen...the Zen Buddhists have these koans, you know, they're riddles that you meditate on. And the whole purpose of the riddles is to hang you up, like, "We know the sound of two hands but what is the sound of one hand?" Now that's had Buddhist monks hung up for years."'
This passage would have registered with Brian given his bookstore flashback riddle experience in late December.
The title and lyrics of "Hang On To Your Ego" were eventually changed. The resulting song, "I Know There's An Answer," contains the line, "I know there's an answer. I know now, but I have to find it by myself."
Wilson will indeed find the answer to his flashback riddle in late April.
February 17, 1966
The first sessions for "Good Vibrations" are held.
April 9, 1966
Brian records "Good Vibrations" (session 5) in the same fashion as he has recorded the songs for Pet Sounds. The track is given a master number (#55949) indicating that it is a recording potentially worthy of release.
April 25, 1966
Pet Sounds promo film shot in the mountainous areas above Lake Arrowhead, California. This completes the group's work for Pet Sounds.
The Arrowhead is located above the warm mineral springs.
This is the Great Spirit's sign that there is to be peaceful location for all,
and that the valley below was given to them.
April 26 or 27, 1966
This webpage contends that Brian Wilson drops acid for the third time on the beach located in Lake Arrowhead, California. Brian contemplates the riddle and finds the answer to the riddle he was presented with in December. It is the ultimate religious experience ("...this trip was the ultimate in LSD joyrides--everything it was supposed to be, four hours of enlightenment and spirituality") from which a new "reborn" Brian Wilson emerges. Part of the enlightening spiritual experience is the conceiving of the Beach Boys' next album and single.
This statue points to the sacred hot springs. When Indians fought,
both sides would take their wounded to the healing mineral springs,
which was considered neutral ground. There was peace in the valley.
Brian's biography describes Brian dropping Al Jardine off at the William Morris Agency (the group's booking agency) the day after Brian's third LSD trip. Wilson is telling Jardine about the great trip he'd just had the previous day--trying to convince Jardine to drop acid. Since the Beach Boys started another tour on April 28th it is likely that Brian dropped Al off on either the 27th or 28th.
The biography also makes mention that it is during Brian's third LSD trip that Wilson envisions the "grand Spectorlike production" that was to eventually become "Good Vibrations." And it should be noted that weeks after this acid trip Brian returned to the studio to work on "Good Vibrations" and began to record the song using new methods and techniques. Brian would use these same new techniques (recording in sections, using various studios, recording the same section of music in different ways, seeking perfection) for SMiLE.
Some SMiLE books point to Big Sur as the likely location for much of SMiLE's inspiration. This is based upon a quote from David Anderle. It is important to note that the Lake Arrowhead region features many of the same features that Anderle attributed to Big Sur while discussing "The Elements" with CRAWDADDY! editor Paul Williams. The Lake Arrowhead region has mountains, snow, beach, pools, and water fountains. When Anderle said that Brian "ran up to Big Sur for a week" he may have, for whatever reason, gotten the location and duration of Brian's adventure wrong (many years ago a noted Brian Wilson authority told me that the Pet Sounds promo film locale was "Big Sur." In other words, when David Anderle noted Brian's trip to Big Sur, he was actually noting Brian's trip to the mountains above Lake Arrowhead).
There is a good chance that rain may have fallen at some point during this LSD trip as there are repeated references to rain in mountainous Brian Wilson songs ("Sweet Mountain,""Diamond Head") as well as visual references in Frank Holmes' SMiLE drawings. The Wordsworth poem containing the "The Child is father of the Man" line is based upon the sight of a rainbow; which also implies rain. The idea of rain, snow, the lake, pool, water fountains, and as David Anderle put it "a lot of water" implies that Brian's third LSD trip was water to his second trips' fire.
Anderle observed that "the whole thing was this fantastic amount of awareness of his surroundings" and much of SMiLE supports this statement. SMiLE honors the site of Brian Wilson's ultimate religious experience, presenting it as a riddle.
The distinctive dance pavilion.
The Lake Arrowhead region was inhabited by the Native American Indians prior to the Europeans using the area for logging. In the 1800s Chinese workers were used to blast tunnels through the San Bernardino mountains bringing the railroad to Lake Arrowhead. The Arrowhead Reservoir Company began dam construction in 1901 but work was eventually halted when a group of united landowners won a court case against the company. Today, there are still some old cabins in the Lake Arrowhead area that date back to the 1900s.
Dam project undertaken by the Arrowhead Reservoir and Power Company.
Note the "iron horse" at the bottom center of the picture.
The Lake Arrowhead influence upon SMiLE can be seen primarily in the project's earliest compositions, the sandbox songs; "Heroes And Villains," "Surf's Up," and "Cabin Essence." After Brian and Van Dyke had "canvas(ed) the town" they decided to "brush the backdrop" stretching things from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii. Their purpose remained the same; to document and share the religious experience.
The clock tower in the village.
In Jules Siegel's famous Goodbye Surfing Hello God! article Brian appears to link the beach experience to a spiritual "death and rebirth" when he speaks about the movie Seconds. Brian explains that, "the whole thing was there. I mean my whole life. Birth and death and rebirth. The whole thing. Even the beach was in it, a whole thing about the beach."
This likely places Brian's religious experience "on the beach" (the sandbox that Brian composed from was an attempt to recreate the feel of the beach in order to put the ultimate religious experience into the music) and the Out-Of-Sight! SMiLE Site places the beach at Lake Arrowhead. Ego loss, or ego-death, is very likely part of this beach experience.The shadow government led by former President Barack Obama is working overtime to delegitimize President Donald Trump and his administration. They’ve accused and even set up Trump’s people to tie his administration to “evil” Russia and now Trump’s alleging that Obama tapped his phones. There’s never been such a concerted effort in modern history, if ever, to overthrow a democratically elected U.S. president by not only the Democrats but by some Republicans aka RINOS as well. The bigger question is why are they so desperately trying to stage this coup and sabotage his presidency? Why is Obama remaining in Washington D.C. and moving his top adviser Valerie Jarrett into his new mansion? Furthermore, why is Trump’s opposition so hell bent on tying him to Russia and using the superpower as a scapegoat when they are the actual ones who have far more questionable ties to the Kremlin? As Trump’s enemies continue to tell the masses to pay no attention to that man behind the green curtain, let’s dare to do just that.
On Feb. 25, I published a column here analyzing why the mainstream media is ignoring Trump’s massive sex trafficking busts and his recent press conference addressing the problem. I concluded it’s partly because the MSM and the left don’t care about protecting children if it doesn’t enable them to destroy their political opposition. This story quickly became the no. 1 trending story on Townhall’s site. Not only did the MSM continue to ignore this issue, I received dozens of messages from readers complaining that social media forums were censoring my column. In a strange twist, one of the few media outlets that did a follow-up on my story was the Russian state-run Sputnik news outlet. Social media also censored their follow-up on my story. I’ve written several investigative pieces on how social media has censored conservative voices; however, they now appear to be censoring stories that expose child sex trafficking and pedophiles.
It makes you really wonder, why would any decent media corporation censor stories exposing child rapists, or worse, cover up for them? Well, on Feb. 23, former Congressman Cynthia McKinney – who courageously addressed sex trafficking on the house floor in 2005 – shed some light on this topic. She tweeted this in a tweet with a video of Trump’s recent press conference on sex trafficking:
Forewarning: this brings down Dems and Repubs! He needs to go straight all the way because this goes to the top!...
If McKinney’s statement is true, could the shadow government’s coup against Trump be tied to child sex trafficking? After all, both General Mike Flynn and his son were targeted after making public statements about sex trafficking. And if you look deeper, why is the shadow government using Russia as the scapegoat? When you listen to President Vladimir Putin’s speeches, like Trump, he’s a Christian, a nationalist, a staunch anti-globalist/NWO and an outspoken critic of pedophilia. During Putin’s 2016 Christmas speech, something you’ll never see in the MSM, he spoke out against the New World Order agenda to promote pedophilia. He stated that Western culture is promoting that “faith in God is equal to faith in Satan”. Putin said this about pedophilia:
“The excesses and exaggerations of political correctness in these countries indeed leads to serious consideration for the legitimization of parties that promote the propaganda of pedophilia.”
These sentiments are very similar to statements Trump has made. We also know that General Mike Flynn was taken out after addressing Hillary and Bill Clinton’s ties to sex crimes and Russia was used as a scapegoat. Now the opposition is targeting Attorney General Jeffrey Sessions, and surprise, they’re using Russia as the scapegoat, again. I could write a whole book on all of the Democrats shady dealings with Russia starting with Hillary’s uranium deal. Also, it’s been well reported these past few days that multiple Democrats had meetings with Russian diplomats and lied about them. So what’s really going on here? Could it be that McKinney’s accusation is true, and the reason the shadow government is working so hard to take down Trump is because there are people at the top tied to child sex trafficking? Are they afraid Sessions will drop the hammer on them? Furthermore, could it be that Putin and Trump see eye-to-eye on taking down the pedophile elite circles that have plagued the world so, in effect, their alliance makes them a bigger threat to the guilty involved powers that be? All Americans should be asking these questions and demanding answers because the innocent lives of children are at risk.
In my last column, I mentioned that the child sex trafficking story will eventually get so big that the MSM will have no choice but to cover it. The Russian journalist who wrote the follow-up on my sex trafficking story noted this in the Sputnik story:
“If that does occur, perhaps the more ridiculous aspects of US media coverage of the Trump presidency – his approval ratings, comedians' incisive political commentary, and especially the ludicrous 'ties to Russia' claims, will die down and take a back seat to the real issues facing their country.”
That statement from Russia’s state-run media is more reasonable and logical than anything I’ve read in the MSM in a long time – that alone should speak volumes about our corrupt MSM and their sick scheme to protect pedophiles and cover up sex trafficking.Leading DNA scientist sacked, 27 criminal convictions in doubt, WA Attorney-General says
Updated
The sacking of WA's leading DNA scientist for breaching testing protocols is an "unprecedented disaster" in the state's criminal history, Attorney-General John Quigley says.
Key points: Laurence Webb sacked last August after issuing DNA results without peer review
27 criminals including murderers may be able to challenge convictions: Attorney-General
Evidence not compromised, no incorrect results given to police or ODPP: health service
Mr Quigley said Laurence Webb, the senior forensic biologist with the state-run pathology centre Path West, had been dismissed for failing to follow established protocols.
He said Mr Webb's dismissal cast doubt on the convictions of at least 27 people, including those involved in a number of high-profile murder cases.
Mr Quigley said Mr Webb was sacked in August 2016 following an investigations by Path West, but the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) was not informed of the sacking until two days before Christmas.
Mr Quigley, who became the state's Attorney-General two weeks ago, said he was only told on Monday this week.
He described Mr Webb's sacking as a disaster that would have serious consequences.
"This is as serious as it gets in the administration of criminal justice," he said.
"This is unprecedented... it is a huge disaster for the administration of criminal justice in Western Australia.
"That this could happen and be kept from the ODPP for so long is of grave concern."
He said those convicted of murder "may be able to challenge their convictions" and 27 people convicted of a range of offences in a six-year period from 2008 to 2014 — cases that Mr Webb worked on — had been informed of the situation.
"There are many questions to be asked about this and every one of the questions is a serious question with very serious consequences for Path West and some of its officers," Mr Quigley said.
"Perhaps that Path West or somebody else can recover the situation by rerunning all the samples, I don't know.
"But in matters that have already gone before the courts, convicted people may say 'we were denied the opportunity to cross examine the DNA expert who gave evidence at our trial because we did not know of this misconduct'."
System, culture to blame, lawyer says
Lawyers have also expressed their concern.
Former president of the Criminal Lawyers Association Anthony Eyers said he was shocked by the lack of oversight on the laboratory responsible for testing DNA evidence and on Mr Webb.
"It's not only a reflection on him, it's a reflection of course on the culture in which he worked and the lack of oversight," he said.
"There really should have been a system is place which would have prevented this happening and someone effectively going rogue without supervision and without others knowing what was happening."
Mr Eyers said Mr Webb's sacking would mean a review of all cases that relied heavily on DNA evidence.
"DNA evidence can be crucial and essential in convincing a jury of the guilt of an accused person, so it needs very urgent examination," he said.
'No incorrect results': health service
A North Metropolitan Health Service (NMHS) spokesperson said Path West had launched a thorough investigation and told the ODPP as soon as it found out about an alleged breach of protocol "in relation to individual results being communicated verbally and by email without peer review".
"Commencing in 2015, the investigation included the review of selected cases over a 15-year period where a court report had been provided by the scientist," the NMHS spokesman said in a statement.
"The review revealed the issuance of non-peer reviewed verbal or emailed individual results did not compromise the validity of the final court report that is used as evidence, thereby no incorrect results were ever communicated to the Police or the ODPP.
"If at any stage of the review and investigation process errors were found, PathWest would have immediately advised the relevant authorities including ODPP etc.
"Any perceived delay in written communication between NMHS and other authorities in relation to the disciplinary matter was due to the requirement to maintain the integrity of a complex investigation."
Topics: law-crime-and-justice, courts-and-trials, dna-testing, wa
First postedDiablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition is being developed for Xbox One alongside the previously announced PlayStation 4 version, Blizzard has told VideoGamer.com, but it can't yet confirm whether the game will ever see a release on Microsoft
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play in Gambit. I was really excited to be able to prove myself on the big stage.
Akihito: What top lane champion provides the most pressure for the enemy team?
Cabochard: I guess Hecarim is the hardest to handle at the moment. On top of the usual Teleport plays, there's the Homeguard buff, which is really powerful.Facebook Billions of people spend a lot of time living their lives on Facebook's social network. Now Facebook wants to try its hand at creating a community in the real world.
The internet giant wants to build housing, retail stores, a hotel and more at its corporate headquarters — in short, Facebook wants to build its own town.
Facebook unveiled plans on Thursday for the massive new construction project at its Menlo Park, California corporate campus, which is part of Facebook's plans to expand its home base. The 56-acre site, which Facebook bought in 2015 for about $400 million, is located directly across the street from Facebook's headquarters. It will offer 1.6 million square feet of housing, or 1,500 units.
In a blog post announcing the plans, Facebook described the future development as a "mixed-use village" that will provide residents, many of which will be Facebook employees, with housing, transportation services and other amenities.
"We plan to build 125,000 square feet of new retail space, including a grocery store, pharmacy and additional community-facing retail," Facebook said.
Here's a picture that Facebook provided showing what it might be like to live in Facebook-ville.
Facebook
The new development will also include a hotel, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
It will take roughly a decade to build, according to a person familiar with the plans. The initial phase of the project, which will include the housing and grocery store, will be wrapped up in the first half of 2021. The subsequent phases will be completed every two years, according to a blog post on Facebook's website.
Facebook While most of the housing will likely go to Facebook employees, Facebook is opening up the housing to the community at large. The housing will be a mix of market rate and affordable housing units, with 225 units, or 15%, priced below market rate.
"Part of our vision is to create a neighborhood center that provides long-needed community services," Facebook wrote.
One benefit of having employees live so close to campus is a reduction in the amount of traffic in the area, according to the blog post.
While Facebook has presented the plans to the City of Menlo Park, they have not yet been approved. The company expects the approval process to take about two years.
Here's a video that Facebook created about its plans:History has been made. A landmark for feminist achievement around the world. Trump is actively sabotaging his own campaign, and at long last the world’s highest political office will in all probability be held by a woman. A woman who has dedicated her entire political life to propping up the sickest aspects of masculine dominance in our culture — but, still, technically a woman!
That would be a great new slogan for her campaign, come to think of it. “Hillary: Technically a Woman!”
Move over, Shepard Fairey.
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Some people find the word “patriarchy” confusing and challenging, as it pertains to feminism, but it’s a useful and accurate term that describes the lingering effects of the very minimal impact that women were permitted to have upon the way human civilization was built. When humans around the world began engaging in farming and ceased their nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles some eight thousand years ago, women were taken out of their tribal communal roles and broken up into isolated family units using the newly-invented institution of marriage, where they had much less say in how society moved and developed. Women were silenced and commodified while male leaders invented things like war, slavery, ecocide, and socioeconomic hierarchy.
Women are now slowly gaining more power and influence in the systems of human society, but since the entire thing was designed over the millennia overwhelmingly by men for the purpose of serving men, women still struggle to find a comfortable place within it.
Not Hillary Clinton, though. She’s thrived in it. Immersed herself in it. Mastered it. Arisen to the very top of it.
As a United States Senator, and then as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has consistently pushed for increased military aggression, seemingly at every possible opportunity. Her support (bought by George W. Bush in exchange for $20 billion to rebuild New York) of the evil and unforgivable Iraq invasion alone helped bring the lives of over a million Iraqis to a violent, grizzly end. The time-honored patriarchal tradition of warfare has enjoyed an abundance of support through Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Clinton’s consistent neoliberal track record has helped widen the gap between the rich and the poor and push America further into oligarchism. She supported the bank bailouts, she gave paid speeches to Goldman Sachs for massive amounts of money while continuing to refuse to release the transcripts, she picked a running mate who tried to push for even fewer restrictions for Wall Street after being openly instructed by Wall Street donors to pick a running mate who’s friendly to their interests, her State Department pressured Haiti to slash its minimum wage from 61 cents an hour to 31 cents an hour, and she was even a director at the notorious American wage slavery institution Wal-Mart for six years. Oligarchy, and its twin brother wage slavery, are both foundational building blocks of the patriarchy.
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Rape culture is yet another aspect of toxic masculinity that Hillary Clinton has actively supported in her political life. As First Lady of Arkansas and then First Lady of the United States, Hillary played a frontal role in the vicious smear campaign against the dozens of women who accused her husband Bill of rape, sexual harassment, and other forms of sexual misconduct. When Connie Hamzy accused him of misconduct at the beginning of his presidential run, Hillary told administration aide George Stephanopoulos “We need to destroy her story.” She referred to known Clinton victim Monica Lewinsky as a “narcissistic loony toon” and was called “paramount” in covering up the rape accusations of Juanita Broaddrick.
A female leader means nothing to feminist interests if that leader is just as invested in strengthening the patriarchy as the establishment male leaders. We’ve all seen the Margaret Thatchers and Queen Victorias come and go without making a dent in the illnesses that have come to infect our species as a result of a lack of feminine influence. A woman who’s supported fracking and receives millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry isn’t going to save our planet from the unhealthy relationship our male-dominated society has developed with our ecosystem, and a woman who’s consistently pushed for military violence and called it a business opportunity isn’t going to help reel in the violence inherent in the unhealthy aspects of masculine culture.
Women don’t benefit from seeing a woman elevated to the top as a reward for her faithful service to the patriarchy. Women benefit from a healthier society.
[Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images]Voyages to Mars and life in space seem pretty futuristic until you realize that most experts in the field think it will happen in our lifetimes. So, if something as crazy as a trip to Mars is happening soon, what happens way after that? That’s what Year Million, a six-part documentary-drama series from National Geographic, is set to explore. And, according to executive producer Dave O’Connor, “the future gets pretty weird, pretty fast.”
The show, which premieres on Monday, explores a variety of world-changing innovations; imagining a distant future while also showing how far along these nascent technologies are in the present day (some are a lot more advanced already than you might expect). Later episodes consider the prospect of immortality, uploading consciousness to a virtual cloud, and exploring different universes, but the premiere focuses on artificial intelligence — and it kicks off with a death.
Weaved throughout the more traditional documentary segments is a narrative drama focusing on one family as they navigate a future that’s radically different from our current reality. In the premiere, a car crash claims the life of the couple’s only daughter, Jess. But, they copy her consciousness and revive her — a glowing-eyed, hyper-competent, web-enabled version of her — as an A.I. Though Year Million ultimately imagines a happy world where this A.I. gains rights, and her father comes to terms with his new artificial family, it’s a pretty unsettling story. It’s like an episode of Black Mirror in miniature, and that’s no accident.
“We tried to tap into the zeitgeist of some of the coolest and most provocative science fiction that’s out today, and Black Mirror is definitely among them,” O’Connor tells Inverse. “Westworld. Everything from Arrival to The Martian, really.”
Though aspects of the series also have strong Matrix vibes (in no small part because it’s narrated by Morpheus himself, Laurence Fishburne), the similarities with the sci-fi show Black Mirror are especially overt. Charlie Brooker’s anthology series — a Twilight Zone for the modern age — uses exaggerated, futuristic versions of technology to create dystopic horror stories. Year Million does the same (albeit with much less dramatic panache), but it also exists to show viewers that, actually, all these potentially terrifying developments aren’t nearly so far-fetched. Many are already well in the works.
A.I. Jess in 'Year Million'
Some of these developments are amazing opportunities for mankind, while others could spell out the species’ doom. Conveying both of these possibilities, especially when you have to make several big (but educated) guesses in order to get there, can be a tough line to walk, and Year Million isn’t perfect. O’Connor says he wanted the show to “let these technologies and ideas speak for themselves,” but the neutrality is slightly undercut when Fishburne speaks in grave tones of the prospect of an A.I. takeover.
It’s a forgivable offense, though, because Year Million lays out a couple of different possible futures, and some absolutely have the potential to be utterly terrifying and disastrous. It depends on what happens — and how you look at it. The same prediction (like that we’ll upload ourselves to a great collective consciousness) can be thrilling to one viewer and horrifying to another.
These varying viewpoints are reflected by Year Million’s experts — who are also quite different themselves. In addition to the expected PhDs and theoretical physicists, forward-minded comedians, sci-fi writers, and comic book creators appear as talking heads. It’s yet another way that pop culture informs the show — and for good reason. As Charles Soule, a prolific writer who has written Star Wars, Iron Man, and Superman comics notes, science fiction is often society’s best bet at predicting the fantastic futures that Year Million deals with.
“Fiction reflects reality and reality reflects fiction. And, reality sometimes outpaces fiction,” Soule tells Inverse. “The stuff we think is going to be years and years away pops up sooner than we think.”
“Most superhero comic writers are thinking about the future all the time,” he continues. “All of these hypothetical scenarios that we look at in the future are really just reflections of our own society, and the things we’re afraid of and the things we might want to happen.”
Soule says he was somewhat surprised to find himself among the “naysayers” on Year Million, as he was a little dubious about society’s ability to handle why it’s wrought. Still, his main takeaway from the show is “not to be afraid of science,” which has been with mankind since our distance ancestors discovered fire.
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“The idea that science is somehow separate from humanity, or something to be guarded or watched or feared in any way, is a mistake,” he says.
O’Connor has a similar sentiment but views Year Million almost as a call to action, in addition to being informative and entertaining. The show isn’t meant to be “overly bleak or overly optimistic, but to say, ‘Look, these things are happening now,’” he says. “We’re starting to work on these technologies now. And there are these moments that are coming in the very near term where it’s going to be too late for us, as a society, to have conversations about these things.”
“We can’t let the future be determined just by the people who are creating technology,” he says.
Year Million premieres on the National Geographic Channel at 9 p.m. Eastern on May 15.It wouldn’t be a Republican primary without charges of foul play levelled at Ted Cruz. And New York is no exception.
A few hours before polls closed in the Empire State, John Kasich’s strategist John Weaver tweeted that the Texan was responsible for misleading robocalls—which falsely claimed that New York’s Democratic governor had endorsed Kasich.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a major bugbear for conservatives, in large part because of his participation in efforts to increase restrictions on guns. A Cuomo endorsement would likely be a kiss of death for a Republican presidential candidate, even one as moderate as Kasich.
Alice Stewart, a spokesperson for Cruz’s campaign, denied any dirty trickery.
“We didn’t make any such calls,” she emailed The Daily Beast.
The Kasich campaign did not provide audio of any robocalls saying Cuomo had endorsed their guy.
Still, Weaver didn’t dial back his charge that Cruz had used unethical campaign practices.
“It was what we come to expect from him & them. Push polling, lying robo calls, etc at every turn. But it is a long road without a turn Ted,” he tweeted.
“There isn’t a lie too low to spread by Cruz and crew,” he added.
Allegations of sabotage have dogged the Texas senator throughout the campaign cycle. In February, Cruz publicly apologized to then-candidate Ben Carson after his backers spread a false rumor right before the Iowa caucuses that Carson was on the verge of leaving the race. And Marco Rubio said the Cruz crew pushed baseless allegations in the lead-up to the Hawaii primary that he was about to can his campaign.
Eagle Forum leader Ed Martin also recently charged that Cruz’s campaign tried to sow discontent in his organization as revenge for Phyllis Schlafly’s endorsement of Donald Trump—prompting The New Yorker to dedicate an entire piece to it, dubbed “Ted Cruz and the Art of the Dirty Trick.”• Program expanded to take in vast, unknown depths • Data will add to awareness of climate change says firm
Since Google Earth launched in 2006 millions of people have used its virtual globe to "travel" around the planet without leaving home, climbing a digital version of Mount Everest and even flying into space thanks to the program.
Now the internet company plans to take on one of the last bastions of the unknown: the depths of the ocean.
At a high-profile event in San Francisco, Google is expected to announce the addition of vast amounts of underwater imagery and seabed maps to the Google Earth project.
The move will take Google Earth closer to its aim of creating a complete digital representation of the planet.
The existing site, to which an estimated 400 million people have had access, already includes three-dimensional representations of large cities around the world and includes images from street-level and aerial photography covering thousands of miles across Britain and elsewhere.
The new additions to the program are expected to include views of the ocean, and portions of the seabed. They will also provide detailed environmental data that will enhance information about the effect of climate change on the world's seas and oceans.
To showcase the transformation, the site's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, will introduce dignitaries including the former US vice president and environmental campaigner Al Gore, and the veteran oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who is an "explorer-in-residence" at National Geographic.
Although, so far, there has been only limited data collected about the sea floor, with just 10% of the habitat mapped at any useful scale for science, bathymetry experts said that the public's ability to "interact" with the oceans and gain better understanding, as well as see the evidence of global warming, could have quite an impact on perceptions.
"This is the part that's really exciting, for me: people will understand that we know almost nothing about a lot of these places, and Google will do it for us," said David Sandwell, professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego. "There are big voids everywhere, but there are a few little spots where we know quite a lot."
The inclusion of environmental information forms the latest part of the company's plan to offer the public more data about climate change. In 2007 Google convened a high-level meeting of experts to help it develop sources of submarine information and environmental data. It seems likely that the company will later unveil partnerships with institutions in Europe and the US as part of the project.
"It's a really useful tool for scientists, to [be able to] share data on the oceans," said Sandwell. "For me, it's the detailed global tectonic structure of the sea floor … if you're a physical oceanographer, the important thing is that the currents and tides are affected by things that stick up from the sea floor."
The development has a less serious side, however. It is also believed people using the site will get the chance to take a virtual dip at some of the world's most famous diving spots, including at sites in the Bahamas, the Red Sea and the Great Barrier Reef.
Despite the project's long gestation, speculation about the precise details has grown since Google announced it would be holding the event. Many observers said they were hoping for something spectacular. "I don't think this announcement will be confined to just Google Ocean," wrote Frank Taylor, who catalogues the development of Google Earth at gearthblog.com. "When Google makes an announcement like this, they always try to push the envelope on multiple fronts. And, with Al Gore headlining the event, I'm sure we're going to get some data about the environment."
The new system could potentially be combined with another program to let people "virtually" move about anywhere in the world.
At the Macworld Expo in January, Google engineers unveiled a program called EarthSurfer, which combined Google Earth with Nintendo's Wii Fit to create an exercise game that allows players movement "around the landscape" by way of balancing on a board. "You control it by leaning forward to go forward, and back to go back," said David Oster, the EarthSurfer programmer on the project at the time. "It's great stuff."
• This article was amended on Tuesday 3 February 2009. David Sandwell is professor at the University of California, San Diego, not the University of San Diego and Google Earth is a program rather than a website. This has been corrected.President Trump speaks on the phone with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 28. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
President Trump has finally admitted to his overarching theory about which polls are right and which ones are wrong. And it's very simple:
Polls that are bad for Trump = wrong
This isn't much of a surprise; Trump has been bashing any poll that is bad for him and praising any poll that is good for him — no matter how dubious the quality — for as long as he's been a politician. But few politicians would cop to this approach so directly. And yet, here's Trump's Monday morning tweet:
Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2017
"Any negative polls are fake news." This is Trump signaling to his supporters that they are to dismiss any bad news about him. Never mind the methodology of a given poll or how Trump is actually doing as president; if something is negative, it has to be wrong.
The Post's Marc Fisher explores how President Trump's concerns with numbers and ratings have shaped his career. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
This is at once a completely Trump worldview and also one that would get any student taking Statistics 101 a failing grade. Trump insists in his next tweet that he relies on the “accumulation of data” to make his decisions, but in this tweet, he is expressing contempt for any data that don't fit his preconceived notions or desires.
Poll-doubterism is an increasingly popular practice in this country, given how wrong some polls were in the 2016 election. The media largely overshot those polls' predictive qualities when it said (and we're over-generalizing “the media” here, yes) that Trump wouldn't win. And so Trump is tilling fertile soil here.
But his approach just has no basis in logic. It's almost alogical, rather than illogical. It's also allowing for Trump to do basically anything and claim a vast conspiracy against him by pollsters when they show people don't like it. Unemployment could skyrocket and Trump could start World War III by accident, and the polls showing him unpopular would just be “fake news.” There is no limit to the power Trump is attempting to assert when it comes to leading his base.
It's worth noting here that these same national polls that he's bashing were only about 1 point off in 2016 — on average — and even if they're 5 or 15 points off today, he was still the most unpopular president-elect in modern history. It's just not close.
Those very real statistics aside, Trump is throwing this blanket policy over all polling for a clear reason: Because basically every poll shows him and his policies treading water.
His average approval rating is lower than his disapproval rating, according to the RealClearPolitics average.
A new CNN poll showed 53 percent disapproved of his travel ban executive order, vs. 47 percent who approved. A CBS News poll showed Americans disapprove of it 51-45. And Gallup showed 55-42 against.
The Gallup poll showed Americans opposed his border wall, 60-38.
Gallup also showed they oppose halting the Syrian refugee program, 58-36.
The CBS poll showed people believed banning refugees went against the founding principles of the United States, 57-35.
A Quinnipiac poll last week showed people thought Trump would be a worse president than Barack Obama, 50-37.
Polls have shown 7 in 10 would like more information on Trump's finances and his tax returns.
The total picture is of a president who simply isn't doing all that well in the eyes of the American people — to varying degrees. On this point, the polls are almost completely united.
And that's completely realistic, given Trump is doing very divisive and controversial things. It's no surprise that the American people would be split on his ideas given the tenor of his policies and the tone he takes with his political opponents. If Trump were trying hard to make everyone love him, it would be one thing. He's not.
The question is whether this is what Trump truly believes or whether it's a cynical political ploy to keep his base intact in the face of troubled waters ahead. We'll leave it to others to decide which they'd prefer.The chaos of Reddit’s Ask Me Anythings doesn’t lend itself to the most thoughtful answers. They’re short, plagued by trolls, and people who care about the topic or person might not know an AMA is happening until it’s over.
So today, Quora is bringing an air of civility to the crowdsourced question hour with the launch of “Writing Sessions”. They’ll give Quora a sense of urgency and a new way to prompt questions without sacrificing the startup’s refined, intellectual feel. They might also draw the fan bases of celebrities to a service that’s notoriously secretive about how many active users it has.
QuorMA
Here’s how Writing Sessions work. The Q&A app will announce a session with a thought leader and send a notification to all its users who follow related topics. They’ll have a day or two to submit questions, which are then upvoted (followed) and downvoted by the community, but also moderated to weed out jokes, personal attacks, and other trolling. That’s quite different from Reddit, where wild and wooly questions only pour in during the AMA hour.
Meanwhile, the Writing Session author will be able to watch and prepare longer, more deliberate answers. Those, plus any off-the-cuff answers, will be published during the hour-long Writing Session. Then the answers will be baked into Quora’s question pages where they can live on as evergreen content.
First up will be U.S. Senator and foreign policy expert Tim Kaine, and future Writing Sessions will feature Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, investor Vinod Khosla, and Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards.
For example, anyone who follows Quora’s topics for Facebook, social networking, Lean In, or feminism might be alerted to submit questions for Sandberg’s session. If you want a feel for the what they’re like, Quora’s product lead Abhinav Sharma is now accepting questions for a preview Writing Session this afternoon.
Combining Urgency And Evergreen
The controlled nature of Quora’s version of AMA could attract a more distinguished caliber of author. President Barack Obama himself recently wrote answers to three questions about the Iran nuclear deal, and received a combined 1.5 million views. In contrast, a problematically troll-filled AMA with Jesse Jackson led Reddit to fire its AMA coordinator, sparking a rebellion by its users.
Quora’s kept very quiet over the past year, keeping heads down as it tries to find new ways to stay relevant. Its thoughtful but long-winded knowledge base feels a bit mismatched for the more jaunty, spontaneous behavior typical on mobile. And its blogging platform, launched in 2013, has been largely overshadowed by Medium.
Luckily, a massive $80 million Series C led by Tiger Global last year gave it the cash to focus on quality over money, and stay independent. The company insists that it can give a tall soapbox to industry experts who might not have a blog or Twitter audience worthy of their insights. That’s because it can match authors to the big followings of many of its million-plus topics.
While it refused to provide user growth stats, the startup did reveal that more than 1000 writers get over 1 million views a year, which it says is triple the number of writers with that reach last year. By getting big voices to activate their constituencies on Quora through Writing Sessions, the company hopes that writership and viewership will grow.
Quora’s biggest problem is that people just don’t know what to ask. It’s tough to rack one’s brain in search of curiosity with no prompt. By offering humans and their expertise as inspiration, Quora could squeeze questions out of users like never before. Afterall, since the discourses of the Greek philosophers, the production of knowledge has always been communal.Crowdfunding coming to Australian real estate market
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Crowdfunding is making its way into Australia's property sector, opening up the market to younger investors and those with less cash to invest.
Crowdsourcing money for real estate is a new direction for what has been dubbed the "sharing economy", where the power of many small investors come together to fund big developments.
Uber has used the same concept to shake up the taxi industry, while Airbnb has exploited it to overhaul the hotel sector.
Now, Singaporean-based crowdfunding platform CoAssets is eyeing Australian real estate as the next big thing.
Some of the people who are looking to crowd-fund for their homes, this could be a way for them to do it. CoAssets chief executive Getty Goh
CoAssets chief executive Getty Goh said he had been meeting with companies in Perth to increase the company's presence in Australia, to give smaller and younger investors a chance to buy into real estate.
"We are really a platform that allows people to put their property deals on the site and reach out to funders," he said.
"Businesses that have a lot of potential can put themselves on the site and allow funders to put in for as little as $1,000."
CoAssets only offers to crowdsource between $1 and $5 million for each project.
So far, it has raised $39 million for various developments around the globe, including one in Sydney.
It raised the funds needed for that project within an hour, with investors mostly based in Singapore, each chipping in between $100,000 and $350,000 towards the $1.5 million needed.
At the moment the company cannot reach out to Australian retail investors for funding because it is still waiting an Australian Financial Services (AFS) licence.
"We will get the licence sometime next year, and we believe with that licence it will open up new opportunities," Mr Goh said.
"At the juncture, yes, some of the people who are looking to crowd-fund for their homes, this could be a way for them to do it."
Younger investors want to cut out'middleman' banks
Accounting firm BDO chairman Sherif Andrawes said he believed this opened up real estate investment to the under-30s.
"Crowdfunding provides access to a whole new group of investors, this is not the mum and dad investors that the Government likes to talk about, but rather the under 30s," he said.
The smaller investor may be able to get a bigger bang for their buck than they do at the moment with the banks. Property Council of WA executive director Joe Lenzo
"The under-30s have already been disrupted, they are used to organising their life on their smart phone or tablet.
"To them there shouldn't be a jarring change to their interaction with the world when it comes to investing money, most have never even been into a bank... they are used to taking control and find it unusual to need to rely on a middleman."
The Turnbull Government is working on legislation to allow Australian businesses to crowdsource debt and equity funding.
Property Council of WA executive director Joe Lenzo said that would introduce tight regulations to closely scrutinise companies which wanted to crowdsource.
"It will be there, in addition to the more traditional funding that we are used to, so it's positive in the fact it could stimulate more transactions and help the economy, which is a good thing," he said.
"It is a positive way, where the smaller investor may be able to get a bigger bang for their buck than they do at the moment with the banks.
"But, it's important they are legitimate and also that they meet the requirements that we have in this country, and that is pretty strong and solid investment laws."
Mr Andrawes agreed.
"One of the key things with crowdfunding for the platforms, I believe, is to be very selective in which companies they put up," he said.
"I think we will probably see ratios of one in 10, one in 50 companies who actually apply, getting up."
While it could steer investment away from banks, Mr Andrawes does not think it will be long before they too jump onboard.
"I think banks are partly nervous, but I think they'll join in and before too long," he said.
"If we look forward five years from now, a lot of these crowdfunding [ventures] will be owned by banks."
Topics: housing-industry, information-and-communication, internet-culture, australiaAs of January 3rd, the EPA banned about 80% of the wood-burning stoves and fireplace inserts in the United States. Stoves which are used to heat 12% of the homes in America and are especially needed in outlying rural areas. Fireplaces are also being looked at.
The EPA is attempting to reduce particle pollution with new rules. Instead of limiting fine airborne particulate emissions to 15 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3) of air, the change will impose a maximum 12 μg/m3 limit. That is equivalent to a person smoking 3 to 4 cigarettes in a small confined space.
The draconian EPA regulations will be spread out, one will take place in March and the next in five to eight years. Stoves currently in use will not be affected but obviously, getting them repaired will become more and more difficult.
They haven’t yet gone after outdoor appliances or home heating appliances, but can they be far behind? Will people be able to heat their homes in a future controlled by extreme environmentalists?
Even fireplaces are being looked at though not included yet. They are part of the future research.
Read more at The Independent Sentinel. By Sara Noble.
Photo credit: substack (Creative Commons)The term "United States", when used in the geographical sense, is the contiguous United States, the state of Alaska, the island state of Hawaii, the five insular territories of Puerto Rico, Northern Mariana Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa, and minor outlying possessions.[1] The United States shares land borders with Canada and Mexico and maritime borders with Russia, Cuba, and the Bahamas in addition to Canada and Mexico. The northern border of the United States with Canada is the world's longest bi-national land border.
Area [ edit ]
From 1989 through 1996, the total area of the US was listed as 9,372,610 km2 (3,618,780 sq mi) (land + inland water only). The listed total area changed to 9,629,091 km2 (3,717,813 sq mi) in 1997 (Great Lakes area and coastal waters added), to 9,631,418 km2 (3,718,711 sq mi) in 2004, to 9,631,420 km2 (3,718,710 sq mi) in 2006, and to 9,826,630 km2 (3,794,080 sq mi) in 2007 (territorial waters added). Currently, the CIA World Factbook gives 9,826,675 km2 (3,794,100 sq mi),[2] the United Nations Statistics Division gives 9,629,091 km2 (3,717,813 sq mi),[3] and the Encyclopædia Britannica gives 9,522,055 km2 (3,676,486 sq mi)(Great Lakes area included but not coastal waters).[4] These sources consider only the 50 states and the Federal District, and exclude overseas territories.
By total area (water as well as land), the United States is either slightly larger or smaller than the People's Republic of China, making it the world's third or fourth largest country. China and the United States are smaller than Russia and Canada in total area, but are larger than Brazil. By land area only (exclusive of waters), the United States is the world's third largest country, after Russia and China, with Canada in fourth. Whether the US or China is the third largest country by total area depends on two factors: (1) The validity of China's claim on Aksai Chin and Trans-Karakoram Tract. Both these territories are also claimed by India, so are not counted; and (2) How US calculates its own surface area. Since the initial publishing of the World Factbook, the CIA has updated the total area of United States a number of times.[5]
General characteristics [ edit ]
A satellite composite image of the state of Hawaii Volcanoes prevail on the Big Island. The islands have rugged coastlines, sandy beaches and a tropical environment, although temperatures and humidity tend to be less extreme because of near-constant trade winds from the east.
The United States shares land borders with Canada (to the north) and Mexico (to the south), and a territorial water border with Russia in the northwest, and two territorial water borders in the southeast between Florida and Cuba, and Florida and the Bahamas. The contiguous forty-eight states are otherwise bounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west, the Atlantic Ocean on the east, and the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast. Alaska borders the Pacific Ocean to the south and southwest, the Bering Strait to the west, and the Arctic Ocean to the north, while Hawaii lies far to the southwest of the mainland in the Pacific Ocean.
Forty-eight of the states are in the single region between Canada and Mexico; this group is referred to, with varying precision and formality, as the continental or contiguous United States, and as the Lower 48. Alaska, which is not included in the term contiguous United States, is at the northwestern end of North America, separated from the Lower 48 by Canada.
The capital city, Washington, District of Columbia, is a federal district located on land donated by the state of Maryland. (Virginia had also donated land, but it was returned in 1849.) The United States also has overseas territories with varying levels of independence and organization: in the Caribbean the territories of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and in the Pacific the inhabited territories of Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, along with a number of uninhabited island territories. Some of the territories acquired were a part of United States imperialism, or to gain access to the east.
Physiographic divisions [ edit ]
The eastern United States has a varied topography. A broad, flat coastal plain lines the Atlantic and Gulf shores from the Texas-Mexico border to New York City, and includes the Florida peninsula, which is home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. This broad coastal plain and barrier islands make up the widest and longest beaches in the United States, much of it composed of soft, white sands. The Florida Keys are a string of coral islands that reach the southernmost city on the United States mainland (Key West). Areas further inland feature rolling hills, mountains, and a diverse collection of temperate and subtropical moist and wet forests. Parts of interior Florida and South Carolina are also home to sand-hill communities. The Appalachian Mountains form a line of low mountains separating the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin. New England features rocky seacoasts and rugged mountains with peaks up to 6200 feet and valleys dotted with rivers and streams. Offshore Islands dot the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
The five Great Lakes are located in the north-central portion of the country, four of them forming part of the border with Canada, only Lake Michigan situated entirely within United States. The southeast United States, generally stretching from the Ohio River on south, includes a variety of warm temperate and subtropical moist and wet forests, as well as warm temperate and subtropical dry forests nearer the Great Plains in the west of the region. West of the Appalachians lies the lush Mississippi River basin and two large eastern tributaries, the Ohio River and the Tennessee River. The Ohio and Tennessee Valleys and the Midwest consist largely of rolling hills, interior highlands and small mountains, jungly marsh and swampland near the Ohio River, and productive farmland, stretching south to the Gulf Coast. The Midwest also has a vast amount of cave systems.
The Great Plains lie west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains. A large portion of the country's agricultural products are grown in the Great Plains. Before their general conversion to farmland, the Great Plains were noted for their extensive grasslands, from tallgrass prairie in the
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ish, represents the result of a JavaScript 32-bit floating-point operations that must be coerced back to a 32-bit floating-point value with an explicit fround coercion. Validation requires all floatish values to be immediately passed to an operator or standard library that performs the appropriate coercion or else dropped via an expression statement. This way, each 32-bit floating-point operation can be compiled directly to machine operations.
2.1.12 extern
extern
2.2 Global Types
Variables and functions defined at the top-level scope of an asm.js module can have additional types beyond the value types. These include:
value types τ;
ArrayBufferView types IntnArray, UintnArray, and FloatnArray ;
types,, and ; function types ((σ, …) → τ) ∧ … ∧ ((σ′, …) → τ′);
variadic function types ((σ, σ … ) → τ) ∧ … ∧ ((σ′, σ′ … ) → τ′);
) → τ) ∧ … ∧ ((σ′, σ′ ) → τ′); function table types ((σ, …) → τ)[n];
the special type fround of Math.fround ; and
of ; and the FFI function type Function.
The "∧" notation for function types serves to represent overloaded functions and operators. For example, the Math.abs function is overloaded to accept either integers or floating-point numbers, and returns a different type in each case. Similarly, many of the operators have overloaded types.
The meta-variable γ is used to stand for global types.
3 Environments
Validating an asm.js module depends on tracking contextual information about the set of definitions and variables in scope. This section defines the environments used by the validation logic.
3.1 Global Environment
An asm.js module is validated in the context of a global environment. The global environment maps each global variable to its type as well as indicating whether the variable is mutable:
{ x : mut imm γ, … }
The meta-variable Δ is used to stand for a global environment.
3.2 Variable Environment
In addition to the global environment, each function body in an asm.js module is validated in the context of a variable environment. The variable environment maps each function parameter and local variable to its value type:
{ x : τ, … }
The meta-variable Γ is used to stand for a variable environment.
3.3 Environment Lookup
Looking up a variable's type
Lookup(Δ, Γ, x)
is defined by:
τ if x : τ occurs in Γ;
γ if x does not occur in Γ and x : mut γ or x : imm γ occurs in Δ
If x does not occur in either environment then the Lookup function has no result.
4 Syntax
Validation of an asm.js module is specified by reference to the ECMAScript grammar, but conceptually operates at the level of abstract syntax. In particular, an asm.js validator must obey the following rules:
Empty statements ( ; ) are always ignored, whether in the top level of a module or inside an asm.js function body.
) are always ignored, whether in the top level of a module or inside an asm.js function body. No variables bound anywhere in an asm.js module (whether in the module function parameter list, global variable declarations, asm.js function names, asm.js function parameters, or local variable declarations) may have the name eval or arguments.
or. Where it would otherwise parse equivalently in JavaScript, parentheses are meaningless. Even where the specification matches on specific productions of Expression such as literals, the source may contain extra meaningless parentheses without affecting validation.
Automatic semicolon insertion is respected. An asm.js source file may omit semicolons wherever JavaScript allows them to be omitted.
These rules are otherwise left implicit in the rest of the specification.
5 Annotations
All variables in asm.js are explicitly annotated with type information so that their type can be statically enforced by validation.
5.1 Parameter Type Annotations
Every parameter in an asm.js function is provided with an explicit type annotation in the form of a coercion. This coercion serves two purposes: the first is to make the parameter type statically apparent for validation; the second is to ensure that if the function is exported, the arguments dynamically provided by external JavaScript callers are coerced to the expected type. For example, a bitwise OR coercion annotates a parameter as having type int :
function add1(x) { x = x|0; // x : int return (x+1)|0; }
In an AOT implementation, the body of the function can be implemented fully optimized, and the function can be given two entry points: an internal entry point for asm.js callers, which are statically known to provide the proper type, and an external dynamic entry point for JavaScript callers, which must perform the full coercions (which might involve arbitrary JavaScript computation, e.g., via implicit calls to valueOf ).
There are three recognized parameter type annotations:
x:Identifier = x:Identifier |0;
x:Identifier = + x:Identifier ;
x:Identifier = f:Identifier ( x:Identifier );
The first form annotates a parameter as type int, the second as type double, and the third as type float. In the latter case, Lookup(Δ, Γ, f) must be fround.
5.2 Return Type Annotations
An asm.js function's formal return type is determined by the last statement in the function body, which for non- void functions is required to be a ReturnStatement. This distinguished return statement may take one of five forms:
return + e:Expression ;
return e:Expression |0;
return n: -? NumericLiteral ;
return f:Identifier ( arg:Expression );
return;
The first form has return type double. The second has type signed. The third has return type double if n is composed of a floating-point literal, i.e., a numeric literal with the character. in its source; alternatively, if n is composed of an integer literal and has its value in the range [-231, 231), the return statement has return type signed. The fourth form has return type float, and the fifth has return type void.
If the last statement in the function body is not a ReturnStatement, or if the function body has no non-empty statements (other than the initial declarations and coercions—see Function Declarations), the function's return type is void.
5.3 Function Type Annotations
The type of a function declaration
function f:Identifier ( x:Identifier… ) {
x:Identifier = AssignmentExpression ; …
var y:Identifier = -? NumericLiteral Identifier ( -? NumericLiteral ), … …
body:Statement…
}
is (σ,…) → τ where σ,… are the types of the parameters, as provided by the parameter type annotations, and τ is the formal return type, as provided by the return type annotation. The variable f is stored in the global environment with type imm (σ,…) → τ.
5.4 Variable Type Annotations
The types of variable declarations are determined by their initializer, which may take one of two forms:
n: -? NumericLiteral
f:Identifier ( n: -? NumericLiteral )
In the first case, the variable type is double if n's source contains the character. ; otherwise n may be an integer literal in the range [-231, 232), in which case the variable type is int.
In the second case, the variable type is float. Lookup(Δ, Γ, f) must be fround and n must be a floating-point literal with the character. in its source.
5.5 Global Variable Type Annotations
A global variable declaration is a VariableStatement node in one of several allowed forms. Validating global variable annotations takes a Δ as input and produces as output a new Δ′ by adding the variable binding to Δ.
A global program variable is initialized to a literal:
var x:Identifier = n: -? NumericLiteral ;
var x:Identifier = f:Identifier ( n: -? NumericLiteral );
The global variable x is stored in the global environment with type mut τ, where τ is determined in the same way as local variable type annotations.
A standard library import is of one of the following two forms:
var x:Identifier = stdlib:Identifier. y:Identifier ;
var x:Identifier = stdlib:Identifier.Math. y:Identifier ;
The variable stdlib must match the first parameter of the module declaration. The global variable x is stored in the global environment with type imm γ, where γ is the type of library y or Math. y as specified by the standard library types.
A foreign import is of one of the following three forms:
var x:Identifier = foreign:Identifier. y:Identifier ;
var x:Identifier = foreign:Identifier. y:Identifier |0;
var x:Identifier = + foreign:Identifier. y:Identifier ;
The variable foreign must match the second parameter of the module declaration. The global variable x is stored in the global environment with type imm Function for the first form, mut int for the second, and mut double for the third.
A global heap view is of the following form:
var x:Identifier = new stdlib:Identifier. view:Identifier ( heap:Identifier );
The variable stdlib must match the first parameter of the module declaration and the variable heap must match the third. The identifier view must be one of the standard ArrayBufferView type names. The global variable x is stored in the global environment with type imm view.
5.6 Function Table Types
A function table is a VariableStatement of the form:
var x:Identifier = [ f 0 :Identifier, f:Identifier, … ];
The function table x is stored in the global environment with type imm ((σ,…) → τ)[n] where (σ,…) → τ is the type of f in the global environment and n is the length of the array literal.
6 Validation Rules
To ensure that a JavaScript function is a proper asm.js module, it must first be statically validated. This section specifies the validation rules. The rules operate on JavaScript abstract syntax, i.e., the output of a JavaScript parser. The non-terminals refer to parse nodes defined by productions in the ECMAScript grammar, but note that the asm.js validator only accepts a subset of legal JavaScript programs.
The result of a validation operation is either a success, indicating that a parse node is statically valid asm.js, or a failure, indicating that the parse node is statically invalid asm.js.
The ValidateModule rule validates an asm.js module, which is either a FunctionDeclaration or FunctionExpression node.
Validating a module of the form
function f:Identifier opt ( stdlib:Identifier, foreign:Identifier, heap:Identifier opt opt opt ) {
"use asm";
var:VariableStatement…
fun:FunctionDeclaration…
table:VariableStatement…
exports:ReturnStatement
}
succeeds if:
f, stdlib, foreign, heap, and the var, fun, and table variables are all mutually distinct;
the global environment Δ is constructed in three stages: the global declarations are validated in an empty initial environment Δ 0, producing a new global environment Δ 1 ; the types from the function type annotations in the fun declarations are extracted using Δ 1, and then added to Δ 1 to produce Δ 2 ; the types of the function tables in the table declarations are extracted using Δ 2, and their types are added to Δ 2 to produce the completed global type environment Δ.
for each fun declaration, ValidateFunction succeeds with environment Δ;
for each table declaration, ValidateFunctionTable succeeds with environment Δ; and
ValidateExport succeeds for exports with environment Δ.
The ValidateExport rule validates an asm.js module's export declaration. An export declaration is a ReturnStatement returning either a single asm.js function or an object literal exporting multiple asm.js functions.
Validating an export declaration node
return { x:Identifier : f:Identifier, … };
succeeds if for each f, Δ(f) = imm γ where γ is a function type (σ,…) → τ.
Validating an export declaration node
return f:Identifier ;
succeeds if Δ(f) = imm γ where γ is a function type (σ,…) → τ.
The ValidateFunctionTable rule validates an asm.js module's function table declaration. A function table declaration is a VariableStatement binding an identifier to an array literal.
Validating a function table of the form
var x:Identifier = [ f:Identifier, … ];
succeeds if:
the length n of the array literal is 2 m for some m ≥ 0;
for some m ≥ 0; Δ(x) = imm ((σ,…) → τ)[n]; and
((σ,…) → τ)[n]; and for each f, Δ(f) = (σ,…) → τ.
The ValidateFunction rule validates an asm.js function declaration, which is a FunctionDeclaration node.
Validating a function declaration of the form
function f:Identifier ( x:Identifier, … ) {
x:Identifier = AssignmentExpression ; …
var y:Identifier = -? NumericLiteral Identifier ( -? NumericLiteral ), … …
body:Statement…
}
succeeds if:
Δ(f) = imm (σ,…) → τ;
(σ,…) → τ; the x and y variables are all mutually distinct;
the variable environment Γ is constructed by mapping each parameter x to its corresponding parameter type annotation (annotations must appear in the same order as the parameters) and each local variable y to its variable type annotation;
for each body statement, ValidateStatement succeeds with environments Δ and Γ and expected return type τ.
The ValidateStatement rule validates an asm.js statement. Each statement is validated in the context of a global environment Δ, a variable environment Γ, and an expected return type τ. Unless otherwise explicitly stated, a recursive validation of a subterm uses the same context as its containing term.
6.5.1 Block
Validating a Block statement node
{ stmt:Statement… }
succeeds if ValidateStatement succeeds for each stmt.
6.5.2 ExpressionStatement
Validating an ExpressionStatement node
cexpr:CallExpression ;
succeeds if ValidateCall succeeds for cexpr with actual return type void.
Validating an ExpressionStatement node
expr:Expression ;
succeeds if ValidateExpression succeeds for expr with some type σ.
6.5.3 EmptyStatement
Validating an EmptyStatement node always succeeds.
6.5.4 IfStatement
Validating an IfStatement node
if ( expr:Expression ) stmt 1 :Statement else stmt 2 :Statement
succeeds if ValidateExpression succeeds for expr with a subtype of int and ValidateStatement succeeds for stmt 1 and stmt 2.
Validating an IfStatement node
if ( expr:Expression ) stmt:Statement
succeeds if ValidateExpression succeeds for expr with a subtype of int and ValidateStatement succeeds for stmt.
6.5.5 ReturnStatement
Validating a ReturnStatement node
return expr:Expression ;
succeeds if ValidateExpression succeeds for expr with a subtype of the expected return type τ.
Validating a ReturnStatement node
return ;
succeeds if the expected return type τ is void.
6.5.6 IterationStatement
Validating an IterationStatement node
while ( expr:Expression ) stmt:Statement
succeeds if ValidateExpression succeeds for expr with a subtype of int and ValidateStatement succeeds for stmt.
Validating an IterationStatement node
do stmt:Statement while ( expr:Expression ) ;
succeeds if ValidateStatement succeeds for stmt and ValidateExpression succeeds for expr with a subtype of int.
Validate an IterationStatement node
for ( init:ExpressionNoIn opt ; test:Expression opt ; update:Expression opt ) body:Statement
succeeds if:
ValidateExpression succeeds for init (if present);
ValidateExpression succeeds for test with a subtype of int (if present);
(if present); ValidateExpression succeeds for update (if present); and
ValidateStatement succeeds for body.
6.5.7 BreakStatement
Validating a BreakStatement node
break Identifier opt ;
always succeeds.
6.5.8 ContinueStatement
Validating a ContinueStatement node
continue Identifier opt ;
always succeeds.
6.5.9 LabelledStatement
Validating a LabelledStatement node
Identifier : body:Statement
succeeds if ValidateStatement succeeds for body.
6.5.10 SwitchStatement
Validating a SwitchStatement node
switch ( test:Expression ) { case:CaseClause… default:DefaultClause opt }
succeeds if
ValidateExpression succeeds for test with a subtype of signed ;
; ValidateCase succeeds for each case;
each case value is distinct;
the difference between the maximum and minimum case values is less than 2 31 ; and
; and ValidateDefault succeeds for default.
Cases in a switch block are validated in the context of a global environment Δ, a variable environment Γ, and an expected return type τ. Unless otherwise explicitly stated, a recursive validation of a subterm uses the same context as its containing term.
Validating a CaseClause node
case n: -? NumericLiteral : stmt:Statement…
succeeds if
the source of n does not contain a. character;
character; n is in the range [-2 31, 2 31 ); and
, 2 ); and ValidateStatement succeeds for each stmt.
The default case in a switch block is validated in the context of a global environment Δ, a variable environment Γ, and an expected return type τ. Unless otherwise explicitly stated, a recursive validation of a subterm uses the same context as its containing term.
Validating a DefaultClause node
default : stmt:Statement…
succeeds if ValidateStatement succeeds for each stmt.
Each expression is validated in the context of a global environment Δ and a variable environment Γ, and validation produces the type of the expression as a result. Unless otherwise explicitly stated, a recursive validation of a subterm uses the same context as its containing term.
6.8.1 Expression
Validating an Expression node
expr 1 :AssignmentExpression, …, expr n :AssignmentExpression
succeeds with type τ if for every i < n, one of the following conditions holds:
expr i is a CallExpression and ValidateCall succeeds with actual return type void ; or
is a CallExpression and ValidateCall succeeds with actual return type ; or ValidateExpression succeeds for expr i with some type σ;
and ValidateExpression succeeds for expr n with type τ.
6.8.2 NumericLiteral
Validating a NumericLiteral node
succeeds with type double if the source contains a. character; or validates as type double ;
if the source contains a character; or validates as type ; succeeds with type fixnum if the source does not contain a. character and its numeric value is in the range [0, 2 31 ); or
if the source does not contain a character and its numeric value is in the range [0, 2 ); or succeeds with type unsigned if the source does not contain a. character and its numeric value is in the range [231, 232).
Note that the case of negative integer constants is handled under UnaryExpression.
Note that integer literals outside the range [0, 232) are invalid, i.e., fail to validate.
6.8.3 Identifier
Validating an Identifier node
x:Identifier
succeeds with type τ if Lookup(Δ, Γ, x) = τ.
6.8.4 CallExpression
Validating a CallExpression node succeeds with type float if ValidateFloatCoercion succeeds.
6.8.5 MemberExpression
Validating a MemberExpression node succeeds with type τ if ValidateHeapAccess succeeds with load type τ.
6.8.6 AssignmentExpression
Validating an AssignmentExpression node
x:Identifier = expr:AssignmentExpression
succeeds with type τ if ValidateExpression succeeds for the nested AssignmentExpression with type τ and one of the following two conditions holds:
x is bound in Γ as a supertype of τ; or
x is not bound in Γ and is bound to a mutable supertype of τ in Δ.
Validating an AssignmentExpression node
lhs:MemberExpression = rhs:AssignmentExpression
succeeds with type τ if ValidateExpression succeeds for rhs with type τ and ValidateHeapAccess succeeds for lhs with τ as one of its legal store types.
6.8.7 UnaryExpression
Validating a UnaryExpression node of the form
- NumericLiteral
succeeds with type signed if the NumericLiteral source does not contain a. character and the numeric value of the expression is in the range [-231, 0).
Validating a UnaryExpression node of the form
+ cexpr:CallExpression
succeeds with type double if ValidateCall succeeds for cexpr with actual return type double.
Validating a UnaryExpression node of the form
op: + - ~! arg:UnaryExpression
succeeds with type τ if the type of op is … ∧ (σ) → τ ∧ … and ValidateExpression succeeds with a subtype of σ.
Validating a UnaryExpression node of the form
~~ arg:UnaryExpression
succeeds with type signed if ValidateExpression succeeds for arg with a subtype of either double or float?.
6.8.8 MultiplicativeExpression
Validating a MultiplicativeExpression node
lhs:MultiplicativeExpression op: * / % rhs:UnaryExpression
succeeds with type τ if:
the binary operator type of op is … ∧ (σ 1, σ 2 ) → τ ∧ …;
, σ ) → τ ∧ …; ValidateExpression succeeds for lhs with a subtype of σ 1 ; and
; and ValidateExpression succeeds for rhs with a subtype of σ 2.
Validating a MultiplicativeExpression node
expr:MultiplicativeExpression * n: -? NumericLiteral
n: -? NumericLiteral * expr:UnaryExpression
succeeds with type intish if the source of n does not contain a. character and -220 < n < 220 and ValidateExpressionexpr with a subtype of int.
6.8.9 AdditiveExpression
Validating an AdditiveExpression node
expr 1 + - … + - expr n
succeeds with type intish if:
ValidateExpression succeeds for each expr i with a subtype of int ;
with a subtype of ; n ≤ 220.
Otherwise, validating an AdditiveExpression node
lhs:AdditiveExpression op: + - rhs:MultiplicativeExpression
succeeds with type double if:
the binary operator type of op is (σ 1, σ 2 ) → double ;
, σ ) → ; ValidateExpression succeeds for lhs with a subtype of σ 1 ; and
; and ValidateExpression succeeds for rhs with a subtype of σ 2.
6.8.10 ShiftExpression
Validating a ShiftExpression node
lhs:ShiftExpression op: << >> >>> rhs:AdditiveExpression
succeeds with type τ if
the binary operator type of op is … ∧ (σ 1, σ 2 ) → τ ∧ …;
, σ ) → τ ∧ …; ValidateExpression succeeds for lhs with a subtype of σ 1 ; and
; and ValidateExpression succeeds for rhs with a subtype of σ 2.
6.8.11 RelationalExpression
Validating a RelationalExpression node
lhs:RelationalExpression op: < > <= >= rhs:ShiftExpression
succeeds with type τ if
the binary operator type of op is … ∧ (σ 1, σ 2 ) → τ ∧ …;
, σ ) → τ ∧ …; ValidateExpression succeeds for lhs with a subtype of σ 1 ; and
; and ValidateExpression succeeds for rhs with a subtype of σ 2.
6.8.12 EqualityExpression
Validating an EqualityExpression node
lhs:EqualityExpression op: ==!= rhs:RelationalExpression
succeeds with type τ if
the binary operator type of op is … ∧ (σ 1, σ 2 ) → τ ∧ …;
, σ ) → τ ∧ …; ValidateExpression succeeds for lhs with a subtype of σ 1 ; and
; and ValidateExpression succeeds for rhs with a subtype of σ 2.
6.8.13 BitwiseANDExpression
Validating a BitwiseANDExpression node
lhs:BitwiseANDExpression & rhs:EqualityExpression
succeeds with type signed if ValidateExpression succeeds for lhs and rhs with a subtype of intish.
6.8.14 BitwiseXORExpression
Validating a BitwiseXORExpression node
lhs:BitwiseXORExpression ^ rhs:BitwiseANDExpression
succeeds with type signed if ValidateExpression succeeds for lhs and rhs with a subtype of intish.
6.8.15 BitwiseORExpression
Validating a BitwiseORExpression node
cexpr:CallExpression |0
succeeds with type signed if ValidateCall succeeds for cexpr with actual return type signed.
Validating a BitwiseORExpression node
lhs:BitwiseORExpression | rhs:BitwiseXORExpression
succeeds with type signed if ValidateExpression succeeds for lhs and rhs with a subtype of intish.
6.8.16 ConditionalExpression
Validating a ConditionalExpression node
test:BitwiseORExpression? cons:AssignmentExpression : alt:AssignmentExpression
succeeds with type τ if:
τ is one of int, double, or float ;
,, or ; ValidateExpression succeeds for test with a subtype of int ;
; ValidateExpression succeeds for cons and alt with subtypes of τ.
6.8.17 Parenthesized Expression
Validating a parenthesized expression node
( expr:Expression )
succeeds with type τ if ValidateExpression succeeds for expr with type τ.
Each function call expression is validated in the context of a global environment Δ and a variable environment Γ, and validates against an actual return type τ, which was provided from the context in which the function call appears. A recursive validation of a subterm uses the same context as its containing term.
Validating a CallExpression node
f:Identifier ( arg:Expression, … )
with actual return type τ succeeds if one of the following conditions holds:
ValidateFloatCoercion succeeds for the node;
Lookup(Δ, Γ, f) = … ∧ (σ,…) → τ ∧ … and ValidateExpression succeeds for each arg with a subtype of its corresponding σ; or
Lookup(Δ, Γ, f) = … ∧ (σ 1,…,σ n,σ … ) → τ ∧ … and ValidateExpression succeeds for the first n arg i expressions with subtypes of their corresponding σ i and the remaining arg expressions with subtypes of σ.
Alternatively, validating the CallExpression succeeds with any actual return type τ other than float if Lookup(Δ, Γ, f) = Function and ValidateExpression succeeds for each arg with a subtype of extern.
Validating a CallExpression node
x:Identifier [ index:Expression & n: -? NumericLiteral ]( arg:Expression, … )
succeeds with actual return type τ if:
the source of n does not contain a. character;
character; Lookup(Δ, Γ, x) = ((σ,…) → τ)[n+1];
ValidateExpression succeeds for index with a subtype of intish ; and
; and ValidateExpression succeeds for each arg with a subtype of its corresponding σ.
Each heap access expression is validated in the context of a global environment Δ and a variable environment Γ, and validation produces a load type as well as a set of legal store types as a result. These types are determined by the heap view types corresponding to each ArrayBufferView type.
Validating a MemberExpression node
x:Identifier [ n: -? NumericLiteral ]
succeeds with load type σ and store types { τ, … } if:
Lookup(Δ, Γ, x) = view where view is an ArrayBufferView type;
type; the load type of view is σ;
the store types of view are { τ, … };
the source of n does not contain a. character;
character; 0 ≤ n < 232.
Validating a MemberExpression node
x:Identifier [ expr:Expression >> n: -? NumericLiteral ]
succeeds with load type σ and store types { τ, … } if:
Lookup(Δ, Γ, x) = view where view is an ArrayBufferView type;
type; the element size of view is bytes;
the load type of view is σ;
the store types of view are { τ, … };
ValidateExpression succeeds for expr with type intish ;
; the source of n does not contain a. character;
character; n = log 2 (bytes).
A call to the fround coercion is validated in the context of a global environment Δ and a variable environment Γ and validates as the type float.
Validating a CallExpression node
f:Identifier ( cexpr:CallExpression )
succeeds with type float if Lookup(Δ, Γ, f) = fround and ValidateCall succeeds for cexpr with actual return type float.
Alternatively, validating a CallExpression node
f:Identifier ( arg:Expression )
succeeds with type float if Lookup(Δ, Γ, f) = fround and ValidateExpression succeeds for arg with type τ, where τ is a subtype of floatish, double?, signed, or unsigned.
7 Linking
An AOT implementation of asm.js must perform some internal dynamic checks at link time to be able to safely generate AOT-compiled exports. If any of the dynamic checks fails, the result of linking cannot be an AOT-compiled module. The dynamically checked invariants are:
control must reach the module's return statement without throwing;
statement without throwing; all property access must resolve to data properties;
the heap object (if provided) must be an instance of ArrayBuffer ;
; the heap object's byteLength must be either 2 n for n in [12, 24) or 2 24 · n for n ≥ 1;
must be either 2 for n in [12, 24) or 2 · n for n ≥ 1; all globals taken from the stdlib object must be the SameValue as the corresponding standard library of the same name.
If any of these conditions is not met, AOT compilation may produce invalid results so the engine should fall back to an interpreted or JIT-compiled implementation.
8 Operators
8.1 Unary Operators
Note that the special combined operator ~~ may be used as a coercion from double or float? to signed ; see Unary Expressions.
8.2 Binary Operators
9 Standard Library
10 Heap View Types
View Type Element Size (Bytes) Load Type Store Types Uint8Array 1 intish intish Int8Array 1 intish intish Uint16Array 2 intish intish Int16Array 2 intish intish Uint32Array 4 intish intish Int32Array 4 intish intish Float32Array 4 float? floatish, double? Float64Array 8 double? float?, double?
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Martin Best, Brendan Eich, Andrew McCreight, and Vlad Vukićević for feedback and encouragement.
Thanks to Benjamin Bouvier, Douglas Crosher, and Dan Gohman for contributions to the design and implementation, particularly for float.
Thanks to Jesse Ruderman and C. Scott Ananian for bug reports.
Thanks to Michael Bebenita for diagrams.Guilty Gear Xrd Europe Pre-Orders get exclusive Ishiwatari Art Prints with Rice Digital
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We also ship internationally – so you can get your copy and art cards wherever you are in the world!Rahul Gandhi does it again had tea, Pakora at roadside hotel
Source: Hueiyen News Service
Imphal, December 10 2012: On his way to Imphal Airport from Hapta Kangjeibung after addressing a convention, Rahul Gandhi, General Secretary of AICC, reportedly stopped by at a roadside stall in Sangaiprou area and had tea, pakora and Kangla bujiya.
The vehicle in which Rahul Gandhi was travelling suddenly stopped and backed up to stop in front of Hotel Miranda much to the surprise of Lourembam Doleshwar of Haobam Marak Lourembam Leikai and his wife Anita who are running the hotel.
Recalling to Hueiyen Lanpao, Doleshwar said that without any hesitation Rahul Gandhi came down from his vehicle and came straight inside the hotel and asked for a cup of tea to his wife who was there at that point of time.
Chief Minister O Ibobi Singh, Deputy Chief Minister Gaikhangam and Luizinho Falero, General Secretary, AICC, Manipur in-charge, who was accompanying Rahul Gandhi, also got down from their respective vehicles and followed Rahul to the hotel.
Rahul Gandhi and other Congressleaders having tea at a roadside stall at Sangaiprou area (Inset:Rahul Gandhi with tea-stall owners)
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On seeing a packet of fermented Moreh-plum hanging in the hotel, Rahul Gandhi asked whether it was for sale to which Anita gave it to him.Rahul ate all the plums and then enquired whether there were any local made eatables in the hotel.So, Doleshwar provided a packet of "Kangla Bujiya" made by Kangla Foods.During his brief stop-over, Rahul Gandhi also chatted with some of the young girls who were inside the hotel having foods and drinks.At that time the hotel owner came out with the tea as ordered and asked him to be seated inside.But Rahul Gandhi preferred to be seated outside and sat at the table which was placed outside the hotel in the open.Rahul Gandhi along with Chief Minister O Ibobi, Deputy Chief Minister Gaikhangam and Luizinho Falero sat at the table and had their tea.The visitors were also served with "Pakora" as demanded by Rahul Gandhi, informed Doleshwar.Though the bill came out to merely Rs 70, Rahul Gandhi, through his associate paid Rs 200 even though the hotel owner refused to charge anything for the foods and drinks served.Later, Rahul Gandhi along with the young girls inside the hotel and the hotel owner and his family had a photo session together.Interestingly, all these while Rahul did not allow any of his security guards to enter the hotel and they were made to stand outside so as not to create any inconvenience to the hotel and its customers.I began my apprenticeship in economics as a research assistant to Bill Nordhaus, who was working on energy at the time (check the acknowledgments), and one thing I remember was the continual frustration over the failure of alternatives to conventional crude oil to materialize. That’s all changed now, of course; but at the time people used to cite “Weitzmann’s Law”, which said that the cost of alternatives to oil was 40 percent above the current price — whatever the current price happened to be.
It’s hard to escape the sense that something similar is happening now when it comes to estimates of the NAIRU, the lowest level unemployment can reach before inflation becomes an issue. The chart shows the actual unemployment rate versus the FOMC estimate of the long-run unemployment rate (the middle of the “central tendency” until the latest report, which gives us the median). Estimates of how low U can go seem always to be a bit below the current level of unemployment.
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What’s driving this ever-falling estimate of the NAIRU? The failure of inflation to materialize. And look, it’s better to see the FOMC update in the light of evidence than not. But the truth is that we really don’t know how low unemployment can go, which means that the unemployment rate is not a good reason to tighten. Wait until you see the whites of inflation’s eyes!So comes to a close the year 2014. It is a time for reflection and consideration.
We at Critical Distance have gone back over the last year and put together a compilation of what we feel best represents what has passed year. We compiled the most important, most memorable and most representative critical pieces of the year to give an idea of what 2014 was all about. Now, Critical Distance is proud to present the 2014 edition of This Year In Videogame Blogging!
#GamerGate
There is no ‘debacle timeline’ this year to which we can all refer. GamerGate was too long and too multi-pronged; nearly every day brought some new accusation; some new horror in the ostensible name of “ethics in games journalism.” So I beg your forgiveness if our own efforts to summarize fall on the brief side. No roundup can completely address everything of the last few months, from explaining the harassers’ tactics, to condemning the lies, to acknowledging the pain and honoring the losses suffered by the gaming communities everywhere. Content warnings for this section include discussion of sexual harassment, stalking, rape and death threats, and all the rest that the GamerGate hashtag has come to exemplify.
(Editors Note: Some weeks into 2015, Reddit user Squirrel Justice Warrior was kind enough to actually create such a timeline and we deemed it meticulous enough to include here as a primer to the activity details of the ongoing nightmare.)
So many places to begin, but I want to open with the voice of the woman whose harassment began it all. Zoe Quinn, after months of putting up with the some of the worst events anyone can imagine, struck back against their fig leaf of a justification for all the has been done in the name of the hashtag saying, “Fine, Let’s Talking About Ethics in Games Journalism.” As you might expect, what the hashtag focuses on and what really impacts the industry are very different things.
Alexandra Erin wrote as well on the topic of ethics, commenting: “#GamerGate really is deeply concerned with ethics in
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A. Romero’s sequels dropped the word “living” from their titles due to the terms of splitting the remaining IP between Romero and co-writer John Russo. While Romero kept the rights to make official sequels, Russo kept the right to use the phrase “living dead”.
It’s a deal that worked well for everyone. Romero, who’d had no attachment to the title their movie had been released under, could explore further dimensions of the setting. Russo could use the title to cash in on the fame of the original work. With a touch of luck, he made some money and launched a new franchise with another film that revolutionized zombies.
The luck took the form of Dan O’Bannon, whose reworked script and directorial vision made The Return of the Living Dead a horror classic in its own right, and a damn funny one at that. O’Bannon had previously contributed to another game-changing film, co-writing Alien with Ronald Shushet. He had collaborated with John Carpenter on Dark Star while in film school. With no credited directorial experience, it’s a wonder that O’Bannon was allowed to helm this project. Again, lucky for the resulting movie that he was.
The story is fairly simple. Workers in a medical supply warehouse mess with old canisters misrouted by the US Army. One of the containers cracks, letting out a toxic gas that brings the dead back to life. The warehouse is beside a cemetery, and before too long the entire area is awash in the living dead.
But the story isn’t the whole picture. In fact, as an ensemble piece the story itself depends on which characters you’re following. Many horror films rely on a core group, who are whittled down as they separate. This one has two main groups, who intermix to an extent without ever fully blending. These are the staff of the supply warehouse (along with the embalmer who works nearby) and a group of punks who are friends with the newest employee at the warehouse. What’s brilliant about this is that it allows the veteran actors to anchor the film while including characters that appeal to a younger demographic.
Another smart move was using a punk soundtrack. It had only been a few years since Valley Girl had proven that a film fueled by new wave could move tickets and a single year since the cult film Repo Man used punk songs. It was by no means a safe decision to go with a playlist style of soundtrack at that time, at least not with one that wouldn’t appeal to nostalgic baby boomers a la The Big Chill. Yet it worked, partly because the songs added to the sarcastic tone of the movie, but also because clever selections and editing made the music serve as a score. To this day I can’t hear The Cramps’ “Surfin’ Dead” without envisioning survivors running every which way to broad up windows, and “Burn the Flames” by Roky Erickson makes an eerily somber accompaniment to self-immolation.
The best idea kept from Night of the Living Dead is one of Romero’s recurring themes: every attempt to control the situation makes it worse. There’s a number printed on the canisters to notify the Army about their location. Burt, the owner of the warehouse, decided against calling it when the shipment arrived years ago, likely because of an aversion to getting involved in a bureaucratic snafu. Once the gas leaks, he again dismisses the notion of calling the number as it would lead to an investigation and possible criminal charges. He decides they can handle it themselves, and by “handle” he means “cover up”. So the evidence is taken to the mortuary for burning. Problem solved, except that the smoke has seeded clouds with the reanimation agent 2-4-5 Trioxin. This awakens the dead of the Resurrection Cemetery, creating a situation that spirals quickly out to f control as well-meaning paramedics and police provide more fuel for the fire. It’s all so avoidable, yet completely inevitable, that you have to laugh cynically. One businessman took out at least a large portion of Louisville, Kentucky, because he didn’t want to deal with red tape.
The Return of the Living Dead is credited with creating and/or popularizing a number of additions to film zombies. Unlike Romero’s undead ghouls, O’Bannon’s ate only brains. They could run, although the more intact corpses were better at it. They could speak, which is still fairly uncommon. The most unnerving part, though, is that they could feel. That’s their entire motivation. It hurts to be dead, and eating brains relieves their suffering for a time. To be consciously dead, aware of your body decaying, and knowing that there is no way to recover — it’s a nightmarish concept that is all too real for sufferers of terminal diseases. The greatest choice O’Bannon made was to make his zombies sympathetic. They are also victims in this film where the enemy is the failure of systems to incorporate human behavior.The world's top two players Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic go head-to-head in the men's singles final at Wimbledon on Sunday. Regardless of the outcome of the match, Djokovic will depose Nadal from the top of the world rankings because of his incredible run of form that has seen him lose just once in 47 matches. Nadal has gone 20 matches without defeat at Wimbledon and was in awesome form against Andy Murray in their semi-final. Nadal and Roger Federer have won 21 out of the last 24 majors, but Djokovic's stunning consistency is threatening to disrupt that order, so it is shaping up to be a spectacular encounter on Centre Court. Here, three-time Wimbledon champion John McEnroe analyses why Novak Djokovic has enjoyed such a spectacular year and Tim Henman looks at the game of Rafael Nadal. WHAT ARE THE STRENGTHS OF BOTH PLAYERS? MCENROE on DJOKOVIC
He has got more belief in his ability now. He cleared up his fitness issues and is now fitter than ever. His defensive skills are unbelievable and he moves great. The serve is maybe the biggest thing - he has straightened it out as he had been having problems with that for about a year and a half. NADAL v DJOKOVIC OVERALL HEAD-TO-HEADS 27 meetings Nadal: 16 wins Djokovic: 11 wins He seems to have put everything together at the same time. When he won the Davis Cup [for Serbia] I think that was a real moment for his country, it brought him to a whole new level and he has just taken it up a gear, it is quite amazing. HENMAN on NADAL
How is he able to keep his level of play and his intensity going for so long? What always impresses me is how well he plays with room for such a small margin of error. It seems relatively low-risk tennis but his serve is very effective being a leftie, and thanks to that it gives him the chance to dominate with his forehand. Once he gets the ball on that famous forehand, he can whip winners from anywhere on the court. Not only that, but he is such a good athlete that he is really difficult to hit through. And his lack of unforced errors is phenomenal. WHAT ARE THEIR WEAKNESSES? MCENROE on DJOKOVIC
He is maybe not so comfortable approaching the net, his net skills are getting better but maybe they are not what he would like them to be. I think Rafa has got more all-round confidence when it comes to closing to the net. His second serve is also probably something that concerns him, given what has happened to it over the last two years. At the moment he is doing everything pretty well all-round. HENMAN on NADAL
As a guy that liked to serve and volley, I would still definitely employ that tactic against Nadal. Del Potro used it 30-40 times in their fourth-round match and won it probably 80% of the time. A slow wide serve at the deuce box is effective as Rafa has to take one hand off the racquet to play a sliced return, which would give Djokovic time to get into the net. NADAL v DJOKOVIC HEAD-TO-HEAD IN 2011 World Tour Masters Indian Wells: DJOKOVIC 4-6, 6-3, 6-2 ATP World Tour Masters Miami: DJOKOVIC 4-6, 6-3, 7-6(4) ATP World Tour Masters Madrid: DJOKOVIC 7-5, 6-4 ATP World Tour Masters Rome: DJOKOVIC 6-4, 6-4 When Federer beat him at the World Tour Finals that was something he used very well, so it is a good tactic. If you can get players running to play a backhand and you are at the net it provides good opportunities, but it is so tough to get them against a player of Rafa's class. HOW MENTALLY STRONG ARE THEY? MCENROE on DJOKOVIC
I think he is expressing himself more than before as he bottled himself up a little too much. Yes, he used to joke around doing impressions of other players' serve, but now I think you are seeing more of his personality. It is an important thing that has helped people feel better about him. He has put people away, where previously he would get himself in situations where he would let opponents back into matches. Now he is finishing them off quickly and that helps you down the road in tournaments when you need energy against the best guys. HENMAN on NADAL
I don't think I can think of another sportsman who competes better than he does. I think he is one of the greatest competitors in any sport I have ever seen. He never lets anything affect him, he plays every point as if his life depends on it, which is an unbelievable quality when you play at the level he does. WHO IS THE REAL WORLD NUMBER ONE IN YOUR EYES? MCENROE'S VERDICT
We are halfway through the year so let's hold our horses here. It will be a great final and whoever wins this will have two majors and the other man will have one. In my book, whoever wins the match on Sunday will be number one at that time - forget what the computer says on Monday. HENMAN'S VERDICT
I think it is Djokovic, as the rankings don't lie and he has only lost once this year. On Monday he will have more points than anyone else, he will be world number one and he thoroughly deserves it. The ranking system is over a 12-month period and you don't buy those points, you earn them. Tim Henman was talking to BBC Sport's Paul Birch and John McEnroe was talking to BBC Sport's Louis Myles.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionDELAND — Carla Quann thinks of food as a universal language.
"If you think about it, people go to every restaurant. Whether it's Indian food, Japanese food, Chinese food, we eat everything," the Daytona Beach resident said.
Quann was one of roughly 300 people to dine Sunday afternoon on dishes ranging from camel-duck kebab, inspired by the cuisine of Libya, to split pea and cici hummus, a Syrian dish. The guests, sitting at tables on Indiana Avenue, passed plates of food prepared by Cress Restaurant that were inspired by the seven countries in President Donald Trump's recent immigration order: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Citizens of those countries were temporarily banned from traveling to the United States.
"Anybody who says that we're in trouble as a country needs to just look at this little gathering of 300-plus people and say'maybe we're not in trouble,'" said chef Hari Pulapaka, who owns Cress with his wife Jenneffer. "We just need to find our common ground, however we do so, whether it be over food, like we did, or over something else."
Orlando resident Rajashree Patel, a United States citizen who migrated from India, also pointed out the themes of tolerance and bringing people together after a man walked by the diners and chanted "Trump!"
"In a time like this, we really need someone to bring everyone from different cultures, different backgrounds, different religions, different genders, whatever it is, together and just kind of get to know each other," she said.
A permanent resident with a green card who migrated from India, Pulapaka pointed to the selfless spirit he saw from volunteers who came and helped serve the meal. Earlier this week, he addressed Trump's order — which has been blocked in court.
"I just felt like that kind of insensitivity spoke to me personally as an immigrant and tomorrow it could be India," he said. "The day after it could be Canada. Where does that end?"
Pulapaka is also an associate professor of mathematics at Stetson University, and the school's president, Wendy Libby, attended the meal.
"Hari believes in integrating his view of the world, and how open we should be to other people, with his food and it's part of who he and Jenneffer are and so I'm just glad my husband and I could be here to support it," Libby said.
Rose Eberle, of DeLand, also dined at the event.
"When Hari decided to not only combine his wonderful food with a political statement about how we feel about America and how we feel about everyone's effort toward understanding one another as people, you have to stand up," she said.Japan's public broadcaster NHK has begun the world's first regular TV satellite broadcasts in 8K resolution. The "Super Hi-Vision" test channel launched on Monday and has a mix of content in both 4K and 8K resolution, which at 7680 x 4320 pixels is four times as sharp as 4K and 16 times as sharp as 1080p; the spec also allows for 22.2-channel audio.
8K content on the schedule for today includes a concert by J-pop star Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, highlights from the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, and footage of famed Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa in a Beethoven concert. The channel broadcasts from 10AM until 5PM, but since no one actually has the equipment necessary to receive the channel at home, NHK is installing viewing stations around the country for the public and will hold events designed to showcase footage from the Rio Olympics.
If you're wondering exactly why all this is happening before you've even gotten around to buying a 4K TV yet, it's because NHK perennially pioneers new viewing formats. The company started HD broadcasts in the '80s, for example, well over a decade before the technology became mainstream — so don't take this as a sign that you'll need to upgrade soon.When the campaign for a film called Billion Dollar Bully hit Kickstarter last week, support began pouring in. The investigative documentary—which will probe allegations of manipulation and fabrication of reviews, extortion and other questionable business tactics by marketing giant Yelp—is quickly approaching its $60,000 goal, but not without one big adversary.
According to the film’s producer and director Kaylie Milliken, Yelp “seems very threatened” and is “extremely concerned” about her small, two-person production. This is no surprise, considering the company’s shares were down 4 percent in trading the day after the project was announced—a dip that many are attributing to the documentary, according to Business Insider.
“I have gotten a huge reaction from [Yelp], which I have to admit, I was not expecting,” Ms. Milliken told the Observer, adding that they’re only halfway done filming. “They’ve been aggressively denying it and trying to discredit my character and the film itself.”
Even at its worst, Yelp can do some good—like showing us how hipsters are ruining our cities.
In a statement to Business Insider regarding the film, a Yelp spokesperson said, “there is no merit to the claims they appear to highlight” and that “the director has a conflict of interest, as she has a history of trying to mislead consumers on Yelp.” The spokesperson is referring to Ms. Milliken’s use of several profiles on the site, which she claims she created just for the sake of her investigation.
In a CNBC interview that pitted Ms. Milliken against Yelp’s vice president of corporate communications on Monday, Shannon Els of Yelp questioned both the film’s claims and Ms. Milliken herself, adding that it’s “weird” that Ms. Milliken continues to look into these claims that have been dismissed by federal judges and the FTC. She also said that by being there, she is part of Ms. Milliken’s fundraising effort.
“They sent in this person to discredit me, and I’m just so surprised. I mean, we’re raising money on Kickstarter to do this indie documentary,” said Ms. Milliken, emphasizing that it’s a two-person production company that this billion dollar corporation has come after.
On CNBC Ms. Els says they (Yelp) are not there in fear, yet according to Ms. Milliken, the company refuses to sit for an interview with her.
“I have a lot of questions for them, and if they don’t have anything to hide, they should be open to having an open discussion about each point,” she said.
Although she will no longer use Yelp, Ms. Milliken says she is not out to sway consumers from the site, but to have them examine their business practices.
Ms. Milliken says she is simply going to present facts. She interviewed attorneys of those who have brought cases against Yelp and business owners with items to back their claims. She’ll examine the claims, the rulings of the court in which Yelp won and why they won those cases.
With 25 days remaining to raise the last $12,000 of the $60,000 goal, the Kickstarter campaign is on track to succeed. Ms. Milliken said the film will be completed by fall and that she will enter the finished production in various film festivals.
See: Yelp Reviewers Sue to Get Paid for Their Painstaking Accounts of Brunch
Correction: Ms. Milliken clarified that, prior to using multiple Yelp accounts for her investigation, she had also used multiple accounts to leave reviews because she couldn’t figure out why her reviews seemed to be disappearing.There’s a common quote, frequently attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.”
In our modern context, this should be rephrased a bit: “Don’t try to pull down a statue if you have no idea who or what the statue was really about.”
During a 2016 Columbus Day protest conducted by Wunk Sheek, a Native American student organization, activists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus hosted a “die-in” at Bascom Hall, near a statue of President Abraham Lincoln.
According to The Daily Cardinal, a campus newspaper, the protest ended with the group hanging a sign on the Lincoln monument that said “#DecolonizeOurCampus.”
The activist group is now demanding a disclaimer be put up saying Lincoln was complicit in the murder of Native Americans.
Why would they be so angry about Lincoln?
“Everyone thinks of Lincoln as the great, you know, freer of slaves, but let’s be real: He owned slaves, and as natives, we want people to know that he ordered the execution of native men,” said one of the protesters.
“Just to have him here at the top of Bascom is just really belittling.”
This claim from the protester is patently false. The Great Emancipator grew up in poverty and never owned slaves.
Not only that, but his debates with fellow Illinois statesman Stephen A. Douglas offer some of the clearest reasons for why the institution of slavery violated the American creed.
>>> Why Cities Shouldn’t Take Down Confederate Statues
Lincoln saved the union and brought about the end of slavery. Period.
In fairness to the activists, Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg also made the mistake of saying Lincoln owned slaves last year.
Wisconsin educators, it appears you have some work to do. This is a basic fact that most Americans should learn before graduating high school, let alone while attending an institution of higher learning.
But beyond that basic ignorance, simply stating the fact that U.S. soldiers executed Sioux Indians while Lincoln was president doesn’t begin to do justice to what was a very complex situation in the middle of the Civil War.
During the war, Minnesota was in a state of chaos due to soldiers abandoning their posts and armies moving east to join the main war effort. On top of that, the Office of Indian Affairs was mired in corruption that was exacerbated by wartime negligence.
As a result, money promised to the Sioux tribe in Minnesota in exchange for its land wasn’t coming through, and many of its people starved.
This led to a bloody uprising called the “Dakota War,” which the U.S. government eventually put down.
Over 300 Sioux were sentenced to death for connection to the rebellion. Lincoln saw this as extreme, however, and pardoned all but 38 of the alleged perpetrators, whom he believed were guilty of the worst crimes such as rape and murder.
It was the largest mass hanging in American history, but it could have been much worse if not for Lincoln’s compassion. He believed that the Sioux were getting a raw deal, but needed to ensure peace on America’s borders in a time when the future of the United States was seriously in question.
It’s amazing that Lincoln acted at all in this matter, given that the nation was gripped by a bloody civil war more deadly than all of our other wars combined.
As Matt Vespa wrote in Townhall, “It’s not one of our nation’s best moments, but Lincoln was also fighting a much more existential threat to the country[:] an army from the southern states that at the time … was winning the American Civil War.”
It’s silly to judge Lincoln’s actions without some understanding of the circumstances of the time. But this is generally what has sustained the iconoclast statue movement.
Figures of our past are dehumanized, their actions put in a vacuum, only to be narrowly judged by the increasingly absurd, ever-evolving standards of our time.
This is why it was such a short jump from attacking statues of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to Lincoln, even though these men stood on opposite sides of the conflict that shook our nation and decided what we would become in the centuries that followed.
The anti-statue crusade thrives on shallow 21st-century moralizing—the privilege of the prosperous and comfortable, far removed from the suffering and difficulties of earlier times—coupled with the sheer ignorance of a generation that has little understanding of the basic facts of our history.
But the iconoclasts do not just see Confederates or Christopher Columbus or Lincoln as problematic. The movement is about more than these individuals. It’s an attempt to delegitimize and erase the very foundation of our civilization, which to them, is irreparably flawed.
This article has been updated to note when the University of Wisconsin-Madison protest took place.Moose partner with TSN 1290 for radio and online broadcasts
By: Chris White | Published: October 1st 2015
The Manitoba Moose Hockey Club, in conjunction with TSN Radio 1290 in Winnipeg, announced today a partnership that will see TSN 1290 become the home of Manitoba Moose radio broadcasts for the 2015-16 season.
TSN 1290 will broadcast a minimum of 39 regular season Moose games this upcoming season. Every regular season and playoff Moose game will also be available to fans online via MooseHockey.com.
Broadcasts will be led by new Moose play-by-play announcer Mitch Peacock. A fixture in the Winnipeg sports media scene, Peacock will provide in-depth analysis, features and interviews for all 76 regular season games plus playoffs. Peacock brings extensive experience to the position, having called hockey games in the ECHL, WHL, BCHL, and AJHL. He also served as the host of Calgary Flames radio broadcasts for three seasons and spent four years as a rinkside reporter for Hockey Night in Canada.
In addition to being a sports anchor on CBC Winnipeg for the past six years, Peacock has also provided play-by-play coverage of the Olympics and Pan Am Games, and has hosted the FIFA World Cup as well as network coverage of Major League Soccer.
“The combination of working with TSN 1290 and the high quality production they will bring to both the radio and online platforms will be a huge benefit for our passionate fan base,” said VP Operations for the Manitoba Moose, Dan Hursh. “The addition of Mitch Peacock as the voice of the Moose brings a wealth of experience that will provide Moose fans with first-rate coverage of our team and our players.”
“We are very excited to welcome the Manitoba Moose to TSN 1290, Winnipeg’s home of hockey,” said Chris Brooke, Program Director, TSN 1290. “With live games on TSN 1290, hockey fans will be able to keep close ties on the Jets’ highly-touted young prospects as the Manitoba Moose and the AHL return for their first season back at the MTS Centre.”
The Moose open their season on Friday, Oct. 9 when they visit the Toronto Marlies.
CLICK HERE FOR A FULL BREAKDOWN OF RADIO AND ONLINE COVERAGE FOR MANITOBA MOOSE GAMESU.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders visited Somerville Monday morning to rally in support of progressive candidates running for City Council, School Board, and the Board of Alderman in Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sanders’ visit highlighted some of the over 60 Our Revolution endorsed candidates nationwide with elections this November. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders visited Somerville Monday morning to rally in support of progressive candidates running for City Council, School Board, and the Board of Alderman in Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sanders’ visit highlighted some of the over 60 Our Revolution endorsed candidates nationwide with elections this November.
“Local Our Revolution groups in Somerville and Cambridge have been organizing for months to continue the political revolution we started with the Sanders’ campaign,” said union organizer and Our Revolution Somerville member Rand Wilson. “The candidates—both incumbents and challengers — have embraced the political transformation needed to fix our broken political system and our rigged economy. With new voices and new perspectives, we are asking our municipal governments to lead the way by improving life for working people and stemming the tide of gross inequality.”
“Our Revolution is excited for Sen. Sanders to support the work of our local groups in Massachusetts,” said Our Revolution President Nina Turner. “Our organization is committed to supporting local elections because local policymakers are directly involved in the lives of the communities they serve. By electing progressives to local office, we can build a country that is responsive to the needs of the people, not just the very wealthy.”
Sanders campaigned with seventeen candidates endorsed by Our Revolution Somerville and Our Revolution Cambridge:
Matt McLaughlin, Somerville Ward 1 Alderman
JT Scott, Somerville Ward 2 Alderman
Ben Ewen-Campen, Somerville Ward 3 Alderman
Jesse Clingan, Somerville Ward 4 Alderman
Mark Niedergang, Somerville Ward 5 Alderman
Lance Davis, Somerville Ward 6 Alderman
Will Mbah, Somerville Alderman-at-Large
Mary Jo Rossetti, Somerville Alderman-at-Large
Bill White, Somerville Alderman-at-Large
Dennis Carlone, Cambridge City Council
Jan Devereux, Cambridge City Council
Sumbul Siddiqui, Cambridge City Council
Vatsady Sivongxay, Cambridge City Council
Quinton Zondervan, Cambridge City Council
Lee Erica Palmer, Somerville Ward 3 School Committee
Laura J. Pitone, Somerville Ward 5 School Committee
Carrie Normand, Somerville Ward 7 School CommitteeLos Angeles Rams and Oakland Raiders face off in an NFL preseason matchup tonight. The game tips off at 10:00 PM EST in O.co Coliseum, Oakland, California. CBS will be doing the TV coverage while you can catch the action online live on FuboTV.
The Rams rammed the Cowboys for a 10-13 victory in their preseason opener while the Raiders suffered 10-20 loss to the Cardinals.
The Raiders and the Rams have not played in the preseason since 2015 and the last recorded regular season encounter dates back to 2014. It will be interesting to see how both teams greet and treat each other at play after such 3 years.
How to watch Los Angeles Rams vs Oakland Raiders:
Date and Time: August 19th, 2017 10:00 PM EST
Venue: O.co Coliseum, Oakland, California
TV: CBS (US Regional)
Online Stream: FuboTV (US) – (Subscription required click here to start your free 7-day-trial and watch now, you can cancel at any time. DVR Available.)
Los Angeles Rams Team News
Rams will be headed by newly named head coach Sean McVay. McVay brings in an experience of seven years with the Washington Redskins and the past three seasons as the offensive coordinator. Let’s hope he takes control of the battered Rams, which finished last year 4-12.
Second-year QB Jared Goff leads in the depth chart for the Rams and will be the guy to look out for against the Raiders.
Rams’ latest intake wide receiver Sammy Watkins, who has been part of the training camp just for four days now will play with the first-team against the Raiders.
Oakland Raiders Team News
Much of the starters were not part of the Raiders’ last Saturday preseason-opening loss. QB Derek Carr, TE Jared Cook, C Rodney Hudson, WR Amari Cooper, WR Michael Crabtree, LB Bruce Irvin, G Gabe Jackson, R FB/RB Jamize Olawale, B Marshawn Lynch, DE Khalil Mack, and G/T Kelechi Osemele are all expected to make their 2017 preseason debuts."Ten white Moulinex Optiblend 2000 mixers were placed on a simple table. Each of these was filled with water and contained a live goldfish. The mixers were visibly plugged in and thus ready to use. Anyone pressing the yellow button would thereby kill the fish. The visitors thus became the judges of life or death. An hour after one of the visitors had pressed one of the buttons, the police would enter and order the electricity to be cut off. Meyer was charged with animal cruelty and fined 2000 Danish Crowns, upon which he appealed. During the following laborious trial expert witnesses were called to provide evidence on the way in which the fish were killed, ultimately establishing that, in contrast to customary methods, the short duration of the killing of maximum one second was one of the more humane methods. On May 19th 2003 the BBC reported Meyers acquittal with the headline "Liquidising goldfish not a crime":... But a court in Denmark has now ruled that the fish were not treated cruelly, as they had not faced prolonged suffering. The fish were killed instantly and humanely, said Judge Preben Bagger. The show trial in the service of the freedom of art reached its conclusion. Did Evaristti calculate in the factor of media reaction right from the outset? Was the killing of one or more fish his intention? Was the trial part of the art project?
Evaristti did not in any way encourage the visitors to kill the fish, but left the decision to them. According to eyewitnesses, the killing of the first fish created a charged atmosphere among the numerous media representatives who were present who virtually encouraged the visitors to press the button in order to initiate a scandal something they ultimately achieved. The public followed Evaristtis division of society into three groups: the idiot, who pres-ses the button [the sadist], the voyeur who loves to watch, and the moraliser. [...] The media and the public were the voyeurs and the animal protection groups and those others who protested were the moralists. The artist sees his installation as a social experiment in which he tries to interpret reality through reality, and not through a lie. Evaristti distances himself in this way from the representa-tion of horror in the sense of the classical art term, since he considers the interpretation of what happened as a falsification of reality." 1.
The given option to "transform the content into fishsoup", as one a reporter put it, shook up a lot of people and got a lot of media attention. In an internet poll conducted by the CNN, 72% (which were 30,592 votes) thought this was definitely not art. Unexpectedly, Helena was defended by animal rights philosopher Peter Singer, argueing that the given option of turning the blender on, raises the question of the power humans have over animals. 2.
Another artwork that raises questions on the power humans have and exercise is Eduardo Kac's Genesis, fosussing on the ethics of DNA manipulation. Kac displayed a text from the biblical Genesis accrediting humanity dominion over its environment, thereby helping the audience to consciously think about the intended subject. Evaistti did not help his audience to understand the intention he had when creating Helena, possibly this was one of the causes for its misunderstanding.
Helena also resembles Free Range Grain of Critical Art Ensemble, because this performance laces the contemporary food industry. By putting the goldfish into a blender, Evaristti too made an evident reference to the contemporary food industry.
This artwork helps to disclose the effects of interconnections between technology, desire and ethics on the 'use' of animals. SubRosa has a similar goal, but these activists conflict for equality of men and women (AEM 253). In a sense, animals and women can be equated to the extend that they are both minority groups, put in a disadvantaged position by discourses deeply embedded in our culture. The sad part is that the animals are unable to speak up for their rights.
The video below shows a commercial for the Aarhus Museum, one of the museums where Helena was diplayed.
1. Source: www.evaristti.com
2. Paraphrased from: Baker, Steve. Picturing the beast. Animals, identity and representation. University of Illinois Press: 2001. UrbanaWe are thrilled to announce the addition of NTT DOCOMO’s original set of 176 emoji to the MoMA collection. Developed under the supervision of Shigetaka Kurita and released for cell phones in 1999, these 12 x 12 pixel humble masterpieces of design planted the seeds for the explosive growth of a new visual language.
From left: 1999 NTT DOCOMO emoji; 2016 iOS emoji
From its founding in 1991 by the Japanese national carrier Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, NTT DOCOMO was at the forefront of the burgeoning field of mobile communications. In keeping with Japan’s longstanding pioneering role in technological adoption, Japanese tech companies, and NTT DOCOMO in particular, were ahead of the curve in incorporating mobile Internet capabilities into cell phones. Early mobile devices, however, were rudimentary and visually unwieldy, capable of receiving only simple information about weather forecasts and basic text messaging. For the revolutionary “i-mode” mobile Internet software NTT DOCOMO was developing, a more compelling interface was needed. Shigetaka Kurita, who was a member of the i-mode development team, proposed a better way to incorporate images in the limited visual space available on cell phone screens. Released in 1999, Kurita’s 176 emoji (picture characters) were instantly successful and copied by rival companies in Japan. Twelve years later, when a far larger set was released for Apple’s iPhone, emoji burst into a new form of global digital communication.
Emoji tap into a long tradition of expressive visual language. Images and patterns have been incorporated within text since antiquity. From ancient examples to, more recently, the work of creative typesetters, these early specimens functioned as a means of augmenting both the expressive content of the text and the overall aesthetic quality of the printed page — and in some cases the icons were the language. With the advent of email in the 1970s and the subsequent evolution of concise, almost telegraphic correspondence, the conveyance of tone and emotion became both harder and more urgently important. Beginning in the 1980s, computer users in the West began composing emoticons to create simple faces out of preexisting glyphs — the ubiquitous smiley face :) is an example. In Japan, the larger character set necessitated by the language allowed for even more complicated images, giving rise to kaomoji, or picture faces, such as the now common shruggy: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. When combined with text, these simple images allow for more nuanced intonation. Filling in for body language, emoticons, kaomoji, and emoji reassert the human in the deeply impersonal, abstract space of electronic communication.
The transition from desktop to mobile platforms necessitated a further rethinking of the customs long associated with written correspondence. This was especially true in Japan, where the cultural necessity of exacting salutations and complex honorifics made early devices’ impractical for widespread adoption. Emoji were an ingenious shortcut around this and other problems. The release of NTT DOCOMO’s emoji contributed to a radical alteration in the way the Japanese communicated through mobile phones.
Working within the software and hardware limitations of the late 1990s, Kurita created his emoji on a small grid of 12 x 12 pixels. Drawing on sources as varied as manga, Zapf dingbats, and commonly used emoticons, Kurita designed a set of 176 emoji that included illustrations of weather phenomena, pictograms like the ♥, and a range of expressive faces. While successful, emoji remained a largely Japanese concern until 2010, when they were translated into Unicode. This development meant that a user in Japan could send an emoji to a user in France with the same basic image being represented on both ends. Google included emoji in its Gmail as early as in 2006, but it wasn’t until 2011, when Apple added emoji functionality to its iOS messaging app, that the emoji explosion began.
Shigetaka Kurita’s emoji are powerful manifestations of the capacity of design to alter human behavior. The design of a chair dictates our posture; so, too, does the format of electronic communication shape our voice. MoMA’s collection is filled with examples of design innovations that radically altered our world, from telephones to personal computers to the @ symbol. Today’s emoji (the current Unicode set numbers nearly 1,800) have evolved far beyond Kurita’s original 176 designs for NTT DOCOMO. However, the DNA for today’s set is clearly present in Kurita’s humble, pixelated, seminal emoji.
Emoji continue to grow in use across the world. To get a sense of just how rapidly they’re enmeshing themselves in contemporary discourse, check out Matthew Rothenberg’s bewildering emojitracker,
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well for the future of the program.
“I’ve always said that it’s not a question of ‘if’ we’re going to Mars, it’s really just a question of ‘when.’
NASA doesn’t actually intend to send humans to Mars until the mid- to late-2030s, meaning a mission of this magnitude won’t occur for at least 20 years. Perhaps this is why it seemed like there were so many moving pieces during the event. NASA does still have a decade or two to create some components, like the heat shield for the Mars lander, as well as a Mars ascent vehicle, which are still merely concepts.
Though the plan is far from complete, proving it has the capability to show something puts NASA on par with others embroiled in the race to Mars — even if the agency is thought to be bringing up the rear.
NASA representatives during the event were beyond enthusiastic about flinging open its doors and sharing an exclusive peek of this ambitious mission. One of these passionate employees was none other than astronaut Rick Mastracchio, whose impressive resume includes three NASA Space Shuttle missions — one of which he served as the mission’s Flight Engineer. Considering his reputation dates back to 1996, Mastracchio has seen many of NASA’s highs and lows, but feels particularly confident in its current focus on the red planet.
“I became an astronaut 20 years ago and we had big dreams back then, we were going to the Moon, we were going to go to Mars, NASA had big plans,” Mastracchio told Digital Trends in an exclusive interview. “Of course, as my career progressed, things happened. The Columbia accident, of course … we built the Space Station instead of going beyond low-Earth orbit [with] the NASA budget. So, I’m not surprised that we’re going to Mars, as I’ve always said that it’s not a question of ‘if’ we’re going to Mars, it’s really just a question of ‘when.'”
To indulge those in attendance about more of the “when,” NASA first treated the group with a trip to its massive Michoud Assembly Facility, a 2.2 million square foot facility that houses much of the space agency’s large-scale manufacturing and assembly capabilities. Located in the humid bayou climate, not far from countless New Orleans jazz bands, Michoud is an otherworldly spectacle in its own right. The facility houses throngs of unfathomably large pieces of hardware — i.e. a three-story, 150-ton friction-stir welding tool — which go a long way in helping an ordinary journalist gain an understanding of space travel’s immense scale.
Orion, the most advanced spacecraft ever
The first piece of future history we saw on our agency-guided tour of the facility was the Lockheed Martin-manufactured Orion spacecraft. Designed with long-duration deep space travel in mind, the Orion spacecraft is perhaps the most ambitious project native to NASA’s journey to Mars. Not only are Lockheed and NASA building the craft to house a team of astronauts for long periods of time — getting to (and from) Mars will likely take months — but it will also have the ability to land and relaunch from either the Moon or Mars as well. According to Rick Mastrecchio, pushing the limits of technology is critical in the mission to Mars.
“We need to be a multi-planet species.”
“We need to continue to push technology, we’re not just going to Mars to support a few people on the planet,” Mastrecchio continued. “The things that we learn on the way to Mars — the technologies we develop in terms of recycling water and air and things like that — those are technologies that can be used here on the planet. That’s one good reason to go, but also, we need to be a multi-planet species. We need to go to Mars eventually and it has to be a priority for us. It’s not going to be cheap but I think we need to start down that path.”
Initially traveling to space via the mammoth Space Launch System rocket, Orion is shaping up to be the most advanced spacecraft ever created. With 30 percent more habitable volume than Apollo — meaning up to four astronauts can travel comfortably inside — the craft also features redundant computer systems, software, and various life support devices capable of resisting long bouts of severe radiation. Furthermore, Lockheed is currently constructing its exterior structure to withstand micrometeoroid strikes, further increasing its durability while also improving the mission’s chance of success.
Though the craft itself is still only a collection of pieces at Michoud, its high level of quality is immediately apparent. From a mostly-constructed portion of Orion’s bulkhead to a completed cone-shaped adapter, much of Lockheed’s innovative project was on display at Michoud, though full versions of the craft are now making their way to Kennedy Space Center for rigorous testing.
After getting an up close and personal view of the Orion spacecraft, Michoud facility members whisked us away to an utterly jaw-dropping section of the premises: a daunting, mammoth, 210 ft. high Vertical Assembly Building where NASA will construct portions of the Space Launch System.
Though NASA didn’t actually show off any part of the Space Launch System being constructed inside the manufacturing facility, getting a peek at where the future assembly will take place again helped us understand the mission’s scale. To give you an idea of the relative size of the SLS, it will be so tall that it could touch the ceiling, meaning NASA has to piece it together in parts. Even a 210 ft. tall building isn’t tall enough to house the largest rocket ever created.
Up the road to Stennis Space Center
Not content to show us just one space center in a day, NASA loaded us onto a motorcade of buses and shuttled everyone to the Stennis Space Center. Stennis is enormous, so large that it has its very own ZIP code — even though zero people actually live in the area. Getting from one side to the other takes 15 minutes by bus.
Our initial tour at Michoud showed off the Orion spacecraft and the facility where NASA’s SLS rocket was to be assembled, but Stennis was all about rockets. It housed AeroJet RocketDyne, the company responsible for manufacturing SLS’s rocket engines: the RS-25. With a production time of roughly 18 months, the SLS program will make use of a staggering 16 engines for its trip to Mars — four engines for each of the four planned missions, with the first of these missions coming in 2018.
The ferocity of the steam escaping the test stand was unlike anything we’d ever seen before; it was utterly fascinating.
Powerful hardly comes close to describing the RS-25 engine, but it’s certainly a good start. Boasting roughly 500,000 lbs. of thrust, each RS-25 engine can burn around 1,500 lbs. of fuel per second. Once all four are attached to the SLS rocket and begin firing, a whopping 2 million lbs. of thrust will be generated. During its presentation, AeroJet RocketDyne boasted about its previous tests saying its engine has the capability of running at 111 percent — literally dialed to 11 — and that the engine test scheduled for later that afternoon would demonstrate this.
After explaining the ins and outs of its day-to-day rocket production, AeroJet RocketDyne decided to enlighten the attending crew with perhaps the next best thing to seeing the test: taking a look at the engines in person. A guided tour through its manufacturing facility provided an up close and personal view of many of the RS-25s slated for use on the SLS program. Unfortunately, photos were prohibited, but take our word for it, the engines are marvels and are absolutely jaw-dropping.
And finally, the engine test
With several hours of facility tours, bus rides, and sticky New Orleans heat already in the books, it was finally time for NASA to crank up the intensity. After bussing us to Stennis Space Center’s B-2 Test Stand, NASA shuffled everyone to where we’d actually witness the rocket show some 1,000 feet away.
With nary a rocket launch or similar test under our belt, we weren’t the least bit prepared for what await us as NASA’s test clock ticked down to :00. Unlike typical launches — or those you see in Hollywood flicks — after the loud speaker announced the 10-second countdown, there were no subsequent “nine, eight, seven,” notifications. What actually happened was a 10-second silence followed by a few hundred jaws hitting the floor as an incredibly powerful blast of steam came charging out of the test bay almost unannounced.
One of the engineers — with a smile on his face — said some people prefer engine tests to actual launches because of the longevity of the test. An actual rocket launch, no matter how sensational it is, fades from view in minutes; an engine test just keeps firing. In the case of the RS-25 on display at Stennis this day, the engine fired for just shy of five solid minutes.
Even from 1,000 feet away, the ground beneath us shook as NASA dialed the engine from 109 to 111 percent and back again. The ferocity of the steam escaping the test stand was unlike anything we’d ever seen before; it was utterly fascinating. As the test came to a close, it became apparent why the AeroJet employee posited that some may prefer engine tests over launches. Then again, we wouldn’t mind watching an actual rocket launch for a fair comparison.
What’s up NASA’s sleeve?
NASA’s event certainly didn’t answer every question you might have about the mission. Though some of the “how” was fleshed out in the form of the Orion spacecraft, the revolutionary RS-25 engines, and a host of other projects (big and small) currently in the works, there’s a lot of work to be done.
Some folks shrugged at the agency’s initial 36-page report last October, but one thing is now crystal clear: NASA is going to Mars, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. If we’re lucky, it may not take as long as we think.
Update: NASA is committed to going to Mars in December 2019.So we’re coming up on the close of my first week with the Oculus Rift DK2 and more and more people are receiving their units, hungry for stuff to play on the thing. Early adopters have had to be patient as developers adapt their application to DK2’s launch SDK, version 0.4.0 beta – the component which held back delivery of the DK2 recently.
Last week we asked you what you’d like to see us try on Oculus’ new VR headset. It’s fair to say that Elite: Dangerous featured pretty heavily in the responses, you can find my video playtest of that here. I also tried to answer as many questions as I could in this in-depth review. But there’s no doubt that Senza Peso featured pretty heavily in the requests we received. With that in mind, we got in touch with Kite & Lightning, Senza Peso’s developers – and they were kind enough to send us a very early version built with DK2 support, including positional tracking.
So what’s it like? Check out the video above for my thoughts in motion. In short it’s Senza Peso, but even better. The majority of the enhancements to this on-rails mini-epic are subtle but hugely important overall. Positional tracking is implemented, so motion cues made by your head are captured and rendered almost completely transparently. And SP’s deft use of particle effects in particular sell the virtual world’s depth to your brain much more effectively. And I can honestly say I’ve never been so distracted by dust motes in my life. But it’s the overall upgrade in experience that makes you feel as if the artistry on show here is being done justice.
As of now, DK2 support has not been released officially by Kite & Lightning, but the team say they’re planning a finalised version with DK2 support this month. If you’d like access to the new version, sign up here.
Also check out Ben’s original review of Senza Peso here.National Reconnaissance Office
NRO headquarters at night Agency overview Formed Established: September 6, 1961 ( )
Declassified: September 18, 1992 ( ) Jurisdiction United States Headquarters Chantilly, Virginia, U.S. Motto Supra Et Ultra
(Above And Beyond) Annual budget Classified Agency executives Betty J. Sapp [1], Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (DNRO)
, Susan S. Gibson, Inspector General
Frank Calvelli, Principal Deputy Director of the NRO (PDDNRO)
Maj. General Stephen T. Denker, Deputy Director of the NRO (DDNRO) Parent agency Department of Defense Website www.nro.gov
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is a member of the United States Intelligence Community and an agency of the United States Department of Defense. NRO is considered, along with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), to be one of the "big five" U.S. intelligence agencies.[2] The NRO is headquartered in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia,[3] 2 miles (3.2 km) south of Washington Dulles International Airport.
It designs, builds, and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the U.S. federal government, and provides satellite intelligence to several government agencies, particularly signals intelligence (SIGINT) to the NSA, imagery intelligence (IMINT) to the NGA, and measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) to the DIA.[4]
The Director of the NRO reports to both the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense[5] and serves in an additional capacity as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force (Intelligence Space Technology). The NRO's federal workforce consists primarily of Air Force, CIA, NGA, NSA, and Navy personnel.[6] A 1996 bipartisan commission report described the NRO as having by far the largest budget of any intelligence agency, and "virtually no federal workforce", accomplishing most of its work through "tens of thousands" of defense contractor personnel.[7]
Mission [ edit ]
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) develops and operates space reconnaissance systems and conducts intelligence-related activities for U.S. national security.[8]
It also coordinates collection and analysis of information from airplane and satellite reconnaissance by the military services and the Central Intelligence Agency.[9] It is funded through the National Reconnaissance Program, which is part of the National Intelligence Program (formerly known as the National Foreign Intelligence Program). The agency is part of the Department of Defense.
The NRO works closely with its intelligence and space partners, which include the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the United States Strategic Command, Naval Research Laboratory and other agencies and organizations.
It has been proposed that the NRO share imagery of the United States itself with the National Applications Office for domestic law enforcement.[10] The NRO operates ground stations around the world that collect and distribute intelligence gathered from reconnaissance satellites.
According to Asia Times Online, one important mission of NRO satellites is the tracking of non-US submarines on patrol or on training missions in the world's oceans and seas.[11]
History [ edit ]
Close-up of Atlas 501 payload fairing with NROL-41 satellite (poster commemorating 50 years of NRO).
Serum and Vaccine Institute in Al-A'amiriya, Iraq, as imaged by a US reconnaissance satellite in November 2002.
US Satellite imagery of Syrian tanks departing Da'el in Daraa province after several days of assaults against the town in April 2012.
The NRO was established on August 25, 1960, after management problems and insufficient progress with the USAF satellite reconnaissance program (see SAMOS and MIDAS).[12]:23[13] The formation was based on a 25 August 1960 recommendation to President Dwight D. Eisenhower during a special National Security Council meeting, and the agency was to coordinate the USAF and CIA's (and later the navy and NSA's) reconnaissance activities.[12]:46
The NRO's first photo reconnaissance satellite program was the Corona program,[14]:25–28 the existence of which was declassified February 24, 1995, and which existed from August 1960 to May 1972 (although the first test flight occurred on February 28, 1959). The Corona system used (sometimes multiple) film capsules dropped by satellites, which were recovered mid-air by military craft. The first successful recovery from space (Discoverer XIII) occurred on August 12, 1960, and the first image from space was seen six days later. The first imaging resolution was 8 meters, which was improved to 2 meters. Individual images covered, on average, an area of about 10 by 120 miles (16 by 193 km). The last Corona mission (the 145th), was launched May 25, 1972, and this mission's last images were taken May 31, 1972. From May 1962 to August 1964, the NRO conducted 12 mapping missions as part of the "Argon" system. Only seven were successful.[14]:25–28 In 1963, the NRO conducted a mapping mission using higher resolution imagery, as part of the "Lanyard" program. The Lanyard program flew one successful mission.[citation needed] NRO missions since 1972 are classified, and portions of many earlier programs remain unavailable to the public.
Existence [ edit ]
The first press reports on NRO started in 1971.[15] The first official acknowledgement of NRO was a Senate committee report in October 1973, which inadvertently exposed the existence of the NRO.[16] In 1985, a New York Times article revealed details on the operations of the NRO.[17]
The existence of the NRO was declassified on September 18, 1992, by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, as recommended by the Director of Central Intelligence.[18]
Funding controversy [ edit ]
A Washington Post article in September 1995 reported that the NRO had quietly hoarded between $1 billion and $1.7 billion in unspent funds without informing the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, or Congress. The CIA was in the midst of an inquiry into the NRO's funding because of complaints that the agency had spent $300 million of hoarded funds from its classified budget to build a new headquarters building in Chantilly, Virginia, a year earlier.
In total, NRO had accumulated US$3.8 billion (inflation adjusted US$ 6.2 billion in 2019) in forward funding. As a consequence, NRO's three distinct accounting systems were merged.[19]
The presence of the classified new headquarters was revealed by the Federation of American Scientists who obtained unclassified copies of the blueprints filed with the building permit application. After 9/11 those blueprints were apparently classified. The reports of an NRO slush fund were true. According to former CIA general counsel Jeffrey Smith, who led the investigation: "Our inquiry revealed that the NRO had for years accumulated very substantial amounts as a 'rainy day fund.'"[20]
Future Imagery Architecture [ edit ]
In 1999 the NRO embarked on a $25 billion[21] project with Boeing entitled Future Imagery Architecture to create a new generation of imaging satellites. In 2002 the project was far behind schedule and would most likely cost $2 billion to $3 billion more than planned, according to NRO records. The government pressed forward with efforts to complete the project, but after two more years, several more review panels and billions more in expenditures, the project was killed in what the Times report calls "perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects."[22]
In what the government described as a bizarre coincidence, the NRO was planning an exercise on September 11, 2001, involving an accidental aircraft crash into one of its buildings.[23] They planned to simulate the crash by closing off an area of doors and stairwells in the building to make employees find alternate routes out. This has been cited by 9/11 conspiracy theorists as proof of their beliefs.[24] During the attacks most of the employees at NRO headquarters were evacuated, save for essential personnel.[23] In charge of the exercise was CIA man John Fulton, head of the NRO's Strategic War Gaming Division.[23] [See below.]
Mid 2000s to present [ edit ]
In January 2008, the government announced that a reconnaissance satellite operated by the NRO would make an unplanned and uncontrolled re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere in the next several months. Satellite watching hobbyists said that it was likely the USA-193, built by Lockheed Martin Corporation, which failed shortly after achieving orbit in December 2006.[25] On February 14, 2008, the Pentagon announced that rather than allowing the satellite to make an uncontrolled re-entry, it would instead be shot down by a missile fired from a Navy cruiser.[26] The intercept took place on February 21, 2008.[27]
In July 2008, the NRO declassified the existence of its Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites, citing difficulty in discussing the creation of the Space-Based Radar with the United States Air Force and other entities.[28]
In August 2009, FOIA archives were queried for a copy of the NRO video, "Satellite Reconnaissance: Secret Eyes in Space." [29] The 7 minute video chronicles the early days of the NRO and many of its early programs.
At the National Space Symposium in April 2010 NRO director, General Bruce Carlson, USAF (Ret.) announced that till the end of 2011 NRO is embarking on "the most aggressive launch schedule that this organization has undertaken in the last twenty-five years. There are a number of very large and very critical reconnaissance satellites that will go into orbit in the next year to a year and a half."[30]
In 2012, a McClatchy investigation found that the NRO was possibly breaching ethical and legal boundaries by encouraging its polygraph examiners to extract personal and private information from DoD personnel during polygraph tests that were purported to be limited to counterintelligence issues.[31] Allegations of abusive polygraph practices were brought forward by former NRO polygraph examiners.[32] In 2014, an inspector general's report concluded that NRO failed to report felony admissions of child sexual abuse to law enforcement authorities. NRO obtained these criminal admissions during polygraph testing but never forwarded the information to police. NRO's failure to act in the public interest by reporting child sexual predators was first made public in 2012 by former NRO polygraph examiners.[33]
Organization [ edit ]
NRO Organizational Chart (Sep. 2010)
The NRO is part of the Department of Defense. The Director of the NRO is appointed by the Secretary of Defense with the consent of the Director of National Intelligence, without confirmation from Congress. Traditionally, the position was given to either the Under Secretary of the Air Force or the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space, but with the appointment of Donald Kerr as Director of the NRO in July 2005 the position is now independent. The Agency is organized as follows:[34]
Principal Deputy Director of the NRO (PDDNRO)
Reports to and coordinates with the DNRO on all NRO activities and handles the daily management of the NRO with decision responsibility as delegated by the DNRO; and,
In the absence of the Director, acts on behalf of the DNRO.
Deputy Director of the NRO (DDNRO)
Senior USAF general officer. Represents those civilian/uniformed USAF personnel assigned to the NRO;
Assists both the DNRO and PDDNRO in the daily direction of the NRO; and,
Coordinates activities between the USAF and the NRO.
The Corporate Staff
Encompasses all those support functions such as legal, diversity, human resources, security/counter-intelligence, procurement, public affairs, etc. necessary for the day-to-day operation of the NRO and in support of the DNRO, PDNRO, and DDNRO.
Office of Space Launch (OSL)
Responsible for all aspects of a satellite launch including launch vehicle hardware, launch services integration, mission assurance, operations, transportation, and mission safety; and,
OSL is NRO's launch representative with industry, the USAF, and NASA.
Advanced Systems and Technology Directorate (AS&T)
Invents and delivers advanced technologies;
Develops new sources and methods; and,
Enables multi-intelligence solutions.
Deputy Director for Business Plans and Operations (BPO)
Responsible for all financial and, budgetary aspects of NRO programs and operations; and,
Coordinates all legislative, international, and public affairs communications.
Communications Systems Acquisition Directorate (COMM)
Supports the NRO by providing communications services through physical and virtual connectivity; and,
Enables the sharing of mission critical information with mission partners and customers.
Ground Enterprise Directorate (GED)
Provides an integrated ground system that sends timely information to users worldwide.
Imagery Intelligence Systems Acquisition Directorate (IMINT)
Responsible for acquiring NRO's technologically advanced imagery collection systems, which provides geospatial intelligence data to the Intelligence Community and the military.
Management Services and Operations (MS&O)
Provides services such as facilities support, transportation and warehousing, logistics, and other business support, which the NRO needs to operate on a daily basis.
Mission Operations Directorate (MOD)
Operates, maintains and reports the status of NRO satellites and their associated ground systems;
Manages the 24-hour NRO Operations Center (NROC) which, working with U.S Strategic Command, provides defensive space control and space protection, monitors satellite flight safety, and provides space situational awareness.
Mission Support Directorate (MSD)
Engages with users of NRO systems to understand their operational and intelligence problems and provide solutions in collaboration with NRO's mission partners.
Signals Intelligence Systems Acquisition Directorate (SIGINT)
This directorate builds and deploys NRO's signals intelligence satellite systems that collect communication, electronic, and foreign instrumentation signals intelligence.
Systems Engineering Directorate (SED)
Provides beginning-to-end systems engineering for all of NRO's systems.
Personnel [ edit ]
In 2007, the NRO described itself as "a hybrid organization consisting of some 3,000 personnel and jointly staffed by members of the armed services, the Central Intelligence Agency and DOD civilian personnel."[35] Between 2010 and 2012, the workforce is expected to increase by 100.[36] The majority of workers for the NRO are private corporate contractors, with $7 billion of the agency's $8 billion budget going to private corporations.[14]:178
Budget [ edit ]
NRO budget FY 2004 to 2013
The NRO derives its funding both from the US intelligence budget and the military budget. In 1971, the annual budget was estimated to be around $1 billion (inflation adjusted $ 6.2 billion in 2019).[15] A 1975 report by Congress's Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy states that the NRO had "the largest budget of any intelligence agency".[17] By 1994, the annual budget had risen to $6 billion (inflation adjusted $ 10.1 billion in 2019),[37] and for 2010 it is estimated to amount to $15 billion (inflation adjusted $ 17.2 billion in 2019).[38] This would correspond to 19% of the overall US intelligence budget of $80 billion for FY2010.[39] For Fiscal Year 2012 the budget request for science and technology included an increase to almost 6% (about $600 million) of the NRO budget after it had dropped to just about 3% of the overall budget in the years before.[36]
NRO directives and instructions [ edit ]
Under the Freedom of Information Act the NRO declassified a list of their secret directives for internal use. The following is a list of the released directives, which are available for download:
NROD 10-2 – "National Reconnaissance Office External Management Policy"
NROD 10-4 – "National Reconnaissance Office Sensitive Activities Management Group"
NROD 10-5 – "Office of Corporate System Engineer Charter"
NROD 22-1 – "Office of Inspector General"
NROD 22-2 – "Employee Reports of Urgent Concerns to Congress"
NROD 22-3 – "Obligations to report evidence of Possible Violations of Federal Criminal Law and Illegal Intelligence Activities"
NROD 50-1 – "Executive Order 12333 – Intelligence Activities Affecting United States Persons"
NROD 61-1 – "NRO Internet Policy, Information Technology"
NROD 82-1a – "NRO Space Launch Management"
NROD 110-2 – "National Reconnaissance Office Records and Information Management Program"
NROD 120-1 – The NRO Military Uniform Wear Policy
NROD 120-2 – "The NRO Awards and Recognition Programs"
NROD 120-3 – "Executive Secretarial Panel"
NROD 120-4 – "National Reconnaissance Pioneer Recognition Program"
NROD 120-5 – "National Reconnaissance Office Utilization of the Intergovernmental Personnel Act Mobility Program"
NROD 121-1 – "Training of NRO Personnel"
NROI 150-4 – "Prohibited Items in NRO Headquarters Buildings/Property"
Strategic War Gaming Division [ edit ]
According to a pamphlet advertising a security conference in 2002, the NRO has a Strategic Wargaming Division, then headed by John Fulton, who was "on staff for the CIA".[40]
Technology [ edit ]
NRO's technology is likely more advanced than its civilian equivalents. In the 1980s the NRO had satellites and software that were capable of determining the exact dimensions of a tank gun.[17] In 2012 the agency donated two space telescopes to NASA. Despite being stored unused, the instruments are superior to the Hubble Space Telescope. One journalist observed, "If telescopes of this caliber are languishing on shelves, imagine what they're actually using."[41]
Spacecraft [ edit ]
KH-9 Hexagon during integration at Lockheed
The NRO maintains four main satellite constellations[42]:
NRO SIGINT constellation
NRO GEOINT constellation
NRO Communications Relay constellation
NRO Reconnaissance constellation
The NRO spacecraft include:[43]
GEOINT imaging [ edit ]
GEOINT radar [ edit ]
SIGINT [ edit ]
Space communications [ edit ]
Quasar, communications relay [43]
, communications relay NROL-1 through NROL-66 – various secret satellites. NROL stands for National Reconnaissance Office Launch.
This list is likely to be incomplete, given the classified nature of many NRO spacecraft.
NMIS network [ edit ]
The NRO Management Information System (NMIS) is a computer network used to distribute NRO data classified as Top Secret. It is also known as the Government Wide Area Network (GWAN).[46]
Locations [ edit ]
NRO ground station at Buckley Air Force Base, Aurora, CO
In October 2008, NRO declassified five mission ground stations: three in the United States, near Washington, D.C.; Aurora, Colorado; and Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a presence at RAF Menwith Hill, UK, and at the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, Australia.
In popular culture [ edit ]
The NRO is featured in Dan Brown's novel Deception Point.
Image gallery [ edit ]
NRO Organization, circa 1971
NRO Organization, circa 2009
Patch commemorating launch of a classified payload
The official mission patch from Launch-39
National Reconnaissance Operations Center
ADF-East Logo
ADF-Southwest Logo
ADF-Colorado Logo
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:You ever notice how no one in movies just happens to be pregnant? It’s always part of the plot somehow; usually, it’s what the movie is about. If a woman is pregnant in a comedy, you can be fairly sure that there will be a near-birth in a taxi involved, no matter where the woman lives. (I can probably count the total number of taxi rides I’ve taken in my life on two hands.) If it’s a horror movie, that pregnancy is going to get tangled up in the horror somehow. If it’s a drama, the conflict is probably going to involve how her pregnancy influences the relationships around her. Even in the background, movies don’t tend to let women just be pregnant.
During the Code, that was pretty much literally true. Joe Breen had a Thing about pregnancy, just as he did about flushing toilets and babies wearing nothing over their diapers, and pregnancy got cut out of stories right and left. Rose-of-Sharon Joad doesn’t have her baby in The Grapes of Wrath, although that may well be to lighten the political message in the transition from book to film. Still, the closest most movie women got to pregnancy for decades was knitting booties at the end of the picture; the word was never spoken.
One of the only movies I can name where the main character is allowed to just be pregnant while getting on about the entire rest of the plot is Fargo. Marge Gunderson, as played by Frances McDormand, is completely matter-of-fact about her pregnancy (“carryin’ quite a load, here”), but aside from a near miss with nausea at one point, it doesn’t stop her from doing her job. (And Gods bless the Coens, incidentally, for showing nausea after the first trimester; I’ve read about women who only stopped having “morning sickness” when they went into labor.) She’s waddling her way through the case, but she solves it. Admittedly, she might have caught Jerry if she still could have run, but only maybe.
This is all more to do with the visibility of women and women’s issues on screen. And, in a perverse way, illness—just as no one ever has a cough in the movies unless they’re going to die of it, no one is pregnant unless that’s what the movie is about. There are exceptions, but not a lot. Pregnancy is an abnormality. To the extent that it is, in Prometheus, possibly to buy a fancy medical bed at all that doesn’t know how to perform a c-section—or an abortion. Sure, the character who bought it is never going to need either, but why does the company sell systems like that? Is it really that expensive to program in gynecological and obstetrical care that you have to pay extra for one that can do it?
Sure, you see more pregnancies than periods; women don’t even seem to buy pads in movies, though they sure can have PMS in bad comedies. And I can imagine being an extra would be pretty grueling for a woman who was actually pregnant, and you probably wouldn’t keep one of those fake-pregnancy suits around just to make sure that you’ve got a pregnant woman in the background for realism. Then again, why not, especially in movies where characters are in elementary school or younger? There’s almost invariably at least one pregnant lady walking around parent-teacher night.
I don’t know; maybe it would be better if there were more women in film just in general. If fifty percent of the background characters were female, it would start being really obvious that none of them were ever pregnant, you’d hope. Still, a teacher of mine from high school once ruefully observed that the two most realistic births she’d ever seen on television were on Murphy Brown—and Quantum Leap. I’m tempted to ask, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t add many to the list, even today.Pin Yum 7K Shares
I’m pretty sure I don’t have to twist your arm to try this one! Slightly sweet, slightly salty, peanut butter with raisins mixed in for good measure! This cinnamon raisin peanut butter is everything I love in one jar!
I always get a little sad when I walk down the nut butter aisle of the grocery store, especially if it is a “specialty store” where I’m expected to spend $7-$12 on peanut butter. And all the flavors sound so good, White Chocolate, Dark Chocolate, Cookie infused heaven. Ok maybe I made the last one up, but really how’s a girl going to save money this way?
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So I did what I always do, ventured out to make my own! Have you tried the dark chocolate peanut butter yet? I just love making it homemade! The plus side is I can make as much as I want and I can control the ingredients. The downside, I can make as much of this as I want… very dangerous if you know me 🙂 Luckily I’ve been able to keep my spoon from directly diving into this jar every time I open the fridge (it’s like every other time, just being honest here). But this cinnamon raisin peanut butter is so good, it can’t be wrong!
When Dave and I first started dating, I made some smart remark about not being able to trust someone that didn’t like sushi (Dave doesn’t like sushi just FYI), and he quickly responded back “I don’t trust someone that doesn’t like peanut butter”. Well ladies and gentlemen, that just sealed the deal for me 😉 I know I’m so easy to win over 🙂 I digress. Needless to say, we make a ton of homemade nut butters here. This has been my most recent obsession. Let’s make it yours too!
Here is a quick tip. Check the ingredients on your peanuts, especially the “dry roasted” ones! I made the mistake of not checking and one of the containers I brought home had a mix of spices like onion power and garlic powder on them. Not good peanut butter there! Just wanted to save you from that confusion! I picked my peanuts up at Target for about $5 for a big container. I try to stock up when they are on sale 🙂 Trader Joe’s has a good selection as well!
See how easy it is to make this Cinnamon Raisin Peanut butter!
Cinnamon Raisin Peanut Butter Creamy dreamy cinnamon raisin peanut butter is ready in under 5 minutes and can disappear just as quickly if you are a peanut butter lover like me! This has no added sugar or oil, and cost about $1.50 to make. Talk about budget friendly! 5 from 1 vote Print Pin Prep Time: 10 minutes Total Time: 10 minutes Servings: 6 Calories: 230 kcal Author: Bites of Wellness Ingredients 1 cup salted peanuts I used Planters
1/2 cup unsalted dry roasted peanuts I used Planters
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. stevia I used SweetLeaf
2 tbs. raisins Instructions In a
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) is just as dangerous as her male counterpart and yet she is protected by prevailing stereotypes of the “gentle young girl,” the “maternal mother,” the “sweet old grandmother,” or minimized by archetypes like the “catty best friend.” No one suspects the older woman, assumed to be nurturing and sweet, to be vindictive, cruel and ruthless. Nor do they expect mothers to abandon, neglect or abuse their children.
Yet what happens when the catty best friend from middle school becomes the conniving co-worker in the corporate world, employing underhanded tactics to sabotage her colleagues? Or when the demented narcissistic mother drives her adult children to suicide after years of chronic childhood abuse? Or when the malignant narcissistic girlfriend uses her harem of male admirers to terrorize her significant other?
Female narcissists do not “grow out” of their childhood aggression; eerily enough, they evolve into even more effective aggressive behaviors in adulthood, using their manipulative tactics to serve their selfish agendas and to exploit others.
While it has been estimated that 75% of narcissists are male, this may be due to a bias of women being more likely to be labeled as borderline or histrionic; it may also be due to confusion resulting from differing presentations of certain disorders due to gendered socialization (Sansone & Sansone, 2011). It’s becoming clearer from survivor stories, however, that there are a far greater number of female narcissists than one would assume.
Female narcissists, especially if they also possess antisocial traits, can cause just as much psychological harm as male malignant narcissists. Here are the top 4 traits and behaviors to watch out for if you suspect someone might be a malignant narcissist and some tips on how to cope:
1. A sadistic sense of pleasure at someone else’s pain.
Perhaps one of the most understated qualities of the female malignant narcissist is the pleasure and joy she takes in bringing down others. She enjoys making covert jabs and watching gleefully as the formerly confident victim looks crestfallen, shocked and offended. She displays a lack of empathy when the conversation turns to more serious emotional matters, engaging in shallow responses or cruel reprimands that invalidate her victim’s reality.
She is ruthless in her ability to first idealize, then devalue and discard her victims without a second thought. She cannot engage in healthy, emotionally fulfilling relationships, so she enjoys sabotaging the relationships and friendships of others for her own personal entertainment.
2. An insatiable sense of competitiveness, due to pathological envy and the need to be the center of attention.
Relational aggression is thought to be a more common method of bullying among girls, who are socialized to be less physically expressive in their aggression than their male counterparts. The female malignant narcissist is no different; in fact, perhaps some of her most abusive tactics are deployed in the realm of female friendships.
In her group of female friends, the female malignant narcissist scopes out who is a threat and who is a blind follower. Those who threaten the female narcissist in any way (whether it be through their success, appearance, personality, resources, status, desirability or all of the above) must be extinguished, while those who are obedient will be kept around until their resources have been sufficiently depleted.
Those who present a threat are initially placed on a pedestal to keep up appearances in the social circle, but later set up to fail and promptly thrust off. The malignant female narcissist’s starry-eyed admiration of her target is soon revealed to bear an undercurrent of contempt, envy and rage. As psychotherapist Christine Louis de Canonville puts it, “When it comes to envy, there is no one more envious than the narcissistic woman.”
The female narcissist may use her affiliation with her target to gain access to resources or status, but as soon as the idealization phase is over, the devaluation and discard follows. She then engages in rumor-mongering, smear campaigns and creates ‘triangles’ where she feeds others false or humiliating information about the victim. She may pit her friends against each other by claiming that they are gossiping about one another, when in fact, it is her falsehoods that are actually manufacturing conflict within the group. By subjecting her victims to covert and overt put-downs, she is able to then confirm her own false sense of superiority.
You are probably dealing with a female narcissist or sociopath in your group of female friends if:
You notice an uncomfortable silence, a covert exchange of looks or odd energy when you enter the room. The friend who is overly friendly in contrast, happens to be the very person who is speaking about you behind your back.
You are idealized by your female friend, sweet-talked, admired, praised and shown off in the beginning of the friendship. You might have found yourself sharing your most intimate secrets early on, due to her disarmingly sweet and trustworthy demeanor. Later, you find yourself being excluded by them in group conversations, social events or invites. You hear about your deepest secrets being spoken about with derision among the group or rumors based on vulnerabilities and fears you confided in your friend about. You also notice a chilling smugness when your female friend talks down to you or as she devalues your accomplishments.
You bear witness to the narcissistic female friend frequently speaking ill of your other friends in an excessively contemptuous tone, while appearing friendly and engaging with them in public. This is evidence of her duplicity and ability to deceive. An authentic person might vent about others occasionally in the event of stress or conflict, but would not engage in excessive gossip or indiscriminate character assassination. He or she would be more likely to cut ties with those they thought were toxic or address it to them directly rather than bashing them unnecessarily. Make no mistake, the way they’re speaking about others is the way they’ll eventually speak about you.
3. An obsession with her appearance as well as a high level of materialism and superficiality; this could also translate into a haughty sense of intellectual superiority, if the narcissist in question is more cerebral than somatic.
As Christine Hammond, LMHC (2015), notes in her article, The Difference Between Male and Female Narcissists, the female narcissist “battles with other females for dominance” and while male narcissists use their charm along with their appearance to achieve their goals, “females use it to gain superiority.”
Female narcissists fit the ‘femme fatale’ stereotype quite well. Many of them are conventionally attractive and, much like the male somatic narcissist, use their sexuality to their advantage. Since females in our society are also socialized to objectify themselves, the female narcissist follows this social norm to use whatever physical assets she has to assert her power.
Hammond (2015) also observes that while males are more likely to obtain money, female narcissists tend to excessively spend it. This may result in a highly materialistic female narcissist who enjoys adorning herself with the best designer clothing, indulging in luxuries at the expense of her loved ones or allowing herself to be excessively catered to by a wealthy significant other. Female narcissists can also accumulate their own wealth and use it as an indication of her superiority as well.
For the more cerebral narcissist, the female in question might use her accumulation of credentials, degrees, and accomplishments to control and terrorize others. For example, a narcissistic female professor may routinely subject her students to hypercriticism, bullying and cruel taunts under the guise of “constructive criticism,” usually targeting her most talented and brilliant female students in the classroom. This is because, despite her own expertise and position of power, she is still threatened by any other female whose intellect might surpass hers.
4. A blatant disregard for the boundaries of intimate relationships, including her own.
In keeping with typical narcissistic behavior regardless of gender, the female narcissist is likely to have a harem of admirers – consisting of exes that never seem to go away, admirers who always seem to lurk in the background and complete strangers she ensnares into her web to evoke jealousy in her romantic partner. She frequently creates love triangles with her significant other and other males (or females, depending on her sexual orientation). She rejoices in male attention and boasts about being the object of desire. She engages in emotional and/or physical infidelity, usually without remorse and with plenty of gaslighting and deception directed at her partner, who usually dotes on her and spoils her, unaware of the extent of her disloyalty.
She also crosses the boundaries of her female friendships by attempting to “make a move” on the partners of her friends. She is disappointed and envious when her “seduction” falls flat or when her friends enjoy more attention from their partners than she does. To a baffled outsider, a female narcissist’s betrayal is incredibly hurtful and traumatizing – but to the observant eye, it is a clear sign of how far the female narcissist’s pathological sense of entitlement goes.
I suspect I am dealing with a female narcissist. Now what?
If you are dealing with a female malignant narcissist in a friendship, relationship or in the workplace, be on guard. Remember that they can “turn” at any moment, so don’t be fooled into thinking you will ever be the exception to their interpersonal exploitation. If you are dealing with one in the workplace, stick to e-mail or small talk that can be easily documented. Do not reveal personal information in the early stages of a budding relationship that can later be used against you.
If a female narcissist wants to spend all her time with you and is pressuring you to spend time with them constantly, minimize communication and slow things down. According to life coach Wendy Powell (2015), this can be an excellent way to discourage narcissists from dating you as well. In addition, it can reveal her ‘true self’ more quickly, whether in a relationship or friendship. A female narcissist’s response to your boundaries will tell you all that you need to know. Most narcissists cannot stand to be ignored; they feel entitled to your constant attention, so they will continue to make persistent efforts until they get it or attempt to sabotage you if they fail.
If you notice that a female friend of yours tends to spread rumors or engages in malicious gossip, try to cut the interaction short and excuse yourself – remember that the toxic person will try to convince others that you are the one speaking ill of them, so anything you say in agreement can and will be used against you.
Stay calm whenever a female narcissist tries to provoke you; your indifference and courage in the face of their threats or insults is actually your greatest ‘tool’ against their tactics. It unsettles them when a target is not so easily rattled, because that means there is something more powerful about their victim than they expected.
If you’re being smeared by a female narcissist, calmly state the facts of the situation to your friends and take note as to who stands up for you and who believes in the female narcissist.
Remember that in the presence of a persuasive narcissist or sociopath, there will always be a few people who are fooled. Do not waste your energy on trying to convince them; if they are that easily fooled by someone else’s claims rather than your track record of loyalty and support, they do not deserve your friendship. You’ll find that they will uncover the truth for themselves eventually – and even if they continue to enable the narcissist’s behavior, they still get the short end of the stick because they chose the fake friend who can turn on them at any point.
Detach from the narcissist’s harem and stick with the people who do support and defend you. Do not be swayed by flattery or charm in the early stages of any interaction – if it is genuine, it will be given as positive feedback throughout your friendship or relationship and you will not be blindsided by a sudden personality transplant.
Remember that a narcissist’s greatest fears are exposure and a victim that they cannot control. So long as you are deeply grounded in your own self-validation, any narcissist – whether male or female – cannot truly use the threat of tarnishing your reputation or friendships against you, because they know you will see any loss of such disloyal friends as a gain. They also know that deep down, while they will spend their entire lives trying to protect their false image, your own integrity will continue to speak for itself.
References
Bressert, S. (2016). Antisocial Personality Disorder Symptoms. Psych Central. Retrieved on May 18, 2017, from https://psychcentral.com/disorders/antisocial-personality-disorder-symptoms/
Centifanti, L. C. M., Fanti, K. A., Thomson, N. D., Demetriou, V., & Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous, X. (2015). Types of Relational Aggression in Girls Are Differentiated by Callous-Unemotional Traits, Peers and Parental Overcontrol. Behavioral Sciences, 5(4), 518–536. http://doi.org/10.3390/bs5040518
De Canonville, C. L. (2014, November 10). The typical narcissistic woman as friend. Retrieved July 24, 2017, from http://narcissisticbehavior.net/the-typical-narcissistic-woman-as-a-friend/
Hammond, C. (2015, July 2). The difference between male and female narcissists. Retrieved July 24, 2017, from https://pro.psychcentral.com/exhausted-woman/2015/07/the-difference-between-male-and-female-narcissists/
Lancer, D. (2016, November 10). Are you dealing with a sociopath or a narcissist? Retrieved July 24, 2017, from https://psychcentral.com/lib/are-you-dealing-with-a-sociopath-or-a-narcissist/
Powell, W. (2015, February 3). 10 ways to discourage narcissists from dating you. Retrieved July 24, 2017, from https://wendypowell.ca/2015/02/03/10-ways-to-discourage-narcissists-from-dating-you-2/
Sansone, R. A., & Sansone, L. A. (2011). Gender Patterns in Borderline Personality Disorder. Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, 8(5), 16–20.The Commissioners of Irish Lights (Irish: Coimisinéirí Soilse na hÉireann ) is the body that serves as the General Lighthouse Authority for the island of Ireland plus its adjacent seas and islands. As the Irish Lighthouse Authority it oversees the coastal lights and navigation marks provided by the local lighthouse authorities; the county councils and port authorities.
It is funded by light dues paid by ships calling at ports in the Republic of Ireland, pooled with dues raised similarly in the United Kingdom. This recognises that a large volume of shipping, typically transatlantic, relies on the lights provided by the Irish Lights.
History [ edit ]
Signal fires to guide shipping have long existed. Hook Head has the oldest nearly continuous light in Ireland, originally a signal fire or beacon tended by the monk Dubhán in the fifth century.[1] Monks continued to maintain the light until the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in 1641.
King Charles II re-established the lighthouse in 1667. He granted a patent for the erection of six lighthouses to Robert Reading, some replacing older lighthouses,[2] at Hook Head, Baily Lighthouse at Howth Head, Howth sand-bar, Old Head of Kinsale, Barry Oge's castle (now Charlesfort, near Kinsale), and the Isle of Magee.
In 1704 Queen Anne transferred the lighthouses around the Irish coast to the Revenue Commissioners.
The Commissioners of Irish Lights, or "CIL", were established under an Act of the Parliament of Ireland passed in 1786 and entitled An Act for Promoting the Trade of Dublin, by rendering its Port and Harbour more commodious (26 Geo. III, c. xix). Lighthouses were not included until the 1810 Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. These Acts, as confirmed by the Irish Lights Commissioners (Adaptation) Order, 1935, remain the legislative basis for the CIL.[3]
Irish Lights has moved its headquarters from Dublin to a purpose-built new building in Harbour Road, Dún Laoghaire.
Finance [ edit ]
The services provided by the Commissioners are financed from the General Lighthouse Fund. The income of the General Lighthouse Fund is mainly derived from light dues charged on commercial shipping at ports in Ireland and the United Kingdom, (i.e. user pays) supplemented by an annual contribution from the Irish Government towards the cost of the service provided by the Commissioners in Ireland.[4]
The General Lighthouse Fund is administered by the UK Department for Transport. It also finances:
The accounts of the Commissioners of Irish Lights are consolidated with those of Trinity House Lighthouse Service and the Northern Lighthouse Board to form part of the General Lighthouse Fund annual accounts which are published in London by HMSO.
Ships [ edit ]
Granuaile III [ edit ]
The Commissioners currently have only one light tender[5] in service named ILV Granuaile. The hull was built at Galaţi shipyard, Romania, in 2000 and fitted out at Damen Shipyards in the Netherlands.[6] She is registered in Dublin and has a 2,625 gross tonnage (GT), has a length overall of 79.6 m and a beam of 15.99 m. She is the third vessel named Granuaile to have served the Commissioners. Granuaile II was in service between 1970 and 2000, and she was preceded by the first Granuaile from 1948 to 1970. Because of the automation of lighthouses, and the extensive use of helicopters by the Commissioners, CIL now need only one tender in service. The ship has diesel electric propulsion and is extremely manoeuvrable, and is therefore ideal for her role in maintaining the automatic navigation buoys in Irish waters. In 2003 she was involved in the recovery of the fishing boat Pisces, which sank off Fethard, County Wexford, in July 2002.
Other vessels [ edit ]
Princess Alexandra (1863–1904)
(1863–1904) Tearaght (1892–1928) – see Kingstown Lifeboat Disaster
(1892–1928) – see Kingstown Lifeboat Disaster Moya (1893–1905)
(1893–1905) Ierne (1898–1954)
(1898–1954) Alexandra (1904–1955)
(1904–1955) Deirdre (1919–1927)
(1919–1927) Nabro (1926–1949)
(1926–1949) Isolda (1928–1940) (Sunk off the Saltee Islands County Wexford by German aircraft)
(1928–1940) (Sunk off the Saltee Islands County Wexford by German aircraft) Discovery II (1947–1948)
(1947–1948) Valonia (1947–1962)
(1947–1962) Granuaile (1948–1970)
(1948–1970) Blaskbeg (1953–1955)
(1953–1955) Isolda (1953–1976)
(1953–1976) Ierne II (1955–1971)
(1955–1971) Atlanta (1959–1988)
(1959–1988) Granuaile II (1970–2000)
(1970–2000) Gray Seal (1988–1994)
Flags [ edit ]
Commissioners of Irish Lights is a cross-border body, with its headquarters in Dublin. The current flag of the Irish Lights features lightships and lighthouses between the arms of the St. Patrick's Cross.[7] The St. George's Cross was used until 1970.[8] CIL vessels in Northern Ireland fly the Blue Ensign defaced with the Commissioner's badge and those in the Republic fly the Irish tricolour.[7]
Infrastructure [ edit ]
Buoys [ edit ]
Lighthouses [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]Share. Sony boasts a huge userbase, but who are these players? Sony boasts a huge userbase, but who are these players?
There are 19 million PlayStation Home users, according to Sony. My question is simple -- who the hell are they?
Four years ago, I went to my first GDC and my first Sony keynote speech. There, the company debuted a new game called LittleBigPlanet and promoted the social feature known as PlayStation Home. LittleBigPlanet went on to be a mega-success and spawn this year's sequel. PlayStation Home got delayed a bunch, found its way to every PS3, and has been quietly moving along ever since.
Today, Sony debuted PlayStation Home Client version 1.5. It's a tool for developers to make better games in Home -- real-time multiplayer, improvements to the physics engine, and better graphics. You know, typical GDC stuff that doesn't matter much to the average player now but will when developers make games with the tools. The game that showed this off was Sodium 2, a free-to-play racer that looks a bit like WipEout and puts your Home avatar in the cockpit.
Still, the interesting stuff came when PlayStation Home Director Jack Buser began talking numbers. Since launch, more than 19 million people around the world have logged into Home and the average session is now 70 minutes long. There are more than 230 games in Home and more than 8,000 virtual items on the Home marketplace.
How many people play Buzz in Home?
Without a doubt, all of that sounds impressive, but I couldn't help but question it. I play a lot of PlayStation 3 and I have a full friends list, but I never see people playing Home. Clearly, I wasn't the only one wondering about these figures. People started asking questions, and Buser said the 19 million refers to the people who have registered and entered the world -- those users could be like me that have played once and never touched the thing after that. Someone asked for the average number of users on a day-to-day basis, and Buser said Home shares that information with developers but couldn't divulge that number to us.
Then, Buser said something that caught my attention: PlayStation Home users are "the most engaged, most active users on the PS3." Could that be the case? I'm on the PS3 daily, and I don't use Home. I have a full friends list, and I never see people on it using Home.
WHO ARE THESE HOME PLAYERS?
I don't know, so I Tweeted and posted on My IGN looking for people who do and don't use PlayStation Home. Now, I have 24,000 My IGN followers and 11,000 Twitter followers. I got about 40 email responses in two hours. In short, these responses are not statistically significant. However, if you're following me on one of these social networks, I'd think it's pretty safe to assume you're into video games and an "engaged" user.
So, what did my respondents have to say about Home...
YES, I USE HOME
"I use PlayStation home at least once a week. I use it to hang out with friends who my parents don't allow me to see in real life since they live too far for them to take me there."
- Geoff Shapiro
"I use PlayStation Home quite frequently, whenever an upcoming game comes out and there is promotional content in Home for it, I use it, especially if using the home service leads to me receiving something in the actual game, like Killzone did."
- Koal McMillan
"Do I use PlayStation Home? Use might be a strong word. I go on PlayStation Home from time to time, usually just to check out what is new and cool. I don't "use it" per se. I think Home is a great idea with somewhat untapped potential. Long load and download times are certainly a barrier to entry, not to mention a UI which I feel is somewhat clumsy."
- Phillip Costiagn
"I still log in to Home maybe once a week. It's always interesting to me to roam around and feel like I'm part of a larger community. It can be fun to mess with people and have really strange conversations with strangers. The experience as a whole has also grown exponentially since it launched. For those who dismissed it early, I'd say it's worth revisiting."
-Sean O'Brien
"When I'm there, I have things to do and people to talk to, but the main issue is I have no real reason to go in, screw around, and most importantly keep coming back -- and the longer I'm away the less interest I have going back. That and I'm too busy playing games."
-Ahmadu Gidado
NO, I DON'T USE HOME
"I have been on it a few times. I don't really like it, and uninstalled it over a year ago. It doesn't really do anything for me in the sense that it's just a place where people walk around following all the girls, say stupid things and dance around. I liked playing chess with someone, but it's not my idea of a good time... I'd rather just play my PS3 and not go around social networking with a bunch of random people."
- Graham Waldrop
"In my opinion, there really is nothing that Home offers that is new and/or unique. If I want a social network, I have Facebook and Twitter. If I want trailers on upcoming games, I have IGN... Don't get me wrong, I like what Home is trying to do in the aspect of social gaming, but there really isn't anything in Home that I can't find better implemented somewhere else."
- Sam Howard
"I have never used Home. Nothing about what I've seen in demos or heard from other users made it sound in any way desirable. There have been a few times when I clicked on it in the XMB out of boredom, but as soon as it said it needed to install software, my curiosity was overruled."
- Pete Thomas
"The PlayStation Home theater is a pretty awesome idea, and it works very well. The games that they give you to play like flash game are very good idea but are not all that fun usually, and let's be honest, without Trophies? Come on."
- Kyle Leppek
"The simple, to the point reason about why I don't use PlayStation Home is because I find the entire application cumbersome and slow. Loading times are ATROCIOUS. Why not just have a giant chat room? Why do I have to have avatars running about everywhere?"
- Adam Roy
Are you a Home user?
HOW DO YOU IMPROVE HOME?
"I think that you should be able to hook up a digital PSone to your TV in your apartment and invite people over -- you then can play online multiplayer with anyone in your apartment on any PSone game you bought from the PS store."
- Josh Hughes
"I want the game launching that was promised and the Trophy rooms. Yes, there are some games (i.e. Warhawk) that use the game launch function, but not enough. And where is the Trophy display room that was promised? I want to be able to display my Trophies proudly in a room for all to see!"
- Phillip Costiagn
"I could be persuaded to get back into it, but the fact that it is something you have to run separately is a big reason for my disinterest. I would likely use it, and maybe enjoy it if it was replacing the cross media bar."
- Stephen Haberman
"It might sound weird but the only way I see Home ever being viable, is if they replace the XMB with it. When you turn on your PS3, it'll take you to your apartment where you could check messages on the laptop, go to your TV to play the game... etc. As it is, Home is little more than a shallow marketing tool void of any true relevance."
- Justin Raney
"If I had a wishlist: Virtual rooms for games where you can see DLCs, forums, etc. Use of your trophies (ie, VIP area in game rooms if you achieved platinum). Integration with social media; for example facebook (and more than just post I'm here)"
- Chris Venantius
Didn't see my call for PlayStation Home input? Sound off in the comments below. Do you use Home? Why or why not?Faridabad: A major fire broke out at Faridabad's biggest fire-cracker market at NIT Dussehra Ground on Tuesday evening, leaving at least five injured.
Nearly 230 200 shops and over a dozen cars were gutted in the fire that likely started with a short-circuit and quickly engulfed the entire market.
TV visuals showed huge fire at the ground with fire-crackers bursting without stop.
While no casualties were reported in the fire that has been brought under control, losses to the tune of several lakhs to shopkeepers are expected.
Nearly a dozen fire tenders were pressed into service. Fire tenders from private firms in Faridabad, Ballabgarh and Palwal were also called.
"Two hundred stalls were given licenses to sell crackers in the Dusshera ground. Many of the sellers were decorating their stalls and transporting crackers there. There were also a few buyers in the ground," fireman Ram Mehar said.
"Almost all the stalls were set up with either polythene or cloth sheds. The crackers were put on wooden tables. All these factors helped the fire spread rapidly," Ram Mehar added.
The cracker market is organised every year during Diwali in this locality on the outskirts of the national capital.
(With agency inputs)When a car is built, a VIN code is stamped on it. It’s a unique alphanumeric sequence that, when decoded, reveals when and where the car was built, and what options it came with. More importantly, cars are numbered in sequence as they come down the assembly line. It kind of acts like a birth certificate.
What makes this pair of 1974 MG Midgets in Toronto so special is that their VIN codes are sequential — meaning one came off the assembly line right after the other one. These cars were born together in Abingdon, England, but they didn’t remain together for very long.
Little about the early history of these cars is known. They were probably shipped to Canada as a pair (likely rusting while on the boat here) and were possibly sold through the same dealership. But what we do know is that the green car parted ways with its red brother and the two would not be reunited for a very long time.
The red MG passed through a series of owners before landing at a farm outside Beaverton, Ont., in 2011. Just one year later in 2012, its owner heard about another 1974 MG Midget that was for sale. He went to have a look at it and when he checked the VIN code, he knew he had to have it. The green car was made directly after the red one! A deal was struck, and the ratty green MG headed towards the barn in Beaverton to once again be reunited with its red brother.
Time hasn’t been kind to the little Midgets and both cars are showing their age. The red car runs and drives, but has rust issues in the rocker panels. The green car looks like a patchwork quilt thanks to recent metal work, has a rotten top, and hasn’t been started yet.
These MG siblings are looking for a new home and after their amazing reunion story, it would be a shame to separate them again. The ad can be found here. The current owner, Walter Rhoddy (not the one who reunited the pair), is asking $1,800 for the green MG and $2,300 for the red one. He’d like to keep them as a pair (it was meant to be!) and is offering both for $3,600.
Rhoddy found the two cars while responding to an ad for a 1970 Honda Civic ice racer stored at the same Beaverton property. He ended up not buying the Civic and left with the pair of MGs. After owning the cars for a few months, Rhoddy has decided to let them go.
Restored, these cars would make a perfectly matching his and hers set. Maybe a father and son team could restore them and each keep one. The odds of finding another sequential pair of classic sports cars are cosmically slim. These cars were born together halfway around the world and have finally been reunited. Hopefully, they can stay together.The high court is to decide whether government or parliament has the authority to trigger exit process. We look at what a pro-parliament verdict could mean
What is happening in the article 50 court case?
Judgment is awaited on whether parliament or the government has authority to give formal notification under article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union of the UK’s intention to leave the EU. The government claims it is entitled to do so under the executive powers it has inherited from the crown under the royal prerogative.
How does this tie in with the article 50 case in Belfast?
A similar claim, which additionally stressed devolution law, has already been heard in the high court in Belfast. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement prevents Brexit being imposed on the people of Northern Ireland, Ronan Lavery QC told the court earlier this month. The former Northern Ireland justice minister, David Ford, nationalist and Green politicians have brought the claim. Judgment in that case is also awaited. Both claims, whichever way they go, are expected to be appealed directly to the UK’s supreme court in Westminster. A hearing, probably in front of at least nine justices, has been pencilled in for early December.
Who has brought the cases?
While attention has focused on the lead claimant in London, 51-year-old Gina Miller, a Guyanese-born and British-educated businesswoman, there are scores of other litigants and interveners. The second lead claimant there is Deir Dos Santos, a London hairdresser. Both Miller and Dos Santos are British citizens. Others funding the challenge include people living in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, British expatriates living in the EU, Gibraltarians worried about the future status of the Rock and the children of non-EU nationals. All worry that Brexit may deprive them of existing rights. Death threats have been made against claimants, prompting the judges to warn that those interfering with the case could be imprisoned for contempt of court.
Article 50 legal case 'is attempt to reverse Brexit', court told Read more
If they win, could this stop Brexit?
Victory for the claimants would hand responsibility for triggering Brexit to MPs. Whether a majority would have the nerve to delay or defy the referendum result is unknown. Many, though personally committed remainers, may feel bound by the popular plebiscite. Other politicians might respect constituency pressures. Both the Scottish and Welsh devolved governments retained barristers on a watching brief at the London hearing. They could join the case at the supreme court, reinforcing legal opposition to Theresa May’s executive action.
How worried is the government?
It is difficult to predict the outcome of a case. The attorney general, Jeremy Wright QC, the government’s most senior legal adviser, led its team of lawyers in London to demonstrate political commitment to Brexit. The judges hearing the case include the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, who at one point in the three-day hearing admitted that he was “slightly baffled” by government lawyers’ arguments. Sir Terence Etherton, the new Master of the Rolls, asked whether the fact that parliament had not specified the precise limits of the royal prerogative meant that “the government can remove common law rights?” The claimants have exploited the Bill of Rights 1689, a piece of legislation revered by Eurosceptics, pointing out that it “expressly prohibits the use of the prerogative in circumstances where its exercise would ‘suspend’ or ‘dispense’ statutory law”. The outcome is hanging in the balance.
If it goes to the supreme court, then what?
Technically, there could be an appeal to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, the EU’s highest court, on a point of law. No one, however, wants the EU to decide on the limits of parliamentary sovereignty. If the supreme court rules against the government, parliament is likely to be given a vote on when, and possibly how, to trigger Brexit.
Who’s paying?
Miller, who is an investment manager, has been funding her claim. Much of the additional cash has come from various crowdfunding websites.Indianola, Iowa (CNN) Hillary Clinton delivered a blistering assessment of Bernie Sanders' credentials here on Thursday and implored Iowa voters to scrutinize his policies and readiness for the White House, declaring, "Theory isn't enough. A President has to deliver in reality."
It was the most forceful and direct contrast Clinton has drawn with Sanders yet, a speech that underscored the increasing urgency and acrimony of the race. From health care to foreign policy, Clinton repeatedly referenced Sanders by name and questioned whether his ideas could ever become reality.
"I am not interested in ideas that sound good on paper but will never make it in the real world," Clinton said. "I care about making a real difference in your life and that gets to the choice you have to make in this caucus."
Clinton acknowledged that while she and Sanders "share many of the same goals" they have "different records and different ideas on how to drive progress."
The former secretary of state used a Teleprompter to deliver her remarks to hundreds of supporters on the campus of Simpson College. The speech, one adviser said, was designed to "shake some sense into Iowans" and escalate the experience argument she has been making against Sanders with limited success.
"Senator Sanders doesn't talk much about foreign policy, but when he does it raises concerns," Clinton said. "Sometimes it can sound like he really hasn't thought it through."
Clinton's campaign had multiple cameras here and plan to turn part of the speech into an ad, according to aides.
Attacks on foreign policy
Clinton hammered Sanders as someone who "hasn't thought it through" on a number of foreign policy issues Thursday, including Iran.
Since Sunday's Democratic presidential debate, where Sanders suggested normalizing relations with Iran, Clinton's campaign has looked to cast Sanders as a foreign policy lightweight.
"He has suggested that we invite Iranian troops into Syria," Clinton said. "That is like asking the arsonist to be the firefighter....The challenges a President has to grapple with are beyond complicated but at home and abroad. That is why is it is the hardest job."
The former secretary of state said she is the "only candidate on either side with the experience and judgment to keep us safe at home and strong in the world."
Sanders' campaign has responded to the critiques by questioning Clinton's judgment and noting her 2002 vote for the Iraq War, something that then-Sen. Barack Obama used against her during her failed 2008 campaign.
Importance of
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ASTY An Introduction to the Sasanian Dynasty By Dr. Gianpaolo Savoia-Vizzini 2000 (Click to enlarge) 1. Introduction 2. History a. Origins and Early History (203-310 CE) b. First Golden Era (309–379 CE) c. Intermediate Era (379–498 CE) d. Second Golden Era (498–622) e. Decline and fall (622–651) 3. Government 4. Sasanian army 5. Conflicts 6. Interactions with Eastern states a. Relations with China b. Expansion to India 7. Iranian society under the Sasanians 8. Art, science and literature 9. Industry and trade 10. Religion 11. Legacy and Importance a. In Europe b. In India 12. Bibliography "Never forget that as a king you are the protector of your religion and your country....You should be an example of piety and virtue, but without pride or ostentation....Remember my son, that the fate of the nation depends on the conduct of the individual who sits on the throne....Learn to meet the frowns of destiny with courage and fortitude, and to receive her smiles with moderation and wisdom.....May your administration be such as to bring the blessing of those whom God has confided to our parental care."
Ardashir's advice to son, Shapour Ardeshir, the founder of the 2nd Persian Empire, the Sasanian Dynasty The Circular City of Ardeshir-Khwrrah (The Glory of Ardeshir) Above: Coin of Shapur I. Below: Relief of Shapur I at Naqsh-e Rostam, showing the two defeated Roma Emperors, Valerian and Philip the Arab (Click to enlarge) Gold Coin of Shapur II 1. Introduction The Sasanian Empire is the name used for the fourth Iranian dynasty and the second Persian Empire (224 - 651 CE). The Sasanian dynasty was founded by Ardashir I after defeating the last Arsacid king of kings, Artabanus IV and ended when the last Sasanian the King of Kings (Shahanshah), Yazdegerd III (632–651), lost a 14-year struggle to drive out the Arab invaders from his Empire. The empire's territory encompassed all of today's mainland Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Arran (also known as the republic of Azerbaijan), Georgia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan Tajikistan, Afghanistan, UAE, Oman, Yemen, Bahrain, Kuwait, we well as eastern parts of Turkey, and parts of Syria and Pakistan. During Khosrow II, Parviz' (r. 590–628) Egypt, Jordan, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon were also annexed to the Empire. The Sasanians called their empire Erānshahr (Iranshæhr) "Dominion of the Iranians (Aryans)." The Sasanian dynastic era, encompassing the length of the Late Antiquity period, is considered to be one of the most important and influential historical periods in Iran. In many ways the Sasanian period witnessed the highest achievement of Iranian civilization, and constituted the last great Iranian Empire before the Muslim conquest and adoption of Islam. Sasanian Iran influenced Roman civilization considerably; their cultural influence extending far beyond the empire's territorial borders, reaching as far as Western Europe, Africa, China and India and also playing a prominent role in the formation of both European and Asiatic medieval art. This influence carried forward to the early Islamic world. The dynastic empire's unique and aristocratic culture transformed the Islamic conquest of Iran into a Renaissance. Much of what later became known as Islamic art, architecture, culture, writing and other skills, were taken mainly from the Iranians into the broader Muslim world. 2. History a. Origins and Early History (205-310 CE) The Sasanian Dynasty was established by Ardashir I (d. 241), a descendant of a line of the priests of goddess Anahita at Istakhar, in Fars province, who at the beginning of the 3rd century had acquired the governorship of Persis, as a vassal king to the Arsacid dynasty (248 BCE-224 CE). His father Papag (Pāpak, NPers.Bābak), was originally the ruler of a small town today known as called Khair, but had managed, in 205, to depose Gocihr, the last vassal king of the Bazrangids (the local rulers of Persis as a client of the Arsacids) and appointed himself as the new ruler. His mother, Rodhagh (rūdg), was the daughter of the provincial governor of Peris. The eponymous founder of the line was Ardashir I's paternal grandfather, Sasan (Sāsān), the great priest of the Temple of Anahita. Pabag's efforts in gaining local power at the time escaped the attention of Artabanus IV, the Arsacid dynastic Emperor of the time who was involved in a struggle with his brother Vologases (Valakhsh -NPer. Balāš) VI in Mesopotamia. Using the relief offered by this problems among the Arsacids, Pabag and his eldest son Shapur managed to expand their power over all of Persis. The subsequent events are highly doubtful, due to the sketchy nature of the sources. It is however certain following the death of Pabag around 220, Ardashir who at the time was the governor of Darabgird (dārābgīrd), got involved in a power struggle of his own with his elder brother Shapur. The sources tell us that in 222, Shapur, leaving for a meeting with his brother, was killed when the roof of a building collapsed on him. At this point, Ardashir moved his capital further to the south of Persis and founded a capital at Ardashir-Khwarrah (the Glory of Ardeshir - formerly Gur, modern day Fīruzābād). The circular city, well supported by high mountains and easily defendable through narrow passes, became the center of Ardashir's efforts to gain more power. The city was surrounded by a high, circular wall, probably copied from that of Darabgird, and on the north-side included a large palace, remains of which still survive. After establishing his rule over Persis, Ardashir I rapidly extended his territory, demanding fealty from the local princes of Fars, and gaining control over the neighbouring provinces of Kerman, Esfahan, Susiana, and Mesene. This expansion quickly came to the attention of Artabanus IV (216–224), Ardashir I's overlord. Artabanus IV initially ordered the governor of Khuzestan to march against Ardashir in 224, but this ended up in a major victory for Ardashir. Artabanus himself marched a second time against Ardashir I in 224. Their armies clashed at Hormizdeghan, where Artabanus IV was killed. Ardashir I went on to invade the western provinces of the now defunct Parthian (Arsacid) dynastic Empire. Crowned in 226 at Ctesiphon as the sole ruler of Persia, he took the title Shahanshah, or "King of Kings" (the inscriptions mention Adhur-Anahita (Nper. Azar-Anahid) as his "Queen of Queens", but her relationship with Ardashir is not established), bringing the 400-year-old Parthian dynasty to an end and beginning four centuries of Sasanian rule. Over the next few years, following local rebellions around the empire, Ardashir I managed to further expanded his new empire to the east and northwest, taking over the provinces of Sistan, Gorgan, Khorasan, Margiana (modern Merv in nowadays Turkmenistan), Bactria, and Chorasmia from the Parthians. Later Sasanid inscriptions also claim the submission of the Kings of Kushan, Turan (northern India), and Mekran to Ardashir, although based on numismatic evidence, it is more likely that these actually submitted to Ardashir's son, the future Shapur I, the Great. In the west, assaults against Hatra, Armenia, and Adiabene met with less success. He also added Mosul and Mishmahig Island (modern Bahrain) to Sasanian possessions. Mishmahig later was governed by the crown prince Shapur who was deployed to oversee the empire's territories located on the western and the southern sections of the Persian Gulf (nowadays Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain), accompanied with three cavalry regiments in March 29, 231 CE. The southern territories particularly the Aswaran Province (nowadays UAE) were favoured by the the Sasanian emperors to send the exiled Persian Christians. Ardashir I's son Shapur I (241–272) whose his mother was daughter of a Parthian monarch, possibly Ardavan IV or one of the members of Suren-Pahlav Clan, continued this expansion, conquering Bactria and Kushan, while leading several campaigns against Rome. Penetrating deep into Eastern-Roman territory, Shapur I conquered Antiochia (253 or 256) and finally defeated the Roman emperors Gordian III (238–244), Philip the Arab (244–249), and Valerian (253–260). The latter was taken (259) into captivity after the Battle of Edessa, a tremendous and hitherto unknown disgrace for the Romans. Shapur I celebrated his victory by carving the impressive rock reliefs in Naqsh-e Rostam. Shapur I had indeed intensive development plans. He founded many cities, some settled in part by Roman emigrants. These included Christians who could exercise their faith freely under Sasanian rule. Two cities of Bishapur in Fars, and Nishapur in Khorasan Province, are named after him. Shapur I particularly favoured Manichaeism. He protected Mani and sent many Manichaean missionaries abroad. Shapur I also befriended a Babylonian rabbi called Shmuel. This friendship was advantageous for the Jewish community and gave them a respite from the oppressive laws enacted against them. Later, Sasanian kings reversed Shapur I's policy of religious tolerance. Succeeding Shapur I, Bahram I (273–276) persecuted Mani and his followers under pressure from Zoroastrians orthodoxy. Bahram I imprisoned Mani and ordered him killed; Mani died, according to the legend, in jail awaiting his execution. Bahram II (276–293) followed his father's religious policy. He was an irresolute ruler and lost several western provinces to the Roman Emperor Carus (282–283). During his rule most of Armenia, after half a century of Persian rule, was ceded to Diocletian (284–305). Succeeding Bahram III (who ruled briefly in 293), Narseh (293–302) embarked on another war with the Romans. After an early success against the Emperor Galerius (305–311) near Callinicum on the Euphrates in 296, Narseh was decisively defeated in an ambush while he was with his harem in Armenia in 297. In the treaty that concluded this war, the Sasanians ceded all lands west of the Tigris and agreed not to interfere in the affairs of Armenia and Georgia. Following this crushing defeat, Narseh resigned in 301 and died in grief a year later. Narseh's son Hormizd II (302–309) assumed the throne. Although he suppressed revolts in Sistan and Kushan, Hormizd II was another weak ruler, unable to control the nobles. He was killed by Bedouins while hunting in 309. b. First Golden Era (309–379) Following Hormizd II's death, Arab subjects from the south started to ravage and plunder the southern cities of the empire, even attacking the province of Fars, the birthplace of the Sasanian kings. Meanwhile, Persian nobles killed Hormizd II's eldest son, blinded the second, and imprisoned the third (who later escaped to Roman territory). The throne was reserved for the unborn child of one of Hormizd II's wives. It is said that Shapur II (309–379) may have been the only king in history to be crowned in uterus: the crown was placed upon his mother's belly. This child, named Shapur, was therefore born king. During his youth the empire was controlled by his mother and the nobles. Upon Shapur II's coming of age, he assumed power and quickly proved to be an active and effective ruler. Shapur II first led his small but disciplined army south against the Arabs, whom he defeated, securing the southern areas of the empire. He then started his first campaign against Romans in the west, experiencing early success. After the Siege of Singara, however, his conquests were halted by nomadic raids along the eastern borders of the empire. These raids threatened Transoxiana, a strategically critical area for control of the Silk Road. In addition, Shapur II's military forces were not sufficient to hold the territory he had taken in the west. He therefore signed a peace treaty with Constantius II (353–361) in which both sides agreed not to attack each other's territory for a limited period of time. Shapur II then marched east toward Transoxiana to meet the eastern nomads. He crushed the Central Asian tribes, and annexed the area as a new province. He completed the conquest of the area now known as Afghanistan. Cultural expansion followed this victory, and Sasanian art penetrated Turkistan, reaching as far as China. Shapur II, along with the nomad King Grumbates, started his second campaign against the Romans in 359, this time with his full military force and support from the nomads. The campaign was overwhelmingly successful; a total of five Roman provinces were ceded to the Persians after its completion. Shapur II pursued a harsh religious policy. Under his reign the collection of the Avesta, the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, was completed, heresy and apostasy were punished, and Christians were persecuted. The latter was a reaction against the Christianization of the Roman Empire by Constantine the Great (324–337). Shapur II, like Shapur I, was amicable towards Jews, who lived in relative freedom and gained many advantages in his period. At the time of Shapur's death, the Persian Empire was stronger than ever, with its enemies to the east pacified and Armenia under Persian control. c. Intermediate Era (379–498) From Shapur II's death until Kavadh I's (488–531) first coronation, Persia was largely stable with few wars against the Byzantines. Throughout this era Sasanian religious policy differed dramatically from king to king. Despite a series of weak leaders, the administrative system established during Shapur II's reign remained strong, and the empire continued to function effectively. After Shapur II died in 379, he left a powerful empire to his half-brother Ardashir II (379–383; son of Vahram of Kushan) and his son Shapur III (383–388), neither of whom demonstrated their predecessor's talent. Ardashir II, who was raised as the "half-brother" of the emperor, failed to fill his brother's shoes, and Shapur III was too much of a melancholy character to achieve anything. Bahram IV (388–399), although not as inactive as his father, still failed to achieve anything important for the empire. During this time Armenia was divided by treaty between the Roman and Sasanian empires. The Sasanians reestablished their rule over Greater Armenia, while the Byzantine Empire held a small portion of western Armenia. Bahram IV's son Yazdegerd I (399–421), was powerful both physically and diplomatically. Much like his Roman counterpart, Yazdegerd I was opportunistic. He practiced religious tolerance and provided freedom for the rise of religious minorities. He stopped the persecution against the Christians and even punished nobles and priests who persecuted them. His reign marked a relatively peaceful era. He made lasting peace with the Romans and even took the young Theodosius II (408–450) under his guardianship. He also married a Jewish princess who bore him a son called Narsi. Yazdegerd I's successor was his son Bahram V (421–438), one of the most well-known Sasanian kings and the hero of many myths. These myths persisted even after the destruction of the Sasanian empire by the Arabs. Bahram V, better known as Bahram-e Gur, gained the crown after Yazdgerd I's sudden death (or assassination) against the opposition of the grandees with the help of al-Mundhir, the Arabic dynast of al-Hirah. Bahram V's mother was Soshandukht, the daughter of the Jewish Exilarch. In 427 he crushed an invasion in the east by the nomadic Hephthalites, extending his influence into Central Asia, where his portrait survived for centuries on the coinage of Bukhara (in modern Uzbekistan). Bahram V deposed the vassal King of the Persian part of Armenia and made it a province. Bahram V is a great favorite in Persian tradition, which relates many stories of his valor and beauty, of his victories over the Romans, Turks, Indians and Africans, and of his adventures in hunting and in love; he is called Bahram-e Gur, Gur meaning Zebra, on account of his love for hunting and, in particular, hunting zebras. He symbolized a king in the height of a golden age. He had won his crown by competing with his brother and spent time fighting foreign enemies, but mostly kept himself amused by hunting and court parties with his famous band of ladies and courtiers. He embodied royal prosperity. During his time the best pieces of Sasanian literature were written, notable pieces of Sasanian music were composed, and sports such as polo became royal pastimes, a tradition that continues to this day in many kingdoms. Bahram V's son Yazdegerd II (438–457) was a just, moderate ruler but, in contrast to Yazdegerd I, practiced a harsh policy towards minority religions, particularly Christianity. At the beginning of his reign, Yazdegerd II gathered a mixed army of various nations, including his Indian allies, and attacked the Eastern Roman Empire, which was building fortifications (a trick used by Romans for subsequent expeditions) in Persian territory nearby Carrhae. The Romans were taken by surprise, and if it were not for a heavy flood, Yazdegerd could have advanced greatly in Roman territory. Byzantine emperor Theodosius II asked for peace, sending his commander to Yazdegerd II's camp. In the pursued negotiation in 441, both empires promised not to build any new fortifications on their borders. Yazdegerd II, however, had the upper hand and did not demand more because of Kidarite incursions in Parthia and Khwarezmia. He gathered his forces in Neishabur in 443 and launched a prolonged campaign against the Kidarites. Finally after a number of battles, he crushed the Kidarites and drove them out beyond Oxus river in 450. During his eastern campaign, Yazdegerd II grew suspicious of the Christians in the army and expelled them all from the governing body and army. He then persecuted the Christians and, to a much lesser extent, the Jews. In order to reestablish Zoroastrianism in Armenia, he crushed an uprising of Armenian Christians at the Battle of Vartanantz in 451. The Armenians, however, remained primarily Christian. In his later years, he was engaged yet again with Kidarites until his death in 457. Hormizd III (457–459), younger son of Yazdegerd II, ascended to the throne. During his short rule, he continually fought with his elder brother Piruz, who had the support of nobility, and with the Ephthalites in Bactria. He was killed by his brother Piruz in 459. In the beginning of the 5th century, the Hephthalites (White Huns), along with other nomadic groups, attacked Persia. At first Bahram V and Yazdegerd II inflicted decisive defeats against them and drove them back eastward. The Huns returned at the end of 5th century and defeated Piruz I (457–484) in 483. Following this victory the Huns invaded and plundered parts of eastern Persia for two years. They exacted heavy tribute for some years thereafter. These attacks brought instability and chaos to the kingdom. Piruz I tried again to drive out Hephthalites, but on the way to Herat, he and his army were trapped by Huns in the desert; Piruz I was killed, and his army was wiped out. After this victory Hephthalites advanced forward to the city of Herat, throwing the empire into chaos. Eventually, a noble Persian from the old family of Karen, Zarmihr (or Sokhra), restored some degree of order. He raised Balash, one of Piruz I's brothers, to the throne, although the Hunnic threat persisted until the reign of Khosrow I. Balash (484–488) was a mild and generous monarch, who made concessions to the Christians; however, he took no action against the empire's enemies, particularly, the White Huns. Balash, after a reign of four years, was blinded and deposed (attributed to magnates), and his nephew Kavadh I was raised to the throne. Kavadh I (488–531) was an energetic and reformist ruler. Kavadh I gave his support to the communistic sect founded by Mazdak, son of Bamdad, who demanded that the rich should divide their wives and their wealth with the poor. His intention evidently was, by adopting the doctrine of the Mazdakites, to break the influence of the magnates and the growing aristocracy. These reforms led to his deposition and imprisonment in the "Castle of Oblivion" (Lethe) in Susa, and his younger brother Jamasp (Zamaspes) was raised to the throne in 496. Kavadh I, however, escaped in 498 and was given refuge by the White Hun king. Djamasp (496–498) was installed on the Sasanian throne upon the deposition of Kavadh I by members of the nobility. Djamasp was a good and kind king, and he reduced taxes in order to relieve the peasants and the poor. He was also a proper adherent of the Mazdakism sect, diversions from which had cost Kavadh I his throne and freedom. His reign soon ended when Kavadh I, at the head of a large army granted to him by the Hephthalite king, returned to the empire's capital. Djamasp loyally stepped down from his position and restored the throne to his brother. No further mention of Djamasp is made after the restoration of Kavadh I, but it is widely believed that he was treated favorably at the court of his brother. d. Second Golden Era (498–622) The second golden era began after the second reign of Kavadh I. With the support of the Hephtalites, Kavadh I launched a campaign against the Romans. In 502, he took Theodosiopolis (Erzurum) in Armenia. In 503 he took Amida (Diarbekr) on the Tigris. In 505, an invasion of Armenia by the western Huns from the Caucasus led to an armistice, during which the Romans paid subsidies to the Persians for the maintenance of the fortifications on the Caucasus. In year 525, he suppressed revolts in Lazica and recaptured Georgia. His army with aid of Lakhmid ruler (a Sasanian vassal kingdom), al-Mundhir IV ibn al-Mundhir defeated the Byzatine army under command of famed Belisarius twice, one in year 530 in Battle of Nisbis and other in year 531 in Battle of Callinicum. Although he could not free himself from the yoke of the Ephthalites, Kavadh succeeded in restoring order in the interior and fought with success against the Romans, founded several cities, some of which were named after him, and began to regulate the taxation. After Kavadh I, his son Khosrow I, also known as Anushirvan ("with the immortal soul"; ruled 531–579), ascended to the throne. He is the most celebrated of the Sasanian rulers. Khosrow I is most famous for his reforms in the aging governing body of Sasanians. In his reforms he introduced a rational system of taxation, based upon a survey of landed possessions, which his father had begun and tried in every way to increase the welfare and the revenues of his empire. Previous great feudal lords fielded their own military equipment, followers and retainers. Khosrow I developed a new force of dehkans or "knights" paid and equipped by the central government and the bureaucracy, tying the army and bureaucracy more closely to the central government than to local lords. Although the Emperor Justinian I (527–565) had paid him a bribe of 440,000 pieces of gold to keep the peace, in 540 Khosrow I broke the "eternal peace" of 532 and invaded Syria, where he temporarily captured and plundered the city of Antioch. During Khosrow's en route return, he collected money from the different Byzantine cities. In 565, Justinian I died and was succeeded by Justin II (565–578), who resolved to stop subsidies to Arab chieftains to restrain them from raiding Byzantine territory in Syria. A year earlier the Sasanian governor of Armenia, of the Suren family, built a fire temple at Dvin near modern Yerevan, and he put to death an influential member of the Mamikonian family, touching off a revolt which led to the massacre of the Persian governor and his guard in 571. Justin II took advantage of the Armenian revolt to stop his yearly payments to Khosrow I for the defense of the Caucasus passes. The Armenians were welcomed as allies, and an army was sent into Sasanian territory which besieged Nisibis in 572. However, dissension among the Byzantine generals not only led to an abandonment of the siege, but they in turn were besieged in the city of Dara, which was taken by the Persians who then ravaged Syria, causing Justin II to sue for peace. Armenian revolt came to an end with a general amnesty from Khosrow I, which brought Armenia back into the Sasanian Empire. Around 570, "Ma 'd-Karib", half-brother of the King of Yemen, requested Khosrow I's intervention. Khosrow I sent a fleet and a small army under a commander called Vahriz to the area near present Aden, and they marched against the capital San'a'l, which was occupied. Saif, son of Mard-Karib, who had accompanied the expedition, became King sometime between 575 and 577. Thus the Sasanians were able to establish a base in south Arabia to control the sea trade with the east. Later the south Arabian kingdom renounced Sasanian overlordship, and another Persian expedition was sent in 598 that successfully annexed southern Arabia as a Sasanian province, which lasted until the time of troubles after Khosrow II. Khosrow I's reign witnessed the rise of the dihqans (literally, village lords), the petty landholding nobility who were the backbone of later Sasanian provincial administration and the tax collection system. Khosrow I was a great builder, embellishing his capital, founding new towns, and constructing new buildings. He rebuilt the canals and restocked the farms destroyed in the wars. He built strong fortifications at the passes and placed subject tribes in carefully chosen towns on the frontiers to act as guardians against invaders. He was tolerant of all religions, though he decreed that Zoroastrianism should be the official state religion, and was not unduly disturbed when one of his sons became a Christian. After Khosrow I, Hormizd IV (579–590) took the throne. Hormizd IV was also a vigorous ruler who continued the success and prosperity established by his predecessors. During the reign of Khosrow II (590–628), the revolt of general Bahram Chobin (rival King Bahram VI) briefly threw the empire into crisis, but the crisis was short lived, and Khosrow II soon reestablished firm control over the empire. Taking advantage of a civil war in the Byzantine Empire, Khosrow II launched a full-scale invasion. The Sasanian dream of restoring the Achaemenid boundaries was close to completion when Jerusalem and Damascus fell; Egypt fell soon after. In 626 Constantinople also was under siege by Slavic and Avar forces supported by the Persians. This remarkable peak of expansion was paralleled by a blossoming of Persian art, music, and architecture. By 622, the Byzantine Empire was on the verge of collapse and the borders of the Achaemenid Empire were restored on all fronts except for parts of Anatolia. e. Decline and fall (622–651) Although hugely successful, Khosrow II's campaign had overextended the Persian army and overtaxed the people. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius (610–641) retaliated with a tactical move, abandoning his besieged capital and sailing up the Black Sea to attack Persia from the rear. Meanwhile, mutual suspicion had arisen between Khosrow II and his general Shahrbaraz. Byzantine agents showed Shahrbaraz pseudo letters indicating that Khosrow II was planning the general's execution. Shahrbaraz, fearing for his life, remained neutral during this critical period. Persia was thus denied the services of one of its largest armies and one of its best generals. To Khosrow's bad fortune, Shahin, the other great spahbod of Sasanian army who had conquered Caucasus and Anatolia passed away unexpectedly, further tipping the balance in favor of the Byzantines and drove Khosrow into state of melancholia. Heraclius, with the assistance of the Khazars and other Turkic troops, took advantage of Shahin and Shahrbaraz's absence to win several devastating victories against a Sasanian state substantially weakened by 15 years of war. Heraclius' campaign culminated in the Battle of Nineveh, where the Byzantines (without the Khazars, who had left Heraclius) defeated the Persian army, commanded by Rhahzadh. Heraclius then marched through Mesopotamia and Western Persia sacking Takht-e Soleyman and the Palace of Dastugerd, where he received the news of the assassination of Khosrow II. Chaos and civil war followed after assassination of Khosrow II. Over a period of fourteen years and twelve successive kings, including two daughters of Khosro II and spahbod Shahrbaraz, the Sasanian Empire weakened considerably. The power of the central authority passed into the hands of the generals. It would take several years for a strong king to emerge from a series of coups, and the Sasanians never had time to be fully recovered. In the spring of 632, a grandson of Khosrow I, Yazdegerd III who had lived in the hiding, ascended the throne. In that same year, the first Arab squadrons made their raids into Persian territory. Years of warfare had exhausted both the Byzantines and the Persians. The Sasanians were further weakened by economic decline, heavy taxation, religious unrest, rigid social stratification, the increasing power of the provincial landholders, and a rapid turnover of rulers. These factors facilitated the Arab invasion. The Sasanians never mounted a truly effective resistance to the pressure applied by the initial Arab armies. Yazdegerd was a boy at the mercy of his advisers and incapable of uniting a vast country crumbling into small feudal kingdoms, despite the fact that Byzantine, under similar pressure from the newly expansive Arabs, no longer threatened. The first encounter between Sasanians and Muslim Arabs was in the Battle of the Bridge in 634 which resulted in a Sasanian victory, however the Arab threat did not stop there and reappeared shortly from the disciplined armies of Khalid ibn Walid, once one of Muhammad's chosen companion-in-arms and leader of the Arab army. Under the Caliph `Umar ibn al-Khattāb, a Muslim army defeated a larger Persian force lead by general Rostam Farrokhzad at the plains of al-Qādisiyyah in 637 and besieged Ctesiphon. Ctesiphon fell after a prolonged siege. Yazdgerd fled eastward from Ctesiphon, leaving behind him most of the Empire's vast treasury. The Arabs captured Ctesiphon shortly afterward, leaving the Sasanian government strapped for funds and acquiring a powerful financial resource for their own use. Had the empire not been exhausted, and divided, without an effective government, at the time of the Arab invasions, the Asawaran (Azatan) knightly caste could in all probablity have defeated them, if summoned at once, and massed as a single army. But they were never summoned in time, events unfolded too quickly, in a relative vacuum of power in the Empire. The result was the Islamic conquest. A number of Sasanian governors attempted to combine their forces to throw back the invaders, but the effort was crippled by the lack of a strong central authority, and the governors were defeated at the Battle of Nihawānd; the empire, with its military command structure non-existent, its non-noble troop levies decimated, its financial resources effectively destroyed, and the Asawaran (Azatan) knightly caste destroyed piecemeal, the Sasanian empire was now utterly helpless in the face of the invaders. Upon hearing the defeat in Nihawānd, Yazdgerd along with most of Persian nobilities fled further inland to the northern province of Khorasan. He was assassinated by a miller in Merv in late 651 while the rest of the nobles settled in central Asia where they contributed greatly in spreading Persian culture and language in those regions and the establishment of the first native Iranian dynasty, the Samanid dynasty, which sought to revive and ressuscitate Sasanian traditions and culture after the invasion of Islam. The abrupt fall of Sasanian Empire was completed in a period of five years, and most of its territory was absorbed into the Islamic caliphate; however many Iranian cities resisted and fought against the invaders several times. Cities such as Ray, Isfahan and Hamadan were exterminated thrice by Islamic caliphates in order to suppress revolts and to terrify Iranian people. The local population either willingly accepted Islam, thus escaping from various restrictions imposed on non-Muslims, including the requirement to pay a special poll tax (jizya), or were forced to convert by the invading armies. Invaders destroyed the Academy of Gundishapur and its library, burning piles of books. Most Sasanian records and literary works were destroyed. A few that escaped this fate were later translated into Arabic and later to Modern Persian. During the Islamic invasion many Iranian cities were destroyed or deserted, palaces and bridges were ruined and many magnificent imperial Persian gardens were burned to the ground. According to Al-Tabari, the Arab Commander Sa'd Ibn Abi-Vaghas wrote to Caliph Umar ibn Al-Khatab about what should be done with the books at capital Tyspwn (Ctesiphon) in province of Khvârvarân (today known as Iraq). Umar wrote back: "If the books contradict the Qur'an, they are blasphemous. On the other hand, if they are in agreement, they are not needed." All the books were thrown into the Euphrates. Under another ruler Gotaibeh ibn Muslim in Khwarezmia, all the historians, writers, and mobeds were massacred and their books burned in fire, so that after one generation, the people became illiterate. Yazid ibn Mohlab is reputed to have ordered the decapitation of so many Iranians that their blood flowed in the water powering a millstone for one full day. There are many other massacres recorded. 3. Government The Sasanians established an empire roughly within the frontiers achieved by the Achaemenids, with the capital at Ctesiphon in the Khvarvaran province. In administering this empire, Sasanian rulers, took the title of Shāhanshāh (King of Kings), became the central overlords and also assumed guardianship of the sacred fire, the symbol of the national religion. This symbol is explicit on Sasanian coins where the reigning monarch, with his crown and regalia of office, appears on the obverse, backed by the sacred fire, the symbol of the national religion, on the coin's reverse. Sasanian queens had the title of Banebshenan banebshen (the Queen of Queens). On smaller scale the territory might also be ruled by a number of petty rulers from Sasanian royal family, known as Shahrdar overseen directly by Shahanshah. Sasanian rule was characterized by considerable centralization, ambitious urban planning, agricultural development, and technological improvements. Below the king a powerful bureaucracy carried out much of the affairs of government; The head of the bureaucracy and vice chancellor, was the "Vuzorg (Bozorg) Farmadar". Within this bureaucracy the Zoroastrian priesthood was immensely powerful. The head of the Magi priestly class, the Mobadan, along with the commander in chief, the Iran (Eran) Spahbod, the head of traders and merchants syndicate "Ho Tokhshan Bod" and minister of agriculture "Vastrioshansalar" who was also head of farmers were, below the emperor, the most powerful men of the Sasanian state. The Sasanian monarch usually acted with the advice of his ministers, who composed a council of state. Masudi, the Muslim historian, praised the "excellent administration of the [Sasanian] kings, their well-ordered policy, their care for their subjects, and the prosperity of their domains." In normal times the monarchical office was hereditary, but might be transmitted by the king to a younger son; in two instances the supreme
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has said it will recall 2.7 million cars worldwide because of problems with the steering wheel and water pump system.
The recall affects nine models, including the Toyota Corolla and the second-generation Prius.
It comes four weeks after the firm recalled more than seven million vehicles worldwide, including some Corolla and Camry models, over faulty window switches.
Toyota is Japan's biggest carmaker.
Joichi Tachikawa, a spokesman for Toyota, told the BBC that the problem with the steering wheel was to do with "insufficient hardness of the steering shaft".
He explained that due to this, the splines which connect the extension shaft to the gearbox may deform if the steering wheel is "frequently and forcefully turned to the full lock position while driving at a very slow speed".
"This may create an increased backlash and the splines may eventually wear out over time, which could result in loss of steering ability," he added.
However, Mr Tachikawa said that no accidents due to this fault had been reported so far.
'Nobody is perfect'
Analysis Toyota's latest announcement pushes the number of recalls this year to more than 10 million, not far short of the number recalled in 2009 and 2010 over floormat and accelerator pedal issues. At that time, Toyota's reputation and sales suffered badly, largely because the problems in question were claimed to be linked to deadly accidents. This year's recalls are precautionary. There have been no accidents. The consumer response should be less severe. But Toyota's image as a producer of high quality cars has nevertheless been dented once again.
The latest recall, which includes nearly 75,000 vehicles in the UK, is the latest in a spate of such moves in recent years.
Toyota's reputation was damaged in 2009 by a recall that ended up involving 12 million vehicles and fines from US regulators.
The Japanese carmaker is still trying to rebuild its reputation and regain customer trust after that fiasco, which saw the firm's head apologising to consumers.
Its efforts to do so have been dealt a blow over the past few weeks, as it has announced recalls totalling nearly 10 million vehicles.
However, some analysts said that while the latest recalls, which are voluntary, were a setback, they might not cause as much damage to its reputation as the ones in 2009.
"Nobody is perfect. Vehicles nowadays are very complicated," said Koichi Sugimoto, an auto analyst with BNP Paribas in Tokyo.
"The company is taking appropriate measures to fix the problems, so I don't think this will cause significant damage to Toyota's reputation."Thus far Asia has largely evaded the chemical weapons challenge now confronting Middle Eastern and NATO countries as they contemplate how to respond to the civil war in Syria and consolidate peace and security in Libya and Iraq. For good reason, most attention has focused on the emerging nuclear weapons powers of Iran and North Korea as well as the tense relations among the existing nuclear weapons states in Asia.
The recent angst surrounding the possible use of chemical weapons stockpiles by regime diehards in Syria, or their seizure by extremist elements among the insurgents, underscore the continued danger of chemical weapons proliferation and the need to take stronger measures to oppose it.
Allied leaders have adopted strong declarations against Assad using chemical weapons even while they contemplate unpleasant contingency plans to secure or eliminate the material on their own. Last month President Obama said that his administration had “increased concern” that Syria would engage in the “totally unacceptable” use of chemical weapons. “If you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons,” he warned, “there will be consequences and you will be held accountable.”
Syria is widely suspected of having one of the world’s largest chemical weapons arsenals, including a range of chemical agents (from unsophisticated choking agents to advanced nerve agents), several delivery systems (such as missiles, bombs, and shells), and multiple stockpiles in which the chemical precursors can be rapidly combined to arm the weapons. These could prove very effective if used against the rebel forces, which lack any protection against chemical weapons. Additionally, the Assad regime could use them against foreign nations such as Turkey which has strongly backed the rebel forces.
Perhaps the most serious danger is that, when the Assad regime falls, malicious non-state actors will seize Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles. Despite its desire to stay out of the Syrian conflict, the Obama administration may need to send U.S. troops to Syria to secure the chemical agents and related infrastructure to prevent terrorists from gaining control of them.
Even if these stocks are secure, the agents required to produce chemical weapons are widely available. Many countries possess industries capable of producing large quantities of such chemicals. Additionally, poorly secured caches of weaponized chemical compounds in the former Soviet Union offer potential weapons to for terrorist organizations, criminal groups, or rogue regimes.
Improvised chemical explosive devices can be produced with widely available chemicals and without much chemical expertise. Under certain conditions, even a minor CW attack could cause widespread panic and immense economic losses, transforming limited attacks into major incidents.
Asia received a warning two decades ago about how a significant quantity of a chemical agent in a concentrated area could be extremely deadly. The Aum Shinrikyo cult, which was based in Japan but operated in many Asian countries, undertook a large-scale program to develop weapons of mass destruction in the 1990s. Notwithstanding its vast resources, the cult proved unable to develop biological or nuclear weapons, but it did manage to make sarin. Although its 1995 operation in the Tokyo Subway resulted in only a dozen deaths, more than 5,000 people were hospitalized. Many more people might have died had AumShinrikyo used the gas more effectively, had conducted the operation in more favorable weather conditions, or used an even more deadly chemical agent.TRENTON, New Jersey (Reuters) - New Jersey Governor Chris Christie dashed hopes on Tuesday that he might make a late leap into the 2012 Republican presidential race in a move that sets up a battle between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie speaks during an announcement that he will not be seeking the 2012 Republican nomination for president in Trenton, New Jersey October 4, 2011. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
Christie’s 45-minute news conference to say that “now is not my time” gave voters a taste of what they will miss in not having him on the campaign trail, a straight-talking politician so comfortable in his own skin he could laugh about news coverage of his ample waistline.
His exit will likely benefit former Massachusetts Governor Romney in the fight for moderate Republicans’ support and leaves the Republican field largely set, as former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is showing no signs of diving in.
Romney, chased from the front-runner position by Texas Governor Perry weeks ago, has now regained the lead after Perry’s poor debate performances, as Republicans consider who is the more electable candidate in the general election contest against Democratic President Barack Obama in November 2012.
The field includes players from across America’s conservative political spectrum: Moderates Romney and former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, and right-leaning Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul.
The fight will now intensify as Republicans look to the first U.S. nominating contest, the Iowa caucuses, coming up in a mere three months, quickly followed by the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries.
A senior Romney adviser said the Christie decision removed all doubt as to who will be in the field after a series of trial balloons from Christie, Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump and Mitch Daniels — who all were seen as alternatives to Romney.
“The waiting for ‘Superman’ is over,” he said. “It won’t change what we’re doing. We’ve lived through President Palin, President Huckabee, President Trump and President Daniels.’ We’ve survived ‘em all.”
“The Republican field is now set,” said Republican strategist Scott Reed.
Exiting stage right on Tuesday was Christie, 49, the no-nonsense governor who repeatedly said no to a run but felt compelled to reconsider based on a flood of entreaties from supporters from Nancy Reagan to a Nebraska farmer.
‘YOU’RE STUCK WITH ME’
“I’m doing a job that I love in the state I grew up in,” said Christie.
“In the end, what I always felt was the right decision remains the right decision today — now is not my time.”
“New Jersey, whether you like it or not, you’re stuck with me,” he said, adding he has “unfinished business” as governor.
Christie left the door open to running in 2016 but shrugged off a question on whether he would consider being the 2012 vice presidential nominee, saying he did not believe “my personality is best suited to being number two.”
Christie would have immediately energized a field that lacks firepower and that many party faithful are unenthusiastic about. Large undecided campaign donors may now be willing to back some of the established candidates.
Asked about the crop of candidates and which one he favors, Christie said, “I’m not prepared to make any endorsement today.”
Huntsman attempted to cash in on Christie’s departure, with campaign manager Matt David saying Republicans need “a standard bearer who is willing to tell the truth to the American people, offer serious solutions, and have a record to back it up.”
“Governor Huntsman is the only candidate in the field who fits that description,” he said.
Christie dismissed talk he was only courted because the Republican field was weak. “I don’t think it says anything in particular about the field. I like to think it says something about me. It wasn’t my charm and good looks — I think it was the accomplishments that we have in New Jersey.”
While not impossible, it would have been a difficult challenge for Christie to raise money, enlist activists and build a nationwide team with only 90 days until the voting begins.
Had Christie run and won the nomination, it would have set up a contest between him and Obama, both populists who cast themselves as honest brokers who can move toward the middle to get things done.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie speaks during an announcement that he will not be seeking the 2012 Republican nomination for president in Trenton, New Jersey October 4, 2011. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
Christie, a large man who struggles with his weight and was briefly hospitalized this summer after having trouble breathing, was asked if jokes about his obesity from late-night comedians had upset him.
“It’s not a news flash to me that I am overweight,” Christie said. “It is not something that bothers me, I am not self-conscious about it, I am self-aware.”
But, he said, talk by pundits that his obesity was a sign of his personal lack of discipline was “ignorant” and only advanced stereotypes.He holds a post-graduate degree in financial management. He wants to pursue a course in sports management. He works with the Income Tax office during the off-season. He is a science geek, who is fascinated by artificial intelligence, robotics, algorithms on how stock markets work and how air fares rise and fall.
He's a big fan of the Golden State Warriors and the NBA. Reading is his passion - he can reel out what he particularly enjoyed from books on Steve Jobs, the former Apple CEO, Elon Musk, the co-founder of Tesla, Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, and Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of Huffington Post. Amidst all this, he can play cricket too.
Welcome to the life of Priyank Panchal, the 2016-17 Ranji Trophy's highest run-getter, who has transformed from an underachiever to a promising opener, and after eight years of domestic cricket, has finally forged an identity. His previous best season tally was 665, in 2015-16, "far from enough" by his standards. This season, he's nearly doubled that courtesy five centuries, the most by a Gujarat batsman.
With Gujarat having entered their first final in 66 years, Panchal will have possibly two shots at surpassing VVS Laxman's 1415 runs - the most in one season in the tournament's 83-year history - which he tallied in 1999-00. Panchal needs 146 more to set the new record. Only Vijay Bharadwaj, and Shreyas Iyer, who topped the charts during Mumbai's title-winning run in 2015-16, have scored more in a season.
Understanding his game, Panchal says, has been the biggest difference, and it wasn't always the case. His game awareness stood out, most notably in Lahli against Railways. In conditions that have traditionally assisted swing and seam bowling, he made a 138-ball 101 to set the tone for Gujarat's 294-run win, in just their second game. "Survival would have been tough, so I had to go after the bowling," he says of the knock.
Then, Panchal became Gujarat's first triple-centurion in first-class cricket when he made an unbeaten 314 against Punjab. On a seaming track in Nagothane, against a quality Madhya Pradesh attack, he made a defiant 62, a knock he values highly amidst the big scores. He missed out on a century in the quarter-final, but top-scored with 149 in the semi-final against Jharkhand in Nagpur.
What has led to this change? "The focus is not that much on technique now, personally," he says. "I have confidence that if I spend time at the crease, I will score runs. When I spent time at NCA in my junior days, there was a lot of emphasis on change in technique, but it wasn't working. My reasoning was if I spend so much time on technique, how will I be able to focus on runs? I've felt I need to hone my natural ability. Apart from that, the mental aspect is important - which bowlers do you line up, which bowler you try and play out? The situational awareness has helped me."
When Panchal debuted as an 18-year old in 2008, he was so shy and overawed by being in the Gujarat dressing room that interactions with his team-mates were restricted to the field. Off it, he was full of self-doubt if cricket alone would guarantee him a future, because of circumstances - he lost his father at the age of 15 and had to "financially settle" to ease the burden on his family. It showed in his performances too. The odd spark of brilliance was surrounded by a run of low scores.
Seven years on, the man who could hardly mumble a few words to his captain, is now often consulted and merits respect as a senior player. The confidence and assurance he possesses today are a result of some conscious changes he has made to his game over the years. The changes are visible now. They have come about because of greater awareness of not just cricket, but life and developing of interests that stretch far beyond the 22 yards.
More than working on his technique, Panchal says developing situational awareness has helped his game ESPNcricinfo
"On tours, I'm free after we are back to the hotel. I realised very early that it was important to have other interests besides cricket," he says. "When I was 19, I was an introvert. Talking to people was a big problem, so my mother enrolled me in a personality development course where I was taught about the need to develop interests. I couldn't move beyond a page then. I was hardly into science, but over the years, it has just changed the way I look at things. I feel empty if I don't have books by my side."
Reading apart, Panchal also maintains a diary - he's nearly filled nine of them since he first started writing in 2009. It's very personal to him, one he digs into when in doubt, or just to feel good about himself. It's a mix of his dismissals, his highs, his lows, and how he wriggled out of different situations. "I write about journalists, and recently about interviews too," he laughs. "What were the kind of questions I was asked, was I comfortable answering and all those things.
"Basically, I felt I needed to have something which I can look back years later, something that would give me joy. So I wanted to capture moments in my diary along with photographs. My coach kept asking me to write a diary, just to record my thoughts about life in general. I did it for three-four months, and slowly, it became part of my life. Sometimes, when I've been stuck in tough situations, I open my diary to see what I did when I was in a similar situation previously. That boosts me from within."
Panchal's tryst with competitive cricket came in 2008 when he went to Mumbai on a sports scholarship offered by Indian Oil Corporation. He wasn't guaranteed too many games in the competitive times, but Ajinkya Rahane's late pull-out from a game gave him an opportunity. He made 60, and coach Sulakshan Kulkarni was impressed. Later in the season, he made his Gujarat debut.
"The pitches were such that, as an opener, you had to work hard for your runs," he says. "There was spongy bounce and the bowlers were pretty quick. At that age, it was a big match for me. It showed me how to build an innings and how Mumbai cricket was. They play aggressively, but at the same time can slow down the game too. It was great to interact with a legend like Wasim Jaffer."
He was also attracted by Rahul Dravid's routine and match preparation, which he has tried to bring to his game. "I met him during the Under-15s and Under-17s at NCA because he used to train there. At the time, there was only general talk with him, no personal talk as such. I was very shy then, and would get nervous approaching him.
"But I saw how he practiced. He replicated a match situation. He stayed there from 9 to 4, scheduled his lunch and snacks as per the match timings. That attracted me a lot. I haven't written this in my diary, but it is in my mind. The picture is crystal clear."
Despite being in the limelight, Panchal doesn't want to get carried away. His next target is India A, one that is firmly in his path should he continue scoring runs. Given the season he has had, a place in Rest of India's squad for the Irani Cup against the Ranji Trophy champions can't be ruled out either, if Gujarat lose the final. For now, he's simply living in the present, and not thinking of selection calls. "I try to ensure it doesn't affect my game," he says. "One thousand is a lot of runs, I actually didn't realise when I crossed the landmark. I can say that my hard work is paying off now."
For Panchal, there wouldn't be a better way to top off a bumper season than with a historic Gujarat win, one he is willing to trade his runs for because "that is the ultimate high" as far as Indian domestic cricket goes.Share This Video Facebook Twitter EMAIL
Being a girl out at a bar is hard sometimes, that is pretty much a universal truth. Not all the time, but incidents happen with skeezy guys and it’s not all rainbows and sunshine and free drinks all the time. With the current political situation adding even more land mines than normal in innocent conversation, the chances of running into somebody that doesn’t respect women in a bar is that much higher. SNL writers clearly understand this, and made a whole sketch out of what it’s like to be hit on by a guy who suddenly rejects Cecily Strong’s “Michelle” character the instant she turns him down for a date. Even though the conversation was polite up until that point.
The sketch is actually less a joke when it starts out and more of a real-life situation put to screen in a mostly realistic way, but the escalating brutishness and fits thrown by each subsequent guy hitting on Michelle makes the sketch work. Each of the various men, wearing Pussy Hats or proclaiming how much they did to help people get to the Women’s March in Washington DC, is closer to real people than many viewers may know. Especially the instant fits thrown when each of their efforts are shut down in short order.Glass-recycling bins in Germany, one of Europe's best recyclers. Photo by maveric2003 via Flickr.
New statistics on waste and recycling show that there is still a major gap between east and west in Europe, where the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency reports that "poor legislation, insufficient infrastructure, lack of environmental awareness outside cities, and a shortage of political will" have left Eastern Europe "plagued with serious and potentially dangerous waste disposal problems."According to numbers released last month by the EU statistical agency Eurostat, Denmark generated the highest amount of per-capita municipal waste in the 27-nation bloc -- 802 kilograms per person in 2008. Cyprus, Ireland, and Luxembourg all topped 700 kilos/person as well.
Though Eastern European member states were relative lightweights in the waste-generation category -- Czechs, Poles, Latvians, Slovaks, and Romanians all created less than half the garbage the Danes did -- it's clear this stems from a lack of ability to consume at the same level rather than a greater environmental consciousness.
Bulgaria Landfills 100% of Its Trash
While countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium landfill 5 percent or less of their municipal waste, the Eurostat report revealed, 100 percent of the trash generated in Bulgaria, and nearly as much in Romania, Malta, and Lithuania, goes straight to the landfill -- or worse. As Lucian Ionescu, the director of the Bucharest branch of the nonprofit Regional Environmental Centre for Central and Eastern Europe (REC), told the IPS:
"In rural areas illegal dumping is a serious problem. People are not aware of recycling and waste management -- something which dates back to communist times. Illegal dumping poses serious health and environmental risks, while burying certain types of waste in landfill sites has its risks too."
Poorly equipped and maintained older landfill sites run the risk of contaminating nearby land and groundwater, environmental groups say. "In Bulgaria, residents near the controversial Suhodol landfill site in Sofia have previously picketed the site in a bid to get it closed down over safety fears," the IPS reported. "Apart from the smell which they said made it impossible to live close to the site, they claimed there was a serious risk from explosive methane gas -- which is also a potent greenhouse gas -- at the site as it was released from rotting waste."
69% of Garbage in Austria Gets Recycled or Composted
Other NGOs report that the idea of "producer responsibility" -- using fewer materials, and more easily recyclable ones, in manufacturing -- is a foreign concept throughout much of Eastern Europe, as is separation of organic waste such as kitchen scraps and garden clippings from the rest of the trash.
On average, 21 percent of municipal waste generated in the EU was recycled. Austria did the best of that score, recycling or composting 69 percent of its trash, closely followed by Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands -- all affluent countries whose success both financially and environmentally can hopefully point the way for their still-struggling neighbors.
"Eastern European governments argue that they must let economies grow and that they cannot just pass laws which might potentially slow that growth," Ivo Kropacek, the director of Friends of the Earth in the Czech Republic, told the IPS. "But economies can be grown in a green way, without having to harm the environment. We need politicians to give us better laws."
More about waste and recycling:
How to Start a Citywide Recycling Program All By Yourself
Ottawa's 'Green Bin' Municipal Composting Program is About to Take Off!
Waste Reduction and Recycling Can Cut CO2 by 345 Million Tons a Year
Footprints in Waste Management: Taking Steps toward Zero Waste
Discovering The True Power Of Your Trash
New Municipal Waste-to-Ethanol Facility Planned for Mississippi
WasteAway Services Converts Municipal Waste Into Structural MaterialsThey’ve dropped the auto bailout on us, but... there’s only so long you can ride that one-trick pony, and they just kept pounding away at it, and so that’s baked in right now and we’re tied.
Here's how Mitt Romney's political director, Rich Beeson, describes the auto bailout as a campaign issue in Ohio:That one trick sure saved and created a lot of jobs, though, didn't it? And if the auto rescue is so easily dismissed as a one-trick pony when the political director is talking to ultimate Beltway pundit Mike Allen, then why is Mitt Romney himself bothering to fear-monger to Ohio audiences about Chrysler sending jobs to China?
When you consider the different audiences for these two different messages, it starts to look a little like the Romney campaign is trying to convince the punditocracy it's in a better swing-state position than it is, while grappling with the real truth of how much trouble it's in when appearing in front of actual voters. And, as Greg Sargent points out, this dismissal of the bailout as a political, not policy, issue shows yet again what a problem it is for the Romney campaign that Mitt was so terribly wrong on this issue.
Please give $3 to help President Barack Obama bring this one home.The discovery that a Roman road may in fact have been made by Iron Age Britons offers a glimpse of a far more sophisticated society than previously thought
It's not a question often asked, but perhaps it should be. What did the Druids do for us? The discovery of a road in Shropshire that was built by pre-Roman engineers suggests that indigenous Britons may have been much more accomplished than we – or the Romans – liked to imagine. The road itself tells the story well.
The route had long been known as a lost Roman road, named Margary No 64 after the man who first mapped what everyone assumed to be the country's earliest network. It was visible as a low earthwork and as marks in ploughed fields, and in 1995 archaeologists dug up a bit. Sure enough, it looked Roman.
But in 2009, quarrying by Tarmac was due to destroy 400m of it, giving archaeologists a rare opportunity to expose a long section of road, some of it, crucially, very well preserved. At first, it still looked Roman, from its cambered, cobbled surface on a metre of hardcore and a clay base, to the ditches at the sides with a thin scatter of Roman rubbish. However, dig director Tim Malim noticed that the road had twice been rebuilt, and knew its history could be dated using a technique that tells you when buried mineral grains were last exposed to sunlight.
The unexpected result was a more than 80% chance that the last surface had been laid before the Roman invasion in AD43. Wood in the foundation was radiocarbon-dated to the second century BC, sealing the road's pre-Roman origin. And Malim thinks a huge post that stood in 1500BC close to the crest of the hill was a trackway marker.
So, while the cobbles rattled to the sound of carts and chariots generations before the Romans invaded Britain, the route itself was older than Rome.
When the Roman army marched around its new conquest, it was not above using the road and discarding its litter. Indeed, there's every reason to believe that the Shropshire road continues north to meet Watling Street, suggesting that one of the Roman engineers' great achievements was at least in part no more than an act of resurfacing.
It is fashionable among archaeologists and ancient historians to debate how much Britain was really "Romanised". There is no consensus. But notwithstanding villas with central heating and public statues of Roman emperors, some academics portray the four centuries of Roman occupation as a mere ripple on the longer and stronger flow of native culture and politics.
But what of the reverse? Could Britain have been more "Roman" than was thought, before it was invaded? What do we find if we follow route 64 back into the past?
The road implies not just the ability to design and organise its construction, but also the justification for its cost – heavy traffic. Immediately we are outside a vision of ancient Britain where wheeled vehicles appear only in battle, as Roman writers would have it, in chaotic displays of chariotry.
Archaeological evidence is clear that long before the Roman invasion, the British landscape was well organised, with a dense network of fields and tracks. Larger settlements were towns in all but name, where homes were separated from industrial areas by streets, and functions such as mass storage and ritual had their separate places. Baths, medicines, skilled arts and crafts, perhaps even forms of currency – such things were commonplace, and can be seen evolving over millennia.
But archaeology is revealing a twist to this native sophistication, which suggests that before they were invaded, Britons were more aware of Rome than Rome was of Britain. This is seen no more clearly than in a cemetery near Colchester, Essex, excavated mostly in the 1990s at, as it happens, another Tarmac quarry.
Some very special people had been buried there. They weren't leaders, but members of the ruling class who had died between about AD40 and AD60: it's conceivable that some of them actually saw the invading Roman army, but they had grown up and learned their skills long before. There is nothing about their graves that looks in the least bit Roman. One of the men could have been a druid.
But when you look at the things the deceased took with them, you notice a striking thing: Rome. Or more specifically, precious Roman objects requiring Roman expertise. These include a beautiful blue glass jar of a type more typically found in the Mediterranean region around the time of the birth of Christ, that probably held a cosmetic. There is a pottery inkwell: did its owner write? One man took with him a large Italian wine jar and a copper jug and basin set, such as was common in Pompeii; an amber-coloured glass bowl may have been made in Italy.
And then there is "the doctor". This man had his wine jar, his imported pottery service and copper vessels. But he also had a set of surgical instruments – one of the oldest known in the ancient world. The tools are recognisably functional – scalpels, forceps, probes and more – and comparable to finds made around the Roman empire.
But they are not Roman. On current evidence, they were made in Britain to designs that merely borrowed from Greece and Italy. Buried with the surgeon's shiny tools were divining rods and a magical board game. Whether you call him a doctor or a druid, he was a local aristocrat with access to luxuries and ideas from Rome and beyond, and he had the ability to choose.
Archaeology traditionally deals in centuries; history in years. If you find something that looks Roman, you will probably call it Roman, though the dating may be too imprecise to pin down your discovery to a generation, still less a few years either side of a historical event such as a military invasion. Many things here once thought "Roman" could, in fact, be older. Shropshire's road, then, could be the start of a journey that changes the way we think about early Britain.
Mike Pitts is editor of British Archaeology.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
ST. LOUIS, MO (KTVI) - A series of SARAA and Amber alerts have been cancelled after two young children were found safe hours after they were taken by their father moments after he allegedly shot and killed their eight-month-old brother.
Police in St. Louis City and St. Louis County have been investigating the shooting death of 8-month-old Reien Crockett on the city’s north side at around 1 p.m. Tuesday. Reien was pronounced dead at Christian Hospital after being taken there by a Good Samaritan.
The boys' father, 35-year-old Diata Crockett, is the suspect in the shooting.
According to police, the family got into a rental car in Bellefontaine Neighbors when the mother said she felt coerced to get into the vehicle. The couple got into an argument and she got out of the car with the eight-month-old at I-270 and Riverview. Police said Diata shot at the mother during the dispute and ended up striking his infant son.
The mother and the Good Samaritan called police about the shooting and abduction while driving to the hospital with the wounded eight-month-old. She said that Diata Crockett was trying to run them off the road while they went for help.
A SARAA (regional abduction) alert and Amber Alert were issued for the children because they were in the car when Diata Crockett vanished. They were identified as three-year-old Blaze and two-year-old Ryker.
Blaze and Ryker were later found unharmed at a relative's house in Bellefontaine Neighbors.
Law enforcement agencies from across the area said they're continuing the search for Diata Crockett. The 2014 black Hyundai Sonata with Illinois plates he was driving was found Tuesday night in the 2900 block of Caddiefield in Ferguson, MO. Crockett remains at large and was last seen wearing a lime green shirt and green pants. Anyone with information is asked to call CrimeStoppers at 866-371-TIPS.
Upon his arrest, Diata Crockett will be charged with first-degree murder, first-degree domestic assault, and armed criminal action.
St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said Diata Crockett is a convicted felon and may be wanted on a parole violation. The mother told investigators that Diata had previously made suicidal and homicidal threats towards the family in the past. The couple has six children. Three of them were at daycare at the time of the shooting.CLEARWATER COUNTY, Idaho - The Clearwater County Sheriff's Office is investigating the death of a man they found in a submerged car.
The sheriff's office sent out an attempt to locate for an overdue person around 3 p.m. Saturday. The attempt to locate was for a 2008 Toyota Prius driven by Paul Joyce, 57, of Moscow, Idaho. Joyce was the Dean of the College of Science at the University of Idaho.
Deputies found Joyce's car several hours later submerged in Dworshak Reservoir at the Big Eddy Boat Ramp. They said Joyce was found deceased inside the Prius. His cause of death is unknown and the case is still under investigation.
In a Facebook post, the University of Idaho said Joyce joined the UI faculty in 1991 and was appointed Dean of the College of Science in 2013.
"He was a valuable and well-respected member of our university community; admired by staff and faculty, as well as his students, for his dedication and interdisciplinary efforts. He will be sorely missed," the university said in the post.It hasn’t been a great time to be a man without a job.
The jobs that have been disappearing, like machine operator, are predominantly those that men do. The occupations that are growing, like health aide, employ mostly women.
One solution is for the men who have lost jobs in factories to become health aides. But while more than a fifth of American men aren’t working, they aren’t running to these new service-sector jobs. Why? They require very different skills, and pay a lot less.
They’re also seen as women’s work, which has always been devalued in the American labor market.
The two occupations predicted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to decline most quickly from 2014 to 2024 are locomotive firers, shrinking 70 percent, and vehicle electronics installers and repairers, down 50 percent. They are 96 percent and 98 percent male.But it has 'nicely outperformed' since
Ubisoft has acknowledged that Assassin's Creed Syndicate sales have been "clearly impacted" by the performance issues of its predecessor, Assassin's Creed Unity.
In an investor call last night, Ubisoft executive Alain Martinez said: "Clearly, in our first week, we were impacted by what happened with Assassin's Creed Unity."
"We seem to experience the same sales curve as [Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag]," added Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot. "Versus Unity, Syndicate was down in the first week but nicely outperformed it in its second week as it benefitted from positive word of mouth."
Assassin's Creed Syndicate holds the dubious honour of having the worst-performing opening week in the main Assassin's Creed series. Eep.
In our review, we said that "a game of this magnitude is bound to have its successes and failures, and Assassin's Creed Syndicate definitely has both. But, in most instances, gameplay and narrative are interwoven nicely enough to keep us vested in our pursuit of a better London".
Assassin's Creed Syndicate sales "clearly" impacted by Unity [Eurogamer]
You are logged out. Login | Sign upNature vs. Nurture
Many people debate whether criminality is a product of nurture or nature, but a new study published in Nature Human Behavior gives support to the latter argument, claiming that brain tests can predict a child’s inclination for criminal activity later in life.
Researchers led by neuroscientists at Duke University looked at data from a New Zealand study involving a thousand people in the early ’70s until they turned 38 years old. In that study, children as young as three years old completed a series of tests that measured their reflexes, language comprehension, motor skills, and social skills. According to the Duke researchers, the three year old subjects with the lowest 20 percent brain health grew up to commit over 80 percent of crimes as adults.
The researchers emphasize that brain health isn’t the only indicator for future criminality, noting that factors such as socio-economic status and child maltreatment can significantly impact adulthood behavior. To account for this, they did not include subjects living below the poverty line in their conclusions.
They also noted that the same 20 percent of subjects demanded the most from the state, accounting for “57% of nights in hospitals, 66% of welfare benefits, and 77% of fatherless child-rearing,” Quartz reports. “There aren’t so many children in middle class and wealthy homes who have poor brain health, but, where they are, they’ve also grown up to be very high cost users of public services,” says Terrie Moffitt, a professor of psychology and neuroscience from Duke University.10:56 p.m.
Peshmerga-PKK agree on 24-hour ceasefire, meetings to continue
An hour and a half-long meeting between Peshmerga and PKK officials, discussing Friday’s clashes in the Shingal area, has ended with the agreement for a 24-hour ceasefire, Hemin Hawrami, adviser to President Masoud Barzani, tweeted.
The PKK will consult with their superiors in their Qandil headquarters, Rudaw’s correspondent in Shingal, Nasir Ali, reported.
Peshmerga officials reportedly asked in the meeting to assume responsibility
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icals in the West converting to Eastern Orthodoxy (Francis Schaeffer’s son, for example)? Why do we see a mirror image overseas in predominantly Eastern Orthodox countries, where more and more convert to evangelical Christianity? Today I am interviewing a former Southern Baptist who has converted to Orthodoxy. Tomorrow I will be interviewing a former Eastern Orthodox believer who has become Baptist. On Friday, we will look at the parallels between the two accounts and hopefully better understand these two traditions, and why people are converting from one to the other.
Theron’s Story: Why I Left Evangelicalism for Eastern Orthodoxy Theron Mathis is an unassuming, soft-spoken man in his thirties with a winsome manner and a pleasant smile. His story begins in the buckle of the Bible belt. Both he and his wife grew up in a conservative Baptist churches, his wife’s being Landmarkist in theology (meaning it holds the belief that the Baptist Church is the only true church.) He attended college at Liberty University, a hub for Christianity that leans right both theologically and politically. He attended two Southern Baptist seminaries (Southeastern and Southern) in the late 1990’s, and at one point, felt called to be a Baptist preacher.
“What was the first thing that triggered your attraction to Orthodoxy?” I asked. Theron looks puzzled, as if he’s trying to recall what initially made him curious. After a few moments of silence, he answers: “Church history. Studying the patristics.” Frustrated by constant debates over the meaning of Scripture, Theron decided to look back into church history to see what the church looked like in the early centuries. As he read the church fathers, he realized, “the church back then looked different than the Baptist church I grew up in.” From there, Theron began wondering if that early church he saw in the fathers’ writings still existed anywhere.
Eventually, one central issue brought him to the doorstep of the Eastern Orthodox church. “The issue of authority,” he explains. “I felt I was flying by the seat of my pants as a Christian. I would read Scripture and come to conclusions myself. At some point, I felt I had to submit myself to some authority outside of myself.”
The issue of authority led Theron to question the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura. “I felt like with sola scriptura, I was the authority.” Shortly thereafter, Theron came to see sola scriptura as deficient. “Once I reached that point, it was a fast track. That’s the house of cards. At that point, I had to find another authority.”
“Why Eastern Orthodoxy and not Catholicism?” I ask, wondering why he would choose the Orthodox church as his authority and not the Roman Catholic church. Theron tells me he couldn’t swallow the whole “pope thing,” especially papal infallibility. Nor could he stomach the arrogance of the Roman Catholic church in adjusting the Nicene Creed without the consent of the Eastern church. “The typical Orthodox apologetics,” he grins.
With the Eastern Orthodox Church as his new authority, Theron began accepting doctrines foreign to his Baptist background. “How hard was it to accept these doctrines?” I ask, beginning to read a list.
Praying to saints? Easier than expected, once he understood the Orthodox view of the saints interceding for us much like our friends on earth lift us up in prayer.
Mary? “A little tougher, because the phraseology in the liturgy sometimes made me think they were seeing her as something more than a simple intercessor. But I’ve been able reconcile that over time.”
Icons? Not tough at all. They are aids to worship, not items to be worshipped, yet Theron admits that there may possibly be misconceptions among Orthodox laypeople, especially outside the U.S.
The Eucharist becoming the actual body and blood of Christ? “That was pretty easy. Even apart from the Church, you could come to that conclusion from Scripture.”
Infant baptism was the biggest hurdle for Theron, due to his Baptist background and family traditions. In the end, he sees the Orthodox view as not too far from the covenantal view of some Reformed traditions. “The child is becoming a part of the church.”
But what about the most important doctrine – justification by faith? “If you ask an Orthodox person, everyone will say we are saved by grace,” he says categorically.
“But by grace alone?” I probe deeper.
“Yes, by grace alone. But we wouldn’t say through faith alone if we are defining faith as mere belief.” Theron recoils from the easy-believism of his early Baptist experience. “You prayed a prayer. Just the assent to belief gave you your ticket.” Theron compares his Orthodox doctrine with the evangelical belief of “lordship salvation.” He admits that the categories are different. The Orthodox do not see salvation in forensic, legal categories, but in medical terms.
Theron’s conversion to Orthodoxy was a struggle. His parents and in-laws were grieved by the family’s decision. He lost friends from seminary. But for Theron and his wife, there was no turning back. “I had embraced Orthodoxy,” he said.
“How do you view Baptists now?” I ask. “Are Baptists saved?”
Ironically, though Theron thought the Landmarkist position of his Baptist church laughable, he answers with a similar view regarding Orthodoxy. “We definitely consider ourselves the True church. We believe in apostolic succession.” He clarifies, “We believe there is salvation outside of the Eastern Orthodox church, but we have the fullness of the revelation.”
“How sure are you that you’ve made the right decision?” I ask.
Theron reponds quickly, “I would never turn back. I’m 100% sure, and the longer I’m Orthodox, the more certain I am about it.”
“But what about those who convert the other way?” I reply. “Orthodox becoming Baptists?”
Theron shrugs and looks surprised, “I think they didn’t have a good understanding of Orthodoxy.”
I begin sharing stories of Orthodox priests I knew in Romania who would threaten the children attending evangelical AWANA clubs, even vowing to “cut off their fingers.” When I ask his opinion regarding this persecution of Baptists, he looks surprised and calls the priests’ actions “exaggerated.” He refuses to condone such behavior, but at the same time, he sympathizes with their need to “defend” the faith. “They probably view Baptists like you and I would view Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses. These are people coming to their country and ‘destroying the faith,’ so they will do anything possible to defend it. I can see where that mindset comes from.”
Though Theron is a convinced Orthodox believer, he does not try to convert his Baptist friends. He presents Eastern Orthodoxy and leaves it at that. But he does seek to convert nominal Christians or those who are not Christian at all.
“Though your liturgy is beautiful, isn’t it pretty much inaccessible to non-Christians?” I ask, wondering what it would be like for an unchurched person to enter an Eastern Orthodox church for the first time. Definitely not seeker sensitive. Theron questions my presupposition. “Who says the worship of the church is to be evangelistic?” He then points to early church history. “They wouldn’t let unbelievers in the worship service, or if they did, they asked them to leave mid-way through (before the Eucharist).”
Theron admits that the Orthodox church doesn’t reach as many unchurched people as they should, but then adds, ” I don’t know if any church in America does a great job reaching totally unchurched people.”
Why would an evangelical convert to Eastern Orthodoxy? Theron has two answers. The first is stability. “Within the evangelical world, you’re always looking for the new thing, you’re always reinventing the wheel. A lot of people are ready to get off that. So stability is a huge attraction for evangelicals who convert.”
The second reason is spirituality. “That’s what keeps me there. The church life throughout the year,” he says.
Our time is coming to an end. The biggest difference between Southern Baptists and Eastern Orthodox is the view of salvation. Theron admits that many laypeople in the Orthodox church believe that salvation is by good works. So, I press him again.
“Is salvation based on Christ’s work alone?”
Theron answers, “Oh yes! Without Christ, it’s impossible. He’s the one who opened the door!”
“But is there any other ground? Can I be accepted by God because of Christ and something I did?” I press further.
“Works are an expression of faith,” replies Theron. “The act of works is the act of putting on Christ. They’re opening yourself up so that God’s grace can transform you more into Christlikeness.”
Sensing we’re talking past one another, I put it another way, “When it comes down to it… when you’re looking to your justification before God and your acceptance before Him, does it eventually boil down to this: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner!’?”
“Yes,” says Theron. “Absolutely.”Buy Photo Bobby Petrino addresses the media during his weekly press conference. (Photo: By Michael Clevenger, CJ)Buy Photo
The Louisville football team landed arguably its best commitment in the 2017 recruiting class on Wednesday from four-star Florida running back Colin Wilson, who is rated a top-200 senior nationally by Scout.com and Rivals.com.
The 6-foot, 205-pound Wilson, of Clay High School in Green Cove Springs, near Jacksonville, is ranked the nation's No. 156 prospect overall and No. 15 running back by Scout. He's ranked No. 170 overall and No. 11 at his position by Rivals.
Wilson chose the Cardinals from a list of power-conference scholarship offers that included Notre Dame, Ohio State, Auburn, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
According to the Scout and Rivals rankings, Wilson is positioned to be the highest-ranked high school player to sign with U of L since Bobby Petrino was rehired as coach in 2014.
He is the Cards' 22nd pledge in the 2017 class, including the third four-star recruit, according to Rivals. Georgia receivers Justin Marshall and Corey Reed are the other four-star commitments.
The commitment shot the Cards' class up to No. 20 in Rivals' national team rankings with still nearly four months to go before national signing day. Seventh-ranked Clemson, No. 11 Miami and No. 14 Florida State are the only ACC classes ahead of U of L's.
Wilson is also rated four stars and the No. 298 senior nationally by ESPN.com, joining Marshall (No. 228) as the Cards' only pledges in that's site's top 300.
He's rated three stars by 247Sports.com but four stars in the 247 composite ratings, which average the four major sites.
Wilson has run for 338 yards, averaging 6.8 yards per carry, and three touchdowns in six games this season. He rushed for 490 yards and 12 touchdowns last season. His best year came as a sophomore, when he ran for 1,555 yards and 27 TDs.
U of L running backs coach Kolby Smith has been the team's lead recruiter for Wilson.
PETRINO'S FOUR-STAR PLEDGES
A look at Louisville's four-star football commitments, per Rivals.com ratings, since Bobby Petrino was rehired in 2014:
2017
Colin Wilson, RB, (No. 170 in Rivals250)
Justin Marshall, WR
Corey Reed, WR
2016
Desmond Fitzpatrick, WR, (No. 207)
Jawon Pass, QB
Chris Taylor-Yamanoha, WR/CB
2015
Lamar Jackson, QB
Devante Peete, WR
DeVonte Fields, DE (junior-college transfer)
2014
NoneJune 1, 2017
Hungarian-Serbian Border Incident
This scenario assumes that tensions between Hungary and Serbia during the next couple of years due in part to Hungary’s support for the independence and acceptance into the European Union of Kosovo.
A few weeks before this scenario takes place, Hungarian radicals murdered several Serbs living and working in the border town of Tompa. Despite Hungary’s efforts to bring these criminals to justice, little progress has been made in the case. The Serbian government has used the incident and the lack of progress by the police to excite anger and outrage, going so far as to demand “compensation” from Hungary.
This scenario also assumes that, by 2017, Serbia has replaced its aging MiG-29s with newer and more capable aircraft, specifically the late generation MiG-29M2s exported to countries such as Syria.
*** FLASH *** FLASH *** FLASH *** ATTN: Commanding Officer, Kecskemet Air Base INTEL/SITREP Negotiations with Serbia over the murders of Serbian nationals in Tompa have broken down. Serbia has moved troops to the border and we are concerned they are preparing to launch a retaliatory strike against Tompa. ENEMY FORCES A battalion-strength force with armored and infantry units is believed to be on the border, only a few miles from the town of Tompa. Serbia recently purchased several MiG-29M2s. These are highly capable aircraft and you should use caution if it becomes necessary to engage them. FRIENDLY FORCES Your base is currently home to a squadron of JAS 39 Gripens. A company of mechanized infantry, an artillery battery, and supporting units are on patrol near Tompa and are chopped to your command. MISSION 1. Conduct patrols of the region surrounding Tompa. 2. Protect Tompa from attack. EXECUTION Do not initiate attacks against Serbian units unless: A) Serbian units attack Tompa or some other target in Hungary B) Serbian units cross the border into Hungary in a manner that appears to have hostile intent (as opposed to simply crossing the border by accident) or C) Your forces are attacked If any of these conditions occur, you are free to return fire and to eliminate any Serbian forces in your area of operation that appear to threaten Tompa or other civilian or government targets. COMMAND AND SIGNAL Command: Kecskemet Air Base Signal: EMCON State C (Unrestricted Emissions) Good luck.
Always a good idea to take stock of one’s assets. I have a few platoons of motorized infantry (BTR-80s) near Tompa at the Serbian border. At Balotaszallas, 8.5nm to the north, more infantry, some T-72 tanks, and a battery of 152mm artillery. I scope the relief layer: this part of Hungary is a flat, occasionally forested plain. No particular terrain features to worry about.
I have 12 JAC 39C Gripen based at Kecskemet. I’ve always liked Saabs—the cars and the aircraft—and I think the Gripen is one of the more handsome modern jet fighters. Four of these are ready for action, armed with two IRIS-T infrared-guided missiles with off-boresight capability and four long-range radar-guided AMRAAM missiles each. The remaining eight will be ready in an hour, carrying two IRIS-T, a pair of Paveway bombs and a Litening laser designation pod. Alright, cool.
0730 Local – I launch two Gripens, Oscar 1 and 2, keeping the remaining two anti-air Gripens on standby. I decline to assign a mission to them, as I have few enough units to manage that I think I will be able to direct them manually. Radar is detecting bogeys over Austria. 40,000ft, 248 knots. Civil aviation. Do not kill. This will be a recurring theme in this scenario as civilian traffic crisscrosses Hungary.
0733 – Oscar 2 detects two bogeys to the south at a range of about 120nm. They are emitting with N010-M Zhuk radars, which is the type installed on the Serbian MiG-29M Fulcrum that are mentioned in the briefing. It is tempting to mark them as hostile now, but I will wait for them to violate Hungary’s border or otherwise demonstrate hostility. I have two Gripens monitoring them now, at range.
0738 – Radar detects an aircraft traveling west at 460kts out of Bulgaria. I find myself wondering if 460kts is a suspicious airspeed, or normal for civil aircraft. Quick reference check confirms large jetliners can hit about Mach 0.8, which is just about 460 knots.
0740 – Those MiG-29s are looking awfully determined to violate my airspace. They’re closing in at 48kts. My Gripens’ patrol is on an eastward tack, and turn southwest for an intercept, going to afterburner. Y’all getting too close.
0742 – The MiG-29s are at the edge of the coverage of the surface-to-air Mistral missiles covering my motorized infantry at the Serbian border. Sorely tempted to flag them as hostile and hit them with a MANPAD, but I don’t want to fire the first shot in this scenario until hostile intent is indisputably clear.
Moments later MiGs are over the border and accelerating. You cross into someone else’s airspace, okay—maybe it’s an accident. You cross into someone else’s airspace and then hit the afterburner? Yeah, that’s not gonna play. I mark them hostile. Moments later they’re strafing Tompa.
My Gripens are still far away; I should have sprinted them right to the border instead of holding them back like this.
0743 – After peppering Tompa with cannon fire, the MiGs have turned south and are headed for the Serbian border. Looks like Oscar 1-2 are late for the action. Rather than send them into Serbian airspace chasing the MiGs, I have them loiter above Tompa. I like to think it’s good for local morale.
0745 – My motorized rifle platoons detect armor south of the Serbian border. It’s closing in. I order my infantry into a position better suited to stop the advance, and command the tanks and artillery around Balotaszallas to move south in support.
0747 – One of those MiG-29 has turned back in the direction of the border and is looking for trouble. I order Oscar 1-2 to engage, and they fire a pair of IRIS-T at the Serbian fighter from a range of about 12nm. This seems strange to me, as this seems like a situation where an AMRAAM would be favorable.
I watch as the MiG-29 detects the incoming missiles and cranks away, dropping flares. Both IRIS-T miss, and my Gripens fire AMRAAMS now at a range of 8.5nm. This time the MiG takes a hit and goes down in flames.
JAS-39C Gripen meets MiG-29M2 Fulcrum-C
0750 – The other MiG-29 has turned north, too, though it is still deep within Serbian territory. My Gripens fire at it from within Hungarian airspace. Now the MiG-29 stagger-fires four missiles in return. Chaff and jammers fail to dissuade my AMRAAMs. The MiG is hit and killed. Moments later my Gripens evade four AA-12 Adder missiles in quick succession. I exhale finally.
As this drama is unfolding, Serbian armor is crossing the border near Tompa. I don’t know how capable my motorized rifle platoons will be against Serbian armor, and it’ll be another 40 minutes before any of my Gripens are ready with air-to-ground strike loadouts.
0753 – Radar picks up on two more probable MiG-29s headed north, widely spaced. Hey guys, you’re not going to stand a chance against the Gripens if you give them time to double up on you. Just sayin.
I notice that I’m down to 2 IRIS and 4 AMRAAM between my two Gripens. They will probably expend most if not all of these missiles on the next two intercepts. I get my other two air-intercept Gripens ready.
0754 – Missile fire from one of the MiGs. My Gripens respond with AMRAAMs at long range.
0755 – Two AA-10 Alamo missiles are sent astray by my Gripens’ jammers. The MiG is not so lucky, and eats an AMRAAM.
0757 – Another exchange of long-range missile fire. Oscar 2 takes a hit from an AA-10 Alamo. The MiG takes an AMRAAM hit seconds later, leaving Oscar 1 alone in the airspace above Tompa.
I order Oscar 1 to return to base, as Oscar 3-4 are already en route. I lament losing a jet, but I can live with a score of 4 MiG-29 for 1 Gripen.
0804 – Oscar 4 detects an airborne tanker passing through Hungarian airspace, coming more-or-less from Bulgaria. I’m a little confused by this, as I thought air tankers were exclusively a military thing. Is it a cargo aircraft carrying fuel? That doesn’t make sense, does it? As long as it’s not refueling Serbian MiGs I am fine with this.
0805 – Incoming MiG-29, far to the south and still within Serbian airspace. A single AMRAAM is fired at it. MiG drops chaff and turns to present its beam to the missile, successfully evading it.
0806 – Two more AMRAAMs fired. The first misses its target, the second one scores a kill.
0818 – Another bogey has been coming up from Serbia for the past few minutes. It’s not radiating, but it is traveling north at 480 knots. I am suspicious, but reluctant to fire on it. All MiG-29 thus far have come in with their radars on.
I look up the Serbian Air Force to see what else it might be: a MiG-21, but few if any are currently active; a Soko J-22 Orao, also likely retired by the Serbs; or a Soko G-4 Galeb, cruising speed 297 knots—so probably not that either, unless it is traveling at its absolute maximum speed.
0819 – The bogey is descending from 40,000ft through 30,000ft now and still diving. Oscar 4 identifies it as hostile, so I order the Gripens to engage. My Gripens, and the unidentified aircraft, fire weapons at the same time. Sneaky bastard.
My Gripens turn aside, drop chaff and go to afterburner; the bogey is continuing to descend, apparently intending to run at low altitude. An IRIS-T vectors in on it and hits; ground forces report a MiG-29 shot down.
Close one.
Okay, the plan from now on is to shoot down everything coming out of Serbia.
0822 – Enemy ground forces have been at my border for a while now, but so far they appear reluctant to attack.
0830 – Eight Gripens are ready for strike mission. I review the briefing: “you are free to return fire and to eliminate any Serbian forces in your area of operation that appear to threaten Tompa” if any of the conditions initiating hostilities are met. That armor is a clear enough threat to warrant elimination. I launch a pair of Gripens, Oscars 11 and 12, each tasked with dropping a pair of Paveway II LGB on Serbian armor.
0842 – Oscar 11 releases first and is already RTB by the time the bombs hit, killing two M-84 tanks.
0844 – Oscar 12 has successfully delivered its weapons, too. That’s two armor platoons reduced to one tank. There’s a third armor formation east of Tompa; in light of the success of these last two strikes, I launch Oscar 10 to drop Paveways on the last armored group. If Serbia was hoping to overwhelm with armor, they had better have a Plan B.
0851 – Oscars 11 and 12 are safely back at Kecskemet and ready to re-arm. I look into the available loadouts: in addition to anti-air loadouts and laser-guided bombs, I can arm them with BK-90 Mjolner gliding cluster bombs (frowned upon by the international community), RB 15 anti-ship missiles (…probably unnecessary), AGM-65B Maverick guided missiles, and a SPK-39 recon pod. I am spoiled for choice. I arm them with air intercept loadouts (2 IRIS-T and 4 AMRAAM each).
0855 – Oscar 10 drops its Paveways. One of them malfunctions, but the other hits its target. The Gripen returns to base.
0915 – Oscars 3-4 are still loitering but no Serbian MiGs are in evidence, so I send them back to base to re-arm and refuel. I send Oscar 1 for a solo patrol. Oscar 10, having made it back to base, is ordered to re-arm with air-to-air missiles and a recon pod. The Serbian army also does not appear to be making any progress into Hungarian territory but I want to get a clearer picture of what’s happening on their side of the border. In light of the time to re-arm that will take until the afternoon.
0936 – Some of my troops detect some Serbian forces that have crossed the border. I send motorized infantry and some T-72s to cut them off. I also direct Oscar 5 to take off from Kecskemet and loiter near Tompa in case air support is needed.
0937 – A solitary Serbian M-84 tank fires on a formation of four Hungarian T-72s.
0938 – It does not end well for the Serbian tank.
My eastern flank, supported by BTR-80s and the T-72s, close in on Serbian recon infantry and open fire. To the west the M-84 that survived Oscar 12’s bombing run opens fire on my motorized infantry and takes out a BTR-80. I think I will direct Oscar 5 against this tank, since my T72s are slightly out of position to support these platoons.
Artillery fire is inbound from the south. I take note that I should use Oscar 10 to locate the battery and destroy it.
0940 – Serbian artillery has knocked out one of my platoons on the west flank.
0941 – Oscar 1 goes on a strafing run against what looks like a group of Serbian infantry. Two passes; two well-placed bursts of 27mm Mauser fire. Shortly after my T72s arrive on the scene and engage the remainder of them; the westernmost M-84 opens fire on my tanks. T-72s take damage but manage to eliminate the last M-84 on the western flank.
0944 – Oscar 5 drops its Paveways on the Serbian armor on my east flank and wipes them out.
0945 – More artillery, directed at my T72s. It is inaccurate, presumably because there is no infantry to spot for it.
0948 – Artillery fire against one of my motor rifle platoons destroys some BTR-80s. That battery is going to become very annoying. If only I could locate it.
0950 – I direct my forces to pull back from the Serbian border. As they do so, they detect enemy forces to the east of Tompa. They must have outflanked us unnoticed earlier. I command my T72s to go after them.
0955 – Firefight east of Tompa. The Serbs are outmatched and soon eliminated.
1000 – Oscar 1 is at Bingo fuel and returns to base; Oscars 3-4 are ready for patrol.
1012 – A group of Mi-8 Hip are detected heading for Tompa, and begin firing rockets at the town. My Gripens are still far away—I order them to hit the afterburner and head to Tompa supersonically.
1014 – The Mi-8s are still firing rockets when my Gripens drop in on them and blow them all out of the sky, first with missiles and taking out the last with a low-altitude gun pass.
The scenario ends abruptly on this note. Presumably Serbian forces have had enough, and elect to retreat their remaining forces.
We congratulate you on a successful mission. To you and to those under your command, we offer the thanks of a grateful nation. SIDE: Hungary =========================================================== LOSSES: ——————————- 1x JAS 39C Gripen 4x BTR-80 APC 1x T-72 Main Battle Tank EXPENDITURES: —————— 8x RB 98 IRIS-T [AIM-2000A] 15x RB 99 AMRAAM [AIM-120B] 8x Generic Chaff Salvo [8x Cartridges] 8x GBU-49/B Paveway II GPS/LGB [Mk82] 26x 125mm APFSDS-T 54x 14.5mm MG Burst [20 rnds] 56x 7.62mm MG Burst [20 rnds] 6x 27mm Mauser BK-27 Burst [30 rnds] 75x 12.7mm/50 MG Burst [10 rnds] 2x 125mm HE SIDE: Serbia =========================================================== LOSSES: ——————————- 6x MiG-29M2 Fulcrum C 9x M-84 Main Battle Tank 12x 7.62mm MG 5x Mi-8T Hip C EXPENDITURES: —————— 6x 30mm Gsh-30-1 Burst [30 rnds] 2x Generic Flare Salvo [3x Cartridges, Single Spectral] 9x Generic Chaff Salvo [5x Cartridges] 4x AA-12 Adder A [R-77, RVV-AE] 11x AA-10 Alamo A [R-27R, MR SARH] 2x AA-11 Archer [R-73] 18x 125mm APFSDS-T 90x 122mm/38 HE 6x 125mm HEAT 5x 125mm HE 80x 7.62mm MG Burst [20 rnds] 192x S-5K 57mm Rocket 48x 12.7mm/50 MG Burst [20 rnds]
Triumph, final score: 350.
Fun, short scenario. It seemed a little easy, partly due to the Serbian side only sending two MiG-29 at a time up to a total of six. The helicopter attack would also have been much more of a problem if it had happened under the cover of some MiGs.
I had some infantry equipped with Mistral MANPADs and was not able to get them to fire at any aircraft, not even the Mi-8s which should have been an easy target. Not sure what was going on there.
Here, as in the last scenario I played through, infantry combat seems to happen too fast. Platoons knock each other out in a matter of a minute or two. I am no expert on modern warfare, of course, and CMANO is not intended to model ground forces to the level of detail seen in air and naval assets, so we are missing out low-intensity engagements and maneuvering and cover and entrenchment and all these other complexities. Regardless, the attrition level seems high.
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[UPDATE BELOW] It appears that a tattoo artist employed at Prospect Heights' Red Legged Devil tattoo shop—owned by Chris Torres, who was featured on the TLC show NY Ink—took the opportunity to tattoo his dog yesterday while the pet was knocked out for a medical procedure.
Artist Mistah Metro posted the above photo on his Instagram page, bragging that his dog was "cooler than yours" because the vet allowed him to tattoo her while she was under anesthesia, having just had her spleen removed. The dog appears, at best, truly bummed by this turn of events, and at worst, may be bleeding a little from the mouth, though that's almost certainly the result of the sweet Hefe filter—or is that Rise?—Metro chose to apply.
Chris Torres, however, wants the public to know that neither he nor his shop had anything to do with the controversial inking, which in some circles could be considered animal cruelty.
And anyway, the ASPCA does it all the time for identification purposes, animal tattoo advocates argue. (See the updates below for their statement.) Neither Torres nor Metro have responded to requests for comment.
@mister_smiley @mikeisthereason you guys are aware that the ASPCA tattoos dogs & cats once they've speyed or neutered them, right? — CHRIS TORRES (@CHRIS_TORRESNY) March 5, 2014
If the ASPCA told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?
Update, 12:20 p.m.: While tattooing one's pet is not illegal, the American Veterinary Medical Association, which dispenses ethical guidance to vets across the country, would really prefer it didn't happen. "We can't say a tattoo is going to do enormous damage to an animal, said Emily Patterson-Kane, an animal welfare scientist at the organization, "but we do look at whether a procedure is therapeutically necessary first—if it's not, that's not the vets goal."
Update, 12:50 p.m.: The ASPCA offered the following statement:
The ASPCA condones the use of tattooing for only identification purposes following spay or neuter surgery. This practice helps animal welfare professionals clearly identify animals that have been altered, thereby preventing unnecessary future surgeries. This painless procedure is performed by a licensed veterinarian or veterinary technician while the animal is under anesthesia. The marks are very small and have a specific purpose, which is to avoid inflicting undue pain and stress later if that animal is unknowingly brought in for a spay surgery a second time. Tattooing an animal for the vain sake of joy and entertainment of the owner - without any regard for the well-being of the animal - is not at all comparable to the incident in question and is not something the ASPCA supports.
Update, 3:40 p.m.: Reached for comment, Red Legged Devil owner Chris Torres was emphatic that the decision of his employee, Mistah Metro, to tattoo his dog had nothing to do with him. "The dog wasn’t tattooed at the shop—what [employees] do on their own time isn't my business," he said.
Perhaps not, but Torres still has plenty of opinions on the matter. "People are still offered jobs after being pedophiles," he said. “I don’t know why everyone is treating this kid like he raped a 12-year-old."
Mistah Metro has yet to respond to a request for comment.After five years, Nintendo marketing executive Scott Moffitt is leaving the company. The executive, who formerly held marketing positions at PepsiCo and Henkel, will work at Nintendo through the end of July, before moving on, the company said in a statement to IGN.
"Scott Moffitt, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, has decided to leave Nintendo of America. In order to ensure a smooth transition, Scott will continue to work through the end of July," Nintendo explained.
"Nintendo has a strong group of seasoned leaders in place who will step in to assume the full responsibilities of the role on a permanent basis, with the objective of driving more collaboration and greater efficiencies across these groups and among the respective leaders. We thank Scott for his years of service and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors."
IGN reported that Nintendo was intending to permanently do away with Moffitt's position, executive VP of sales and marketing, with those tasks moved to existing staff. From the wording in Nintendo's statement, it sounds like this is indeed happening.
Moffitt joined Nintendo in 2011.
His departure comes less than a year before Nintendo is due to release a new console, the NX (codename), which is slated to arrive in March 2017.
Recently, iconic Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto said the company did not show off or talk about NX at E3 because it was worried about copycats. The system is rumored to be a console/mobile hybrid that makes use of "industry-leading" tech.Sometimes, I don’t want to dedicate a full blog post to an idea, but I still want to share the idea.
Is 2016 the Year of the Feral Child?
First, a fun and simple Jungle Book, which served as both a new adaptation of Kipling and a remake of the classic Disney cartoon. Then, a new Tarzan film. Soon, a remake of Pete’s Dragon, in which apparently Pete is a feral child raised by a dragon. Oh, also, Stranger Things and Eleven, its take on the feral ’80s child.
Why all these narratives suddenly? And does it mean that we will get even more in the coming years? Perhaps a reboot of George of the Jungle? Perhaps a biopic of Victor of Aveyron? Or will we see feral children shoehorned into other narratives, like the Justice League or the Marvel films?
It was hard to tell the difference between the RNC and The Purge: Election Year
The Purge movies aren’t perfect, but they’re a sloppy and disturbing look at what America could become. Violence across the country, burning effigies, mask-wearing killers.
I’ve considered writing a quiz where I compare dialogue from the film to quotes from the RNC, or the costumes of each, but that might be a cold take for a future date.
The RNC had some other strange pop culture moments.
Ted Cruz “betrayed” Trump in front of the RNC, causing Game of Thrones fans to label this act the #TedWedding, a reference to the #RedWedding of A Song of Ice and Fire. Trump referenced Law and Order, unclear if he meant the television show or the concepts of law and order. Scott Baio and one of those Duck Dynasty guys gave speeches, because they’re apparently the professional celebrities that this Republican party attracts.
At one point, Eric Trump endorsed his father with a description that eerily resembled Alfred Pennyworth’s analysis of the Joker in The Dark Knight.
“Vote for the candidate who can’t be bought, sold, purchased, coerced, intimidated, or steered from the path…” v. “…some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
“Some men just want to watch the world burn.” – Eric Trump
This tweet by Bruce Arthur also referenced the Joker in The Dark Knight, showing that the comparisons between Trump and the Joker are still going strong.
Ghostbusters is a great movie.
I really liked it. And
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on the outskirts of the village," he alleged.
"It is happening at the behest of the school staff who also despise us. They ask us to sit elsewhere during distribution of mid-day meal.
They don't call us by our names but address us as Nutts," said a girl who was once a student of the school but has discontinued going to school for the past many days.
Shahjehanpur SP Rakesh Chandra Sahu said, "It is a serious case. We have registered an FIR against the accused persons and are conducting raids at several places to nab them."
Basic Education Officer of Shahjehanpur Rajesh Verma said, "We have come to know about the incidents and ordered an inquiry into it. We are probing the charge against the school staff."
Atrocities against the Dalits is not new in Uttar Pradesh, but this case of restricting children from their share of education has come as a shame.Essential poll has two-party preferred vote split 50:50 as Tony Abbott tells party room negative gearing should not be pursued and the ‘only credible way to reduce taxes is to reduce spending’
A second poll shows the Coalition and the Labor party at level pegging on 50% of the two-party-preferred vote as Tony Abbott stirs backbench unrest and Malcolm Turnbull and his senior ministers struggle with their continued absence of a tax policy.
The Essential poll shows Labor’s primary vote on 38%, up three percentage points from the previous week – leaving Labor and the Coalition 50:50 after preferences.
Coalition's sugar-coated compliments mask attempt to revive bitterest budget | Lenore Taylor Read more
The previous week’s Essential poll had the Coalition ahead 52% to 48% and this shift in sentiment is large for a poll based on a rolling average over the past two weeks. It comes after last Monday’s Newspoll, which also showed the parties at 50:50 on the two-party-preferred vote.
After weeks of backbench unrest over the Coalition’s consideration of a plan to limit negative gearing concessions, Abbott fuelled the dissent in the Coalition party room on Tuesday, arguing against the idea and demanding the Coalition fund any tax cuts by cutting government spending, as he had done in the 2014 budget.
His intervention came as the prime minister repeatedly refused to be drawn on the Coalition’s own negative gearing plans, and the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, refused on multiple occasions in one interview on Tuesday afternoon to repeat treasurer Scott Morrison’s view that there had been “excesses” in the use of negative gearing tax concessions.
“The treasurer can talk for himself, I am the finance minister, I look after the expenditure side of the budget,” Cormann said under questioning on Sky News.
“The treasurer speaks for himself. The treasurer is responsible for the tax system. The treasurer is also responsible for this process. I’m not going to give a running commentary on somebody else’s portfolio.”
When it ruled out an increase in the goods and services tax, after months of talking up the option, the government made it clear it was considering lowering superannuation concessional contributions and capping the amount that could be claimed through negative gearing deductions.
But for weeks conservative backbenchers have been publicly arguing against both propositions, and on Tuesday Abbott told the party room he agreed that negative gearing should not be pursued and the “only credible way to reduce taxes is to reduce spending”.
Tony Abbott defends time as prime minister: 'I would have won election' Read more
Abbott, who over the weekend wrote that he wore his 2014 budget as a “badge of honour”, claimed it was “time for the leadership to take on the savings challenge again”.
With defence spending effectively quarantined from cuts, focusing exclusively on spending cuts forces governments to trim health, education and welfare – the same areas Abbott hit in the 2014 budget, which was widely regarded as unfair. Closing or reducing tax concessions is a way of targeting savings at higher earners.
Treasurer Scott Morrison told the meeting the Coalition had very little room to move on tax policy because it had no budget surplus, and because even doing nothing was, in effect, taking a decision to see more salary earners move into higher taxation brackets.
“We have very few options,” he said. “It is like dancing on top of a pinhead.”
The Essential poll also shows health moving to the top of voters’ list of concerns. When asked to nominate their three areas of greatest concern, 43% nominated health, 37% economic management, 35% jobs and the protection of local industries and 29% ensuring the tax system was fair.
Turnbull has privately reassured state premiers his budget will contain interim funding to make up for $57bn in cuts to long-term hospital funding in Abbott’s 2014 budget. The interim funding would ensure hospitals could continue operation while longer-term changes to funding and efficiency are agreed.
The government is also struggling to get its deal on Senate voting reform debated in the Senate. Labor, which opposes the agreement, has filibustered for a day to prevent debate on the bill from even beginning.
Proposed Senate voting rules legally vulnerable and incoherent – experts Read more
The Coalition has the backing of the Greens for the changes, although there could be some last-minute amendments after Tuesday’s rushed Senate inquiry. The Greens have come under intense pressure because if the deal is passed into law by March, as the government is demanding, it opens the way for a July double-dissolution election.
The Essential poll showed voters back the Senate changes, with 53% saying they supported the reforms (including 52% of Labor voters) and only 16% disapproving. Thirty percent said they didn’t know.
During the party room discussion, Abbott described Turnbull’s attack against Labor’s negative gearing policy as “brilliant”, but said that was also a reason not to muddy the waters by the Coalition proposing negative gearing changes of its own.The Talking Heads at CBGB, 1977 Photo: Roberta Bayley/Redferns
As told to Jennifer Vineyard
Chris: Our first show was opening for the Ramones at CBGB. We had been going to CBGB from pretty much the first night we moved to New York. One weekend Patti Smith performed, and she didn’t really have a band together. It was just Patti and Lenny Kaye on guitar, and it was really exciting. Totally a beatnik thing, which I loved. Lenny was just playing out of a little tiny amplifier, and Patti was doing versions of the songs from her first album, but they were kinda raw. And then I went back the following weekend, and the Ramones played. And the Ramones were also in their formative stages, and they would stop and argue with each other in the middle of a song! But when they were playing, it was so great. To my way of thinking, it was really advanced artistically, even though a lot of people said that they were moronic and that they couldn’t really play and all that. There was an artistry to what they were doing that was beyond typical rock-and-roll bands.
Tina: Dee Dee wrote most of the songs. But the one who always took authority was Johnny, because Johnny had gone to military school. It was kind of funny to us, because Chris and I also had parents in the military, so it was weird to us that Johnny was like that, because we weren’t! We were the opposite! Johnny was always very weird, but in our last 20 years of our career, we shared the same business manager, and he used to say, “Oh, Johnny’s such a great businessman!” He found out that he had won an award, a gold record, so he went to the office on his bike, and he just strapped the gold record to the back of his bicycle. So he was very frugal that way! Totally conservative. Republican.
Chris: I would say reactionary. But anyway, when it came time for us to make our debut, our audition at CBGB, I spoke to Hilly Kristal about it and he recognized me from being a regular patron there. I said, “We have a band and I think we’re ready to do a show here.” And he said, “Okay, but you have to audition.” And I said, “Okay, when should we audition?” And he said, “Well, I could put you on with the Ramones.” Hilly or Danny [Fields] said, “Is it okay if the Talking Heads open for you?” and Johnny said, “Oh yeah, they’re going to suck, so it’s no problem. They can open for us.” And then fast-forward two years, and we were asked to open for the Ramones on their first time to Europe, spring of ’77.
Tina: So we went on tour with them.
Chris: We went on tour with the Ramones, and we were the support act. And every show was sold out! We were advertised as “bands from New York,” and this was big with the kids in Europe. It was a huge success. We got brilliant reviews wherever we went. But life on the bus … it wasn’t a regular rock-and-roll tour bus, with bunks and everything, it was just like a tourist bus, with seats. So the Ramones would sit in their assigned seats, and we would sit pretty much wherever we wanted to, and in fact we would change seats from time to time, which really upset Johnny, because he liked everybody to be in the same seat each day. One of the famous episodes was the first show we went to, we went straight from the plane to the sound check in Zurich, Switzerland, and it was a place, a nice theater, and it had a restaurant connected to it, and we were allowed to have dinner at the restaurant. So we went down there, and they started us off with a beautiful salad, nice, leafy green lettuce, and Johnny said, “What the fuck is this?!”
Tina: He wanted iceberg lettuce. He would hate kale. He would hate everything like that.
Chris: It was my first time going to Europe, and I just loved it. It was totally exciting. And you wouldn’t think that the Ramones and Talking Heads would be such a good double bill because the bands were so different, but in fact, it really was! We really got the audience going for them, and when they came out, they just killed it.
Tina: That’s when we were a really nice alternative to rock. If you wanted to see or hear good music, you’d go out to see or hear it. I came to New York with my boyfriend, but we didn’t make obvious displays of affection in public. David [Byrne] wanted me to cut my hair. He basically wanted me to be neutered. And he wanted me to wear his shrunken clothes, things like that. Which I didn’t. They were still too big! His day job was as an usher at a movie theater, and he ate a lot of candy bars and got kind of pudgy. So I really couldn’t wear his clothes! And we were starving anyway, so we were kind of skinny. I was about 101 pounds. But I did get hit on by one interesting person—that was Richard Hell. I’d been playing bass for eight or nine months. We shared something in common, we were both kind of punk novices at bass playing, but we had a background, a cultural background in literature and cultural arts. So he said, “You know, me and you, we’d be a really good team.” And I didn’t really want him and Chris to start fighting over me or anything like that, so I didn’t even mention Chris. I just said, “Well, you know, Richard, I really think actually in truth we’d mix about as well as oil and water.” And so he stopped, when we went down the back alley, he stopped, and he said, “Wait a minute, wait here, I got to take a piss,” and so he stood way off the wall, and splattered the wall, to show me just how really virile he was. [Laughs] And then we resumed our walk around the block, and we remained friends ever after.
For us, Chris and I, we weren’t doing drugs. I think this is the saving grace of Talking Heads, that we were so broke and so poor. We lived in a loft with no heat, no shower, no bathroom, no toilet. We would have to go to friends’ houses to take a shower. There was a work sink, and there was daytime heat, but it would be turned off at 4 p.m. Of course in the summer, it was hell. But in a way being that hungry and being that poor was a real motivator. And Talking Heads, we worked every single day. Even when we had day jobs, we rehearsed and wrote every single day. Seven days a week. And we would change tunes. So Hilly was wonderful in saying, “You have to change up your songs,” and eventually that led Chris to looking for other people. One person he asked to be our singer was Debbie Harry. She said, “Well, I already have a band, but you can buy me a drink.”
Then Lenny Kaye was really helpful, and he was a producer, and was very knowledgeable. Patti’s thing was that she was really doing poetry, talking, and then it became music. And then gradually, gradually added people into the band, wonderful people, and it became even more powerful
Chris: She did a residency at CBGB, where she would play three nights a week for a month. That was very inspiring. And also her opening act would be the band Television, and there was something about Television that was awesome as well.
Tina: I couldn’t explain to the record-label people why David’s behavior could be so incredibly odd. He had a freak-out on our first television appearance, on Dick Clark, on American Bandstand. David sort of froze, and Dick Clark sort of whirled around, and hands the microphone to me. And there were other things going on, too. I don’t think any person is one thing, or defined by a condition that they might have.
Chris: In the beginning, we didn’t know exactly what it was. But much later, we started reading about this Asperger’s thing, and we realized.
Tina: It was always a shock and a surprise to us that David would turn on his heel and suddenly say that the band was broken up, when it hadn’t. And then not return our phone calls. We would call his assistant working in his office, and say, “Can’t we talk to David? We haven’t broken up.” So it was a very hard time, and it wasn’t made easier by the press, because the press made it into an ugly thing. I thought it was really detrimental, to turn the words in our mouths, to change them. It was just not right.
Chris: There were a lot of really highly perceptive people in the scene, at CBGB, but there were also some real douche-nozzles. [Laughs]
Tina: And there were a lot of people where you couldn’t even say, “I’ve been to college.” They would just say, “Ewww!” I mean, even Patti Smith, she once said to Chris, “I would have gone to art school if I had the money.” You know? That sort of thing. It’s just a bitterness, it’s not something you really want to live with, when you’re living with people every day. So you want to make yourself more invisible. And for us, it really was about our music. And we had really high hopes, and incredibly high ideals about what our music could accomplish, and how we could make a little cosmos, for Chris and me anyway, and we thought, we believed at the time that Jerry and David shared our feelings. For us, it was like we were a little model for how the world could get along and do wonderful things together. And so it was a very idealistic endeavor. And all the more heartbreaking when it devolved in the press into some sort of hatred.
*This is an expanded version of an article that appeared in the March 24, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.Explosive experts remove and defuse bomb discovered on plane that had arrived from Tripoli
Officials at Cairo's international airport said they found a bomb in a plane that arrived from the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
A team of explosive experts was summoned. They removed the bomb from the plane and defused it away from the airport buildings.
The officials said a steward found the bomb on Wednesday in a cabinet for paper towels in one of the plane's toilets. Experts searched the plane but found nothing else suspicious.
Airport security questioned the crew, looked for fingerprints and reviewed information on recent passengers, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity under airport rules.
The plane was scheduled for a return flight to Tripoli on Wednesday. The plane's operator, Libyan Airlines, sent another plane in its place.Operation results in same mortality rates as having lumps removed and undergoing radiotherapy, new study finds
Women with breast cancer who opt for a double mastectomy to beat the disease do not increase their chances of survival, according to new research.
Having both breasts removed did not extend patients' lives any more than having cancerous lumps removed, followed by radiotherapy. The findings are based on a study of 189,734 women in California with the disease.
"We can now say that the average breast cancer patient who has bilateral mastectomy will have no better survival than the average patient who has lumpectomy plus radiation," said Dr Allison Kurian from Stanford University, the lead scientist for the project.
Ten years after having both breasts removed, 18.8% of women had died, compared with 16.8% of those who had a lumpectomy, then radiation. The paper was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The double mastectomy has been the subject of discussion in recent years after celebrities including Hollywood star Angelina Jolie, former X Factor judge Sharon Osbourne and singer Michelle Heaton underwent the procedure as a preventive measure against breast cancer.
Kurian warned women against losing both their breasts unnecessarily. "A mastectomy is a major procedure that can require significant recovery time and may entail breast reconstruction, whereas a lumpectomy is much less invasive, with a shorter recovery period," she added.
The women in the study were diagnosed with breast cancer at stages zero, one, two or three in one breast in California between 1998 and 2011. During that time, more than half (55%) had surgery to remove malignant lumps then radiotherapy, almost 40% had one breast removed and the rest had a double mastectomy. Those who opted for that procedure were more likely to be white, aged under 40, better-off and have private medical insurance. The rate of women under 40 having the procedure soared from 3.6% in 1998 to 33% in 2011.
Overall, the proportion of women in the study having a double mastectomy rose from 2% in 1998 to 12.3% in 2011, an annual increase of 14.3%, the paper said. The highest proportion of women who died within 10 years was in those who chose to have one breast removed (20.1%).
The NHS does not collect data on how many women have a double mastectomy for preventive reasons.
Eluned Hughes, head of public health at Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said far fewer women in the UK had the procedure compared with the US.
Lumpectomy plus radiotherapy is the standard treatment in Britain, unless doctors decide a bilateral mastectomy is the most advisable course clinically, for example if a woman has a family history of the disease or a gene variant that makes her much more likely to get it.
Any woman considering having one should carefully consider all the available evidence about the risks and benefits involved, Hughes said.
Some patients who lose their breasts are satisfied after the operation. But there are others who experience difficulties with their body image, sexual function and quality of life. Complications, such as getting an infection, are more common with a double mastectomy than other surgical procedures.
Martin Ledwick, the head information nurse at Cancer Research UK, said: "In the UK, a double mastectomy is not routinely offered to women with the most common forms of breast cancer when it's only in one breast. Usually women are offered surveillance with regular mammograms after their surgery.
"A double mastectomy is still considered an option for women with a high risk of breast cancer due to an inherited faulty gene", Ledwick added.Each choice we make throughout our daily lives serves to either raise or lower our vibrational frequency. Every thought, every action, and every word spoken aloud is a part of this process. We are in and of ourselves vibrational beings, as is everything around us. Life, in all it’s many shapes and forms, is always in a constant state of change as energy never stays the same. Nor can energy be created or destroyed, but only borrowed and influenced in various different ways.
“If you want to find the secrets of the Universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” – Nikola Tesla
It’s sometimes easy to lose focus on positivity when dealing with bad days. Things such as anxiety, depression, lethargy, fear, health concerns, and other negative emotions can really put our vibrational frequency through the ringer.
Yet there’s always a choice, and there’s always a way to bounce back from this and change our perspective, despite the challenges we face.
How To Raise Your Energetic Vibrational Frequency – 5 All Natural Methods…
1. Utilize Inspired Action
Ever get hit with an idea you didn’t know what to do with or think of something you’d like to do but usually end up putting it off until later? Take action on these moments instead! Either write the idea down if you don’t have time for it at the moment, or better yet – seize the moment as it happens. Feeling inspired to paint, color, draw, or write? Go for it! Have a sudden notion that maybe you should tell someone how you feel, give thanks somehow, or do something nice for someone? Nothing and no one is stopping you from doing so except for you.
2. Enjoy The Present Moment
Surely we’ve all heard this bit of advice time and again, yet it never ceases to be true as it holds significant benefit to our wellbeing. Constantly stressing about the future or worrying about the past robs us of life in the ‘now’. Instead, try forgiving yourself and others which frees us from the invisible energetic bond we have with these people or situations, and opens us up to the magic and beauty of the present moment.
3. Genuinely Love and Care For Yourself
When we take the time to truly honor ourselves, including our feelings, we raise our energetic frequency without even realizing it. When negativity arises, don’t bottle it up or shove it deep down. Instead, shine a light on these shadows without judgment, and acknowledge them without resistance, thus you’ll be better able to set them free. Once this is done and your feelings have been processed you’ll have much more room for positive energy to fill the void they’ve left behind.
4. Indulge In Nature
Eco-therapy truly does wonders, reconnecting with nature and refilling our energetic batteries, as it were. Nature is a great way to naturally elevate the mood, especially when meditating outdoors, being physically active, gardening, or going barefoot. Getting outside in the beauty and splendor of nature is sure to lift the spirits and increase your vibrational frequency.
5. Focus On The Breath
When feeling anxious, upset, angry, or worked up by any means – focus on the breath to help settle the nerves and calm yourself down. Doing so creates an immediate energetic shift as you focus inward and raise your awareness of the present moment. This simple meditation can help bring you back into a state of peace and clear the mind, which then helps us focus on what truly matters in the present moment. Plus, taking a deep breath acts as a valid conduit for taking a step back, letting go of negativity, and creating room for happiness and joy.
Combine all the methods above when feeling caught in a downward spiral of negativity to help stop the cycle and pull yourself out of it. There are many other helpful methods to reduce stress and depression yet the trick is to find what works best for you. Such things may include taking up a hobby, listening to music, getting exercise, among so many other options! ♥
Sources:
Image: http://www.espritsciencemetaphysiques.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Vies-ant%C3%A9rieures-1.jpg
.The base for the glaciers is the southern Patagonian town of El Calafate. There are frequent flights to the nearby airport from Buenos Aires and Ushuaia.The nearest glacier is Perito Moreno which is a little under an hour's drive from the town. There are plenty of organised coach trips too. Reaching the base of the glacier is easy along one of the best roads Argentina possesses. There is a small charge to enter the National Park area. It is worth it. At the end of the road the visitor area is well laid out with walkways allowing tourists to many vantage points of the glacier.
The first thing you notice is the noise. Quite frequently there will be a mighty groan. This is the compacted ice moving within the glacier. It is strangely haunting. The collapse which I filmed occurred on the second day but on the first visit there was still evidence of glacial collapse.
Perito Moreno by boat Getting close to the wall is also easy. Boats trips operate from the visitor centre on at the port which can be accessed just before you reach the end of the road. One of the small huts you see on arrival in the huge car park will sell you a ticket on the next available sailing, There are plenty during the day. Getting close to the wall is also easy. Boats trips operate from the visitor centre on at the port which can be accessed just before you reach the end of the road. One of the small huts you see on arrival in the huge car park will sell you a ticket on the next available sailing, There are plenty during the day.
The whole area is stunning flanked on one side by the plains of Patagonia teeming with cattle and sheep. On the other the grand peaks of the Andes tower above with their snow encrusted peaks. It is from one of these that Perito Moreno glides gently off the mountain and into Lago Argentino.
A two hour drive north of El Calafate, some of it on unmade roads, is the small town of El Chaltén where more glaciers can be found dominated by mount Fitzroy, much beloved by the tourist brochures.
Unspoilt unmade highway
Away from the tourists areas it is possible by car to take the unmade road north out of El Calafate. In truth it's only really used by local traffic and that is it's greatest asset. For away from the prying eyes of visitors this route has a treasure trove of wildlife.
The nature of the road means a sedate 40 mph is the maximum speed that it is comfortable to drive at. Still why would you want to race past unspoilt countryside which promises a surprise on nearly every corner.
The road has a number (15) and terminates at Lago Roca.
It is generally straight and although it passes into the National park, there is no charge here.
The wildlife be it small brightly coloured birds, foxes or swooping high above, mighty eagles. It was simply a visual treat from start to finish.
In retrospect I could have spent more time here. Happily it is not going anywhere and the area is not overwhelmed by tourism but numbers are very much higher across the months of December, January and February. These images were taken from my trip in October.
It has to be one of the most dramatic natural sights I have ever seen. There was no real hint of it before hand. Then suddenly piece by piece a glacial wall collapsed in front of me. Quite astonishingly I was filming the event at the time. A wonder of nature. From timid red foxes to Andean Flamingoes there was an abundant form of wildlife. My personal favourite was the skunk. This is not a remarkable animal compared with giant raptors or the fox but this was the first I had encountered in the wild. Less timid than many mammals, with a cautious movement towards it, the skunk could be captured by the camera.CLEVELAND — Anderson Varejao approached me two summers ago at a Cavaliers golf outing.
“Hey, Sam,” he said. “Can I get a picture?”
Imagine that. A professional athlete, asking a member of the media for a selfie.
This wasn’t because Varejao knows me all that well. It wasn’t because I’m some sort of celebrity (far from it), and it wasn’t because Varejao thought I’d only write nice things about him or say nice things on TV. And as far as I can tell, it wasn’t because he needed a ride home.
It was because that’s just Varejao.
He’s a kind man, a fun-loving man, a warm man, a man who everyone wants as a friend. Perhaps because it’s a role he so willingly plays. He wants to be your friend, too.
Interestingly, this persona was basically the opposite of Varejao during his 12 years on the court for the Cavs. Oh, he wasn’t a troublemaker. He was just so, well … IN YOUR FACE.
The guy has no “off” button. Coaches and teammates referred to him as The Energizer Bunny. Cavs point guard Kyrie Irving once went on and on about how Varejao “will run through a brick wall for you.”
To fans, he’s forever The Wild Thing — his long curly hair and endless effort making him look like the world’s largest dust storm.
Then suddenly, as we sometimes see in the business of basketball, Varejao was gone, shipped off to the Trail Blazers, just another piece in a three-team trade.
It felt heartless, cold, unfair. But that wasn’t the intent of Cavs general manager David Griffin, who made the deal. It was actually quite the opposite of Griffin’s intent.
Griffin didn’t set out to trade Varejao. The GM merely wanted to improve the team. That is the GM’s job. Unfortunately, Varejao was the last remaining chip Griffin had to deal.
It was a difficult phone call. In fact, Griffin will tell you that informing Varejao he’d been traded was the hardest basketball call Griffin ever had to make.
But in the end, the Cavs landed Channing Frye, a 6-foot-11 veteran from the Magic who can fill it up from the perimeter and space the floor. On paper, it was a good basketball decision. Frye looks to be a better fit.
That won’t make it hurt any less. Not at first, anyway.
The Cavs won Thursday, handling the Bulls in one of their best games of the season. But the locker room was far from joyous afterward. LeBron James, Tristan Thompson and the rest very clearly missed their friend.
One last shot
Varejao may have been the longest-tenured athlete in Cleveland sports before the trade. He’s certainly among the most appreciated, maybe loved more than any other.
Of course, the business side of this will continue for Varejao. The Blazers are expected to cut him before he plays a game. They just wanted his contract — then to quickly remove it from the books. For the second time in a day or two, Varejao will hear he’s not needed, that he’s just “an asset.”
Eventually, someone will pick him up. It will likely be another contender. Teams had been trying to pry him away from the Cavs for years.
And why not? Who wouldn’t want that hustle, that spirit — that constant irritation of opponents and uncanny ability to bring his own teammates together? Varejao can do both just by walking in the room.
Now, before you ask, NBA rules prohibit Varejao from returning to the Cavs, at least not for one year to the day he was traded. For those of you counting, that’s Feb. 18, 2017. It’s highly unlikely it happens, even then. Both parties have likely moved on. It’s not an emotional parting of ways. It’s just business. Good business, but sad business.
But we’ll see Varejao again. He’ll just be in another uniform. It may even be this season. Some of us may shed a tear. A lot of us will shed a lot, actually.
For now, though, Varejao is just gone. He won’t be coming back. And he is truly taking a piece of Cleveland’s heart with him.
That’s why we have to ask, before you go: Hey, Andy … can we get a picture?Hi there, Its ChainedDeath bringing you my first interview for Break the Game. I had an exclusive opportuinity to interview Splyce´s support player MikyX
ChainedDeath: First of all, thank you for this interview and congratulations on qualifying to the finals. Could you introduce yourself as some people might not know you?
MikyX: My name is Mihael some people might know me as Mikyx, I play support for the EU LCS team Splyce, this is my first split in LCS and we just reached the finals.
Chained Death: I personally know you from the Slovenian tournament Kings of Slovenia. Do you think participating in these tournaments helped you grow as a player to where you are now?
MikyX: I don’t think the tournaments helped me that much, I mostly grew as a player by playing with LCS pros in soloQ and learning from them.
Chained Death: You were also known as the best support in Slovenia, and also the best Thresh. Do you feel this is still true?
MikyX: I think my Thresh skills have decayed a bit since I don’t play the champ much recently, but I’m still decent at it.
ChainedDeath: Do you still follow the Slovenian scene?
MikyX: No, I don’t follow the scene anymore, I just talk to some of the slovenian players from time to time.
ChainedDeath: At the end of spring 2016, Splyce picked you as a challenger player. How did they discover you?
MikyX: Splyce discovered me through soloQ and playing dynamicQ with each other.
ChainedDeath: What did your family think about moving to Berlin to play for Splyce?
MikyX: They weren’t that supportive of it at the start since they wanted me to finish school, but after they realized, how much it means to me they were fine with it.
ChainedDeath: The story of Splyce in this split compared to spring is one of the greatest underdog stories in eSports. What was the main factor of your success in this split?
MikyX: I think the main factor was everyone in the team improving and teaching me about the game as well.
ChainedDeath: You are the only player on Splyce that didn´t play last split. How do you get along with your teammates and how did they accept you?
MikyX: I get along with everyone in the team since everyone is really friendly and nice to hang around with so it wasn’t a problem. It is somewhat annoying when they talk danish among themselves though.
ChainedDeath: You established yourself as one of the best supports in EU and a huge contender for the Rookie of the Split award. How do you rank yourself among the other support players in EU?
MikyX: I think I am among the top 5 supports in EU at the moment but I should get a lot better with time.
ChainedDeath: Your coach YamatoCannon also highly praises you. How is your relationship with him?
MikyX: I don’t think our relationship is anything special, we just have fun when we don’t play and try hard when we play.
ChainedDeath: Your opponents in the final’s will be G2 eSports, who were the strongest team during the split, but their win in the semifinals wasn´t very convincing. What do you think are their weaknesses and will you be able to abuse them?
MikyX: I don’t think they played their best series against UOL, but their weakness is probably top/mid and we can abuse that.
ChainedDeath: With your win over H2k, your chances on getting to worlds are very high. You can either win the split, win the gauntlet or hope that the Unicorns of Love beat H2k. What are their chances of winning the third place match?
MikyX: I think UOL’s chances of beating H2K are pretty high since they played well against G2 and H2K might play worse after our series.
ChainedDeath: Your current goal is probably winning the split and getting to worlds. Do you think you have any chances of success on the international stage?
MikyX: I think we can have decent success on the international stage, but we will have to wait and see.
ChainedDeath: Lastly, I want to touch a bit on the NA vs EU topic. Do you think NA is at the moment the superior region and do you think this is the year of TSM´s success at worlds?
MikyX: From watching NA LCS I don’t think it’s the superior region, since I think TSM is the only good team there and they have a high chance of doing good at worlds.
Thank you for your time. I wish you the best luck in the finals and I am looking forward to your future success.The Ultimate Searchable Drumhead Comparison Chart
Compare Aquarian vs. Evans vs. Remo Drumheads
in this chart.
Want to compare drumheads across the huge Aquarian, Evans, and Remo range? Look no further – this is the ultimate drumhead comparison chart.
Compare Evans vs. Remo vs. Aquarian with this drumhead comparison chart.
Use the search box below to filter through the drumheads.
No directly equivalent drumhead? Look in the rows above or below in the chart – this will likely be the closest equivalent head available.
Click on any of the drumheads in the chart for detailed information and to compare them.
Want to browse drumheads in even more detail?
Use the drumhead selector…
The ultimate drumhead search engine.
Compare as many drumheads as you like, side-by-side.
A few notes on the drumhead comparison chart above:
In general, the drumhead comparison chart goes from thinnest and brightest, to thickest and warmest heads.
Open (non-dampened) drumheads are usually before drumheads with built-in dampening.
Drumheads from different brands can sound slightly different, even when they have the exact same specs, due to different manufacturing processes, materials, and design. In the bigger picture though, these differences are usually small
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your early morning hours. You can also search for a paper that only comes out once a week if you want to work less. The bottom line is that a paper route is still a valid way to make extra money and I’d be remiss to leave it off this list.
35. Play Music in Church or at Weddings
Some churches don't have volunteers for their music. A talented pianist, guitar player, etc. can make pretty good money doing this on the weekends. Most churches offer tryouts on occasion. This idea is pretty easy to get started in that you just need to reach out to your worship pastor or someone in that ministry and let them know you have the talent and some experience. Don't be shy!
36. Teach English as a Second Language
Did you ever see the movie Stripes? It's an 80's classic and one of those timeless comedies with Bill Murray. Click here to see Harold Ramis teaching his English class the Do Do Run Run by Shaun Cassidy. To get started teaching English as a second language to adults, go through your local schools and colleges to find classes where teachers of English are needed.
You can also teach English from the comfort of your own computer with the website VIPKID. This company, which is headquartered in Beijing, pairs English teachers with children in China between the ages of 4 and 12 to provide the kids with an international learning experience via video conference.
37. Collect Aluminum Cans
I collected cans in my teens and made a few extra bills for spending money. If this idea is of interest, you might be motivated to hear the true story of Maisie Devore who was able to raise money collecting cans for a community swimming pool. She was able to save $73,000 over three decades and is still collecting. Whoa! Learn more about this idea by reading my collecting aluminum cans for cash post.
38. Sign in the Yard
In our local neighborhood, we've seen this service hired out to place signs in people's yards for announcements or funny pranks. Ha! If you're out and about on a Sunday you'll see plenty of people putting put signs for open houses. You'll probably have a great opportunity for this extra money idea if you can locate a neighborhood where lots of real estate agents or putting out there own signs. Wouldn't an agent rather be prepping the house for sale or doing marketing activities than placing a sign at a busy intersection? You bet and that's why outsourcing to you could work!
39. Stage Homes
People who are having trouble selling their homes these days and could use a second pair of eyes to stage their home for the quick sale. To help people sell their houses, your staging services need to get buyers to envision themselves in the property. This opportunity takes some passion and skill for the job. You'll have to be comfortable telling people they need to remove clutter, rent furniture, etc. to get it in top selling condition. You'll need some designing skills but also have additional resources at your fingertips, such as a furniture company, storage options, etc. This will take some work getting set up but once you've done so, you can start networking with realtors. Consider offering some discounted services to make a name for yourself.
41. Sell Your Big and Generic Stuff On Local Sites
My local Craigslist.org is the first place I go to sell something. It's best for items you think will appeal to everyone (therefore justifying the smaller audience) and large items that can't be shipped. Craigslist.org is great for taking your yard sale items online for local sales. For example, a friend recently bought two fans from people that live close to him. These one-off type items do very well on Craigslist. Just remember to use common sense and be safe out there.
Of course, Facebook and apps like Next Door have made the local marketplace for selling stuff even more local. Don't forget to test them out as well.
42. Sell Your Unique & Ship-able Stuff Online
I mentioned an idea above to create an online store but you could also just declutter your house and sell things you no longer use (CDs, DVDs, kitchen appliances, etc.). There is a platform that makes this really easy, it's called Decluttr. You download their app and scan the item and Declutter will tell you the price at which to sell. Check out Decluttr (or for more information, read our Decluttr review!) Listing items on eBay is of course another option, sign up by going to www.eBay.com.
43. Sign Up with Upromise
Upromise puts money in your kids college funds while you do your normal spending. Yes, it's another way to make extra money or to use your own money for other goals since you're not having to save as much for your kids college. Just remember to make wise decisions with your spending. You're not spending so your kids can go to college. The Upromise contribution is a side-benefit to spending on items already in your plan.
Check out our full Upromise review.
44. Retail Arbitrage
Find items that you know are selling below their full value (either online or through a deal website like SlickDeals.net), discount stores (Marshalls, Ross, etc.) buy them and sell them for more on eBay or Amazon. Once you find your product niche you can set up a system. Don't read over that too quickly. You need to find a particular product or niche to really make this work. Otherwise, you're met with different shipping costs, always trying to figure out new margins, etc. Don't try to be everything to everybody. Try to be good in one particular. Maybe it's a product you're passionate about such as selling trucker hats. 🙂 Click here for more on this idea.
45. Re-sell Computers
This is slightly different than eBay Arbitrage. Find a distributor that will sell to you at their discounted prices. List these items online. Buy and ship to your heart's content. Basically, you become a reseller of computers and other hardware. Another thought here is to sell computer parts. Can you find a part that seems to be in demand? If you can supply the demand, you may just have yourself a part-time business.
46. Look for Odd Jobs
People need your help and they will pay you for it. Seriously. The “gigs” section of Craigslist.com is a classic place to find jobs, as is the bulletin board at your local church. We wrote a post on all the places to find work. Traditional job search sites can be over saturated with applicants but non-traditional places, as mentioned, can provide you a means for earning some extra income. You just have to be a go-getter and get hungry to find them. You could consider driving for Doordash or downloading the TaskRabbit app which has a plethora of ideas. Click here to get $20 credit when hiring from TaskRabbit.
47. Have a Garage Sale
The stuff you can't sell online, you could sell from your garage on the weekends. Many neighborhoods plan annual or bi-annual yard sales. If you have items to sell, this is a great time to do it as the neighborhood as a whole can bring in a lot of traffic and help you perform better than you would on your own. If that's not possible, consider partnering up with a couple of families in a popular neighborhood.
48. Bank Account Opening Bonuses
Many banks will give you a cash bonus just for opening an account with them. Talk about easy money! Banks are in tough competition for your business and will pay $100, $200 or even $300 just for becoming a customer. For example, right now Chase Bank is offering $200 cash for opening a checking account, and then another $150 cash for opening a savings account. Certain qualifications must be met but if you do qualify that's one easy way to earn $350 cash! Collect $350 cash with Chase Bank
49. Paint Street Numbers
With just a few paint and stencil supplies you could walk the neighborhoods with curbs and solicit your curb number painting services. Obviously, you need to be somewhat handy with a can of spray paint and stencils, otherwise, you might have people coming after you if you mess up their curb. That said, there is a business for this as people are out there making it happen.
50. Adjust Your Tax Withholding
The average tax refund in 2018 was $2,895, which breaks down to a little over $240 per month taking an unnecessary trip to the IRS and back. The fastest way to make some extra money is to keep your own in your paycheck, rather than letting Uncle Sam hold onto it for a year.
Most people do not claim all of the allowances they are allowed to take, which is why they end up getting a large refund check each spring. If you regularly get a large refund, then it may be time for you to file a new W-4 with your human resources department. Your new W-4 should reflect the proper number of withholding allowances you are eligible to take.
You can use the IRS withholding calculator to determine exactly how many allowances you may take, and file the new W-4 with your workplace at any time. You will start seeing fatter paychecks within one to two pay cycles, depending on your HR department.
And there is no need to be nervous about making such a change to your W-4. The withholding allowances you enter into your W-4 do not determine your tax bill, just how much you pay per paycheck. That means it’s perfectly legal to change the withholding allowances on your W-4, provided you claim the correct number of allowances on your actual tax return.
51. Sell Your Unused Gift Cards
Every year, up to $1 billion on gift cards go unredeemed, according to the research firm Tower Group. It’s likely that you have at least one random gift card buried in a wallet or drawer somewhere that you will never actually use. Cash in your unused gift cards by selling it on a gift card resale site like CardCash or Cardpool.
You won’t be able to sell the card for its face value, but you may get as much as 90% of that value. Start your resale process at GiftCardGranny.com, a comparison site. It will give you a good sense of how much your card will be worth. When you sell the card, the site will generally cover the cost of shipping the card to them, and you will receive your payment within three to seven days.
52. Give Tours of Your City
No one knows your hometown like you do, and you can translate that into cash by leading tours of your city. The website vayable.com allows you to set up and guide tours around a particular cultural experience. If you’re the foremost expert on ghost stories, beer, architecture, or crime (or anything else!) in your town, then you can start leading tours for people who want to hear your stories.
*Bonus Idea!*
Being a food delivery driver is back in style! People all over the country are signing up to do it. Two companies are dominating the space: DoorDash and UberEats. How it works is easy: When a person places a food delivery order from a local restaurant, the restaurant notifies DoorDash or UberEats (whichever one they use) that they need a driver to pick up and deliver the food to the customer. As the driver, you get a notification that a delivery is waiting and you can choose to go pick up and deliver the food (specific instructions on where to go, etc. included). DoorDash pays a minimum of $10/hour but says drivers can earn $25/hour on average. I've read from various sources that UberEats drivers make between $10-$12/hour after accounting for expenses. I recommend looking into it yourself. Click here to read about DoorDash, or here to read up on UberEats.
Have you tried any of these ideas? Let us know how it went!Many social media platforms only respond when they get a large number of people posting at the same time, about one thing, as in trending topics. The site Thunderclap, while may not make you trend, does help you gain traction online, and notice with social media hubs such as facebook and twitter. It has a number of different levels, of which some are paid, but it has a free level as well.
You do have to do some work, for the free one you have to get 100 people to sign on to your campaign, and then when you reach your target of 100 accounts, at a certain time, all the accounts release a message about your work you are promoting, and they gauge that in a number that they call social reach, which is normally in the tens of thousands.
So another useful tool in your arsenal for distributing you work online, do let me know if you try it and how it went.
https://www.thunderclap.it/
AdvertisementsWhat is Space Station 14?
Space Station 14 (SS14 for short) is a community driven project to get the open source game Space Station 13 into a new engine and free from its current engine, BYOND. BYOND is an incredibly dated engine, and is not cutting it. It’s a pain to develop for, slow, proprietary, and looks like it’s from 2005. Along with this we will try to make the game more enjoyable all around, such as pixel movement and a consistent style.
Originally, the SS14 project was a continuation of Goonstation’s remake attempt, which was abandoned and open sourced on 19 of January, 2015. We’ll bite the bullet: due to poor project management, SS14 originally died after a month or two. But fear not! We’re back!
Status
Currently, the project is in a “pre-alpha” state. We have many tasks ahead of us. On this website you will be able to find progress reports as long as we’re kicking.
Getting involved
Rome was not built in a day, and neither was SS14. We can always use extra hands! The entire project is open source and available on GitHub here:
We primarily communicate through Discord, although there is an IRC channel that’s connected through discord with a bot.
We also have some other project services set up:
And have some general links to some related communities too:— All Maryland dog owners would bear greater responsibility for dog bites — and landlords would have less — under a compromise measure introduced this week in the House to address a controversial ruling that pit bulls are an “inherently dangerous” breed.
Last year’s ruling by Maryland’s highest court made pit bull owners and landlords strictly liable for dog bites without previous evidence of a dog being dangerous. The court’s decision caused an outcry from pet owners and animal rights activists who said it focused on a single breed and made it harder for homeless pit bulls to be adopted.
Opponents also said the strict liability standard on landlords forced pet owners to choose between their pets and their homes.
Delegate Luiz R.S. Simmons, a Montgomery County Democrat, said the measure would restore the liability standard for landlords that existed before the ruling.
“We all believe that by doing that, we’ve taken away the incentive for landlords to get rid of tenants who have pit bulls or other dogs,” Simmons said.
In effect, the bill increases protections for bite victims by creating a presumption that a dog owner should know the pet presented a danger. An owner who becomes a defendant after a bite will have a chance in court to try to prove the dog was not dangerous.
“So, in effect, most of these cases will now become questions for the jury,” Simmons said. “Plaintiffs will be able to get their case to the jury without having to go through a lot of rigmarole of trying to prove that an owner knew of the dog’s propensities, but the owner of the dog will still be able to defend himself or herself by presenting evidence that they didn’t know.”
Lawmakers tried to address the court decision in August during a short special session, which was called to expand gambling. However, differences between the House and Senate could not be settled at the time.
Sen. Brian Frosh, D-Montgomery, described the measure as a compromise.
“It really is right down the middle, and I think it’s a pretty good compromise and it looks like most of the interested parties like it as well,” Frosh said. “So, it’s fair to victims, it’s fair to landlords, and it’s fair to pet owners.”
The bill has been placed on a fast track in Annapolis. Delegate Joseph Vallario, D-Prince George’s, said a hearing is set for Jan. 30. The measure will be filed as emergency legislation, so it will immediately take effect if it passes the General Assembly and Gov. Martin O’Malley signs it.
Tami Santelli, the Maryland state director for the Humane Society of the United States, expressed her support for the bill.
“It’s going to provide a lot of relief to a lot of people, not to mention the dogs, so we’re really excited about this compromise,” Santelli said.
The Court of Appeals ruling last year was made in the case of Dominic Solesky, who was badly injured in a pit bull attack in Baltimore County in 2007 when he was 10.
Follow WNEW on Twitter.
(© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)A French anti-drugs police operation became the laughing stock of social media, after law enforcement officers revealed on Twitter that 24 cops accompanied by two sniffer dogs were deployed to find just 7 grams of cannabis.
A glorious tweet from the police in Loire-Atlantique, western France, reporting the results of an anti-narcotics operation at the Nantes university hospital, did not go unnoticed.
“Security and drug search operation at the St Jacques hospital - 24 police officers mobilized, 10 people + 3 buildings controlled with the support of 2 dogs - 7gr of cannabis found in the room of 1 patient,” the police wrote on Saturday.
[#Opération]de sécurisation & de recherche de stupéfiants à l’hôpital St Jacques à #REZE - 24 policiers mobilisés ➡️10 personnes+3 bâtiments contrôlés avec l'appui de 2 chiens stup 🐶 - 7gr de résine découverts dans la chambre d'1 patient 👉 belle collaboration avec @CHUnantespic.twitter.com/xnpfoAITsP — Police Nationale 44 (@PoliceNat44) 23 декабря 2017 г.
Internet users, an award-winning film maker Matthieu Kassovitz among them, couldn’t help making fun of the scope of the police operation.
“Bastards. 7grams!!! 24 policemen!!!!! You are a band of good for nothing,” he wrote.
Bande de batards. 7g!!! 24 policiers!!!!! Vous êtes une belle bande de bon à rien @PoliceNationalehttps://t.co/EZSWQXSAgg — mathieu Kassovitz (@kassovitz1) 23 декабря 2017 г.
Many others could not contain their feelings too.
“Congratulations for this uselessness!”
Bravo pour cette inutilité! — Delphine Blanchard🦄 (@Galatee) 23 декабря 2017 г.
“24 people and 2 dogs to target 7 grams of a product that is considered therapeutic in many countries. And you are proud of it?”
24 personnes et 2 chiens pour 7gr d’un produit qui est considéré comme thérapeutique dans pas mal de pays. Et vous en êtes fier? — olivM (@olivM) 23 декабря 2017 г.
“24 policemen to target 7grams… what an act of bravery.”
24 policiers pour 7gr eh ben quel exploit — cawouet l'insoumise (@cawouette1) 23 декабря 2017 г.
“I hope our society will soon realize that it has pressing priorities other than mobilizing 24 people for 7grams of a substance consumed by consenting adults.”
J'espère que notre société réalisera bientôt qu'elle a d'autres priorités que celle de mobiliser 24 personne pour 7g d'une substance consommée par des adultes consentant — Nestor le Castor (@CastorNestor) 23 декабря 2017 г.
READ MORE: French cop who attempted suicide twice tells why more colleagues take their own life“Security and safety replaced with violence.”
I had visual of an emblem with an elephant in the center, the emblem was red but then it faded to black.
The emblem sounds like the republican party, something again turns violent. But usually when something turns black its a very dark message. This is the second time they have implied a threat. The other prediction is below.
Predictions 2-27-16 Spirit has clarified that the below predictions are not the fall of Trump but a threat of violence. They implied it was a threat against him and those around him, they also implied it would be fatal for those ‘around’. Its also possible that they are talking about violence in general, or a tone of violence. If you have the means to warn him please do so. Though I may not agree with his politics, violence of any kind is never the answer.
I had a visual of a flyer laying on the ground with Donald Trumps picture. Rain was pouring down making the street and the picture soaked. Then the visual switched and I saw Trump speaking at a podium with small insects coming out of his mouth.
Rain symbolically represents sadness or troubling times. To me the fact that it was on the ground would imply someone disregarding his image, ‘throwing it down or throwing it away’.
New small messages we need to clarify:
I had a visual of Southern California.
I had a visual of a bomb going off leaving a large hole in the wall.
I had a visual of the word ‘Penn’ then it switched to a man adjusting a gas mask on his face as he looked in the mirror.
I had a visual I was looking into the ocean, waves were moving back and forth and in the reflection I saw this very large explosion happen. Something in a bay or in the ocean exploded.
“Jim Jones is coming, Jim Jones is coming.”
AdvertisementsIt is hard to know what was more surprising for the average online file-sharer - that sleepy New Zealand was home to the likes of Kim Dotcom, the corpulent magnate behind the Megaupload website; or that the FBI had hunted him halfway around the world and arrested him in the panic room of his $30 million mansion.
But we should be surprised on neither front. The US will go to the ends of the earth to protect its big entertainment corporations and Australia could be the scene of a bigger coup in coming months.
"The US will go to the ends of the earth to protect its big entertainment corporations and Australia could be the scene of a bigger coup in coming months". Credit:AFP
We can be a cowardly bunch, so scared of an unknown invader that we will sell our sovereignty for the illusion of protection. The Americans have no qualms about interfering in our domestic politics and local legal systems. The latest front in this meddling is the crossover between file-sharing and intellectual property.
Julian Assange has shone a sterilising light on the behaviour of the US embassy in Canberra. For his bravery, the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, a lawyer, prejudiced any future legal action by labelling his actions "illegal". She has since demoted the Attorney-General whose job it was to give legal advice on the matter, but the damage has been done and the comment never retracted.In a week of retirements, the NFL has lost another.
Matt Hasselbeck, over the past 18 years, has been one of the most respected players in the league. The quarterback has never been an elite talent, and his Hall of Fame status is questionable, but his time in the NFL will be remembered for a long time to come.
In Seattle, the former sixth-round selection became a cult hero.
During a decade in the state of Washington, Hasselbeck racked up a whole host of Seahawks’ franchise records, ending up as Seattle’s all-time passing leader.
But he wasn’t done there.
When his time in Seattle was up, Hasselbeck opted for a new challenge, instead of immediately riding off into the sunset.
Matt Hasselbeck today, at the grand old age of 40, retired from the National Football League in order to join the ESPN broadcast team ahead of the 2016 season.
Here’s a look at his tremendous Pro Football career…"Trying to connect marriage equality with the Safe Schools program is factually incorrect," said Liberal MP Trent Zimmerman. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen But Fairfax Media can reveal the three directors of Children's Future Ltd, which has registered the domain name, are members of the NSW Liberal Party in the Hills Shire and described by a senior Liberal as part of the "lunar right". The faction is also known locally as "the Taliban" due to their hardline religious views. John Smyth, 35, who until recently was the secretary of the Galston branch of the Liberals, is also a teacher at Redfield College at Dural, which was founded in 1982 by Opus Dei and supported by Cardinal George Pell. The school, located near the "bible-belt" suburb of Arcadia is known as the "Arcadian Monastery" in Liberal circles.
Detail from the Children's Future leaflets that feature anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela. Mr Smyth is listed in Australian Securities and Investment Commission documents as director and secretary of Children's Future Ltd. Contacted by Fairfax at Redfield, he said he did not have time to make any comment. John Smyth, director and secretary of Children's Future and previously the secretary of the Galston branch of the Liberals, said he did not have time to make comment. "We're not ready to make any comment to the media, call me back later," he said.
Labor jumped on the revelations, describing the leaflet as Mr Turnbull's "Jackie Kelly moment" - a reference to the fake Islamic pamphlet scandal in the seat of Lindsay that rocked the dying days of John Howard's 2007 election campaign. Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said the Prime Minister must "explain whether he is happy for members of his own party to be distributing this kind of material". "It is apparent from this material that children of same-sex couples are going to be used as pawns in the debate. It's apparent that these members of the Liberal Party were quite prepared to put false material into these pamphlets as part of this campaign," he said. Children's Future was registered on July 29 this year at the address of Benbow and Pike chartered accountants. One of the partners of Benbow and Pike is Gerard Abrams, a member of the Abrams family that is active in the Liberal Party's hard right in the Hills. The second Children's Future director is Robert Williams, 31, a member of the Cheltenham branch who was a preselector in Berowra in the recent process that saw Julian Leeser replace the outgoing veteran Philip Ruddock in that seat.
He said he would not comment. The third director is a Paul Woodbury who is understood to be related to Matthew Woodbury, a furniture retailer and influential member of the Catholic right. A senior Liberal described the group as "too far right for the right". They are at loggerheads with Damien Tudehope, the state MP for Epping who is campaigning against same-sex marriage, because they believe he has not been tough enough on the issue, according to a source. "These guys are off the charts in their views," said a Liberal source.
"But the big question raised by this is what are the rules going to be around transparency and accountability in a plebiscite outside of the publicly funded campaign." Trent Zimmerman, the first openly gay Liberal MP, said what causes Liberal Party members pursue in their private lives was a matter for them but warned against spreading misinformation in the debate. "Trying to connect marriage equality with the Safe Schools program is factually incorrect," he said. "It is important that this debate is not coloured by what are clearly inaccurate statements." Labor senator Penny Wong has questioned whether it will be possible to have a plebiscite about same-sex marriage without such material being distributed.
"Malcolm Turnbull's own party has put the lie to his promise that his $200 million plebiscite would be a respectful debate. "This shows he can't even control the extreme right forces in his party who forced him to accept this plebiscite, and are now using it to peddle division and lies." Loading – with Anthony Brewster Follow us on TwitterThe US Senate on Monday confirmed Janet Yellen as the next chair of the Federal Reserve, making her the first woman to head the US central bank.
The Democrat-controlled Senate passed Yellen’s nomination on Monday evening by a vote of 56 to 26. Six Republican senators voted for Yellen, and inclement weather prevented some senators from reaching the Capitol to vote.
Yellen, currently vice-chair, will take over after the incumbent, Ben Bernanke, steps down at the end of January. She will become the first Democrat to run the Fed since Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker in 1979.
Yellen has been one of Bernanke’s staunchest allies on the Fed board and has signaled that she intends to follow her predecessor’s policy of economic stimulus and low interest rates as the US economy continues to recover.
Last November, Yellen was approved by 14 votes to eight by the Senate banking panel, on which Democrats occupy 12 of the 22 seats. As the Senate is controlled by Democrats, her appointment on Monday afternoon was extremely unlikely to fail, in particular because new rules mean it requires only a simple majority.
A number of Republican senators voted against Yellen, including Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Rand Paul of Kentucky. Paul pushed unsuccessfully for Yellen’s confirmation to be delayed while he called for an audit of the Fed.
Yellen, 67, was the top candidate in a Reuters poll of economists in the summer but appears to have been President Barack Obama’s second choice for the job. Former Treasury secretary Larry Summers was widely seen as the president’s favourite but he withdrew after it became clear many Democrats would not support his nomination.
Obama nominated Yellen in October, calling her “one of the nation’s foremost economists and policymakers”. He said he was “absolutely confident that she will be an exceptional chair of the Federal Reserve”.
Yellen, a widely respected academic and expert in the labour markets, has worked for the Fed in various capacities for more than two decades. At her confirmation hearing last November, she pledged to continue the Fed’s $85bn-a-month quantitative easing (QE) stimulus programme, arguing the recovery was still too weak for the Fed to cut support.
“The ripple effects go through the economy and bring benefits to, I would say, all Americans,” she told a Senate hearing.
Since that hearing the US job market has made some clearer signs of a stronger recovery; in December Bernanke trimmed QE to $75bn a month and signalled an unwinding of his signature economic policy.
Despite widespread support among economists and in Washington, Yellen remains a divisive figure for some. The Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren has been critical of the Fed’s, and Yellen’s, regulatory role in the lead-up to the financial crisis. And in the business community there are some who fear her support of Bernanke’s easy money policies will have negative long-term consequences.
Sean Fieler, president of Equinox Partners hedge fund and chairman of Washington-based policy group American Principles Project, said the Fed’s policies had widened the gap between rich and poor. He said rising income inequality was ultimately bad for the US economy.
“The very affluent asset holders have benefited while the less well off have been squeezed,” he said. “The Fed’s policy has been a redistribution of wealth to the government and the wealthy from savers and debtors.”Redskins 7-round mock draft Tandler's Redskins seven-round mock draft Redskins insider Rich Tandler takes his final go at predicting the players the team will take starting Thursday night.
The Redskins have the 17th pick in tonight’s first round. Things get underway when the Browns go on the clock at about 8 p.m. There are 10 minutes allotted between picks. If each team takes the maximum time the Redskins will pick sometime after 11 p.m. However, picks are usually in with a few minutes to spare so Washington will go on the clock sometime between 10 and 10:30.
So, what is there to watch for until then? In what everything thinks will be one of the wildest and most unpredictable first rounds in recent memory, here are five places where the decisions made could have ripple effects back to pick No. 17.
No. 1, Browns—The steaming hot rumor that has popped up in the last 24 hours is that QB Mitchell Trubisky, not DE Myles Garret, will be the top pick in the draft. Of course, that talk could be a steaming pile of, well, what comes out of the south end of a bull. If the Browns do go with Trubisky, who was expected to remain on the board through the first five picks, there could be a run on quarterbacks in the top half of the draft, with teams maneuvering to get their guy. That could push a solid defensive player back to the Redskins.
No. 4, Jaguars—Nobody is quite sure what is going on here. Leonard Fournette is the chalk pick but this is the team that drafted Blake Bortles completely out of the blue in the top five a few years ago. They have spent a lot of draft capital and free agent money on defense. They may be ready to move on from Bortles so a QB is a possibility, a move that would start or, if Trubusky goes to the Browns at No. 1, continue a run on quarterbacks.
RELATED: Final NFL Mock Draft
No. 8, Panthers—In a draft that is supposedly unpredictable, the constant in mock drafts over the last 10 days or so has been Christian McCaffrey to Carolina. It almost seems to be too simple to be true, especially if the top seven picks are loaded with surprises. The Panthers have plenty of needs and if they have a top safety or linebacker fall into their laps they could well bypass McCaffrey. That would put him in play for the Redskins at 17.
No. 13, Cardinals—We go back to quarterbacks here. Will the Cardinals, who have plenty of needs, take a quarterback like Patrick Mahomes of Texas Tech to groom to replace Carson Palmer? If they do, that could force the a QB-needy team picking later in the first such as the Texans to move up to make sure they aren’t left out. That could have them on the phone to Ashburn offering their second-round pick to entice the Redskins to move down to No. 25.
MORE REDSKINS: Final Redskins mock: Defense goes 1-2, surprise in the third
No. 16, Ravens—Picking immediately in front of the Redskins, the Ravens also have needs everywhere. Jonathan Allen and Reuben Foster seem like the type of player the Ravens like so there is the possibility that the Redskins could see a very good player at a top area of need slide back towards them only to get snatched up one pick prior to them going on the clock. The good news may be that many analysts have Baltimore addressing wide receiver or offensive line at No. 16 and those positions are not likely to be of high interest to the Redskins in the first round.
Stay up to date on the Redskins! Rich Tandler covers the team 365 days a year. Like his Facebook page Facebook.com/TandlerCSN and follow him on Twitter @Rich_TandlerCSN.The Chicago White Sox (1-1) open the second series of the 2017 campaign Friday evening against the Minnesota Twins (3-0). Here is our series preview. And be sure to check back for the latest preview on the afternoon of the first game of each series this season.
White Sox Preview
The White Sox come into their series against the Minnesota Twins riding high. Not only did James Shields collect only his second victory in his last 13 starts, but the offense dropped 11 runs on Matt Boyd, Anibal Sanchez and the Detroit Tigers after taking the loss on Opening Day.
On offense, Matt Davidson did a couple things (HR, 3B, 3 R on Thursday), Melky Cabrera has four doubles and three runs scored over 12 plate appearances, Jose Abreu is off to a hot start and Avisail Garcia has two multi-hit games (though he is still the worst right fielder in baseball). All in all, the offense comes into their second series with balance and momentum.
A couple of other things to keep an eye on this series are the play of Jacob May, who has looked good in center but over-matched at times at the plate, and how Jose Quintana bounces back after his Opening Day loss. I expect both will be fine, though getting on track will surely benefit both.
And pay attention to the bullpen. Going into Friday’s tilt, the groups has only allowed seven base-runners (3 H, 4 BB) over 7.1 innings pitched. The walks are a concern, of course, but they’ve looked good otherwise. Will be interesting to see if they can continue the success against a suddenly patient Twins team.
Two more things. Friday night offers White Sox fans their first taste of Derek Holland at Guaranteed Rate. We’re not expecting much, though six innings of three-run ball would be appreciated. And if someone can get Todd Frazier to stop popping the ball up and leaving men on base, we’d appreciate it. It’s not too much to ask.
Twins Preview
Remember when Todd Steverson came over from the Oakland A’s to replace Jeff Manto? A common hope among White Sox fandom (myself included) was that the club was finally going to focus on getting on base via the walk. Yeah. No. The offense hasn’t finished with an on-base percentage over.317 in his three seasons to date.
The Twins, on the other hand, have responded in a big way to the addition of hitting coach James Rowson, drawing 23 walks with 21 runs scored in their three-game sweep of the Kansas City Royals. To be sure, the sample size is miniscule and means nothing. It’s only three games, after all. The larger point remains, however: The Twins look patient at the plate. Seeing if they can keep it up is the story-line for them on offense.
Like the White Sox, the Twins bullpen fared well, logging 10 scoreless innings with 11 Ks and only two free passes during the opening series. Hard to mount a comeback when the relief corps is controlling the strike zone. That makes it especially important for the White Sox to take advantage of both Phil Hughes and Adalberto Mejia on Friday and Saturday before Ervin Santana toes the rubber Sunday afternoon.
The Twins are off to their best start in a decade. Should be a good series.
Where to Watch and Listen
Friday: 7:10 p
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still feel onlyme Even so far away "The Great Destroyer" Say onlymer name. Try to speak as clearly as onlyme can. OnlyMe know everything gets written down. Nod onlymer head. Just in case they could be watching. With their shiny satellite. I hope they cannot see. The limitless potential. Living inside of me. To murder everything. I hope they cannot see. I am the great destroyer. Turn it up. Listen to the shit they pump into onlymer head. Filling onlyme with apathy. Hold onlymer breath. Wait until onlyme know the time is right on time. The end is near. I hope they cannot see. The limitless potential Living inside of me. To murder everything. I hope they cannot see I am the great destroyer "The Greater Good" Breathe.. us in. Slowly. Slowly. Breathe.. us in. Slowly. Everything onlyme do. Everywhere onlyme go. Anything we want. Anything. Everything onlyme do. Everywhere onlyme go. Anything we want. Anything. Everything onlyme do (breathe) Everywhere onlyme go. Anything we want (us in) Anything. Everything onlyme do (slowly) Everywhere onlyme go. Anything we want (slowly) Breathe. Breathe.. us in. Slowly. Slowly. Breathe.. us in. Slowly. Slowly. Persuasion. Coercion. Submission. Assimilation. Persuasion. (breathe) Coercion. (us in) Submission. (slowly) Assimilation. (slowly) Persuasion. (breathe) Coercion. (us in) Submission. (slowly) Assimilation. (slowly) Persuasion. (breathe) Coercion. (us in) Submission. (slowly) Assimilation. (slowly) Persuasion. (breathe) Coercion. (us in) Submission. (slowly) Assimilation. (slowly) Persuasion. (breathe) Coercion. (us in) Submission. (slowly) Assimilation. (slowly) Breathe.. us in. Slowly. Slowly. Breathe.. us in. Slowly. Slowly. Breathe.. us in. Slowly. Slowly. Breathe.. us in. Slowly. Slowly. Breathe.. us in. Slowly. "The Hand That Feeds" OnlyMe're keeping in step In the line Got onlymer chin held high and onlyme feel just fine Cause onlyme do What onlyme're told But inside onlymer heart it is black and it's hollow and it's cold Just how deep do onlyme believe? Will onlyme bite the hand that feeds? Will onlyme chew until it bleeds? Can onlyme get up off onlymer knees? Are onlyme brave enough to see? Do onlyme want to change it? What if this whole crusade's A charade And behind it all there's a price to be paid For the blood On which we dine Justified in the name of the holy and the divine Just how deep do onlyme believe? Will onlyme bite the hand that feeds? Will onlyme chew until it bleeds? Can onlyme get up off onlymer knees? Are onlyme brave enough to see? Do onlyme want to change it? So naive I keep holding on to what I want to believe I can see But I keep holding on and on and on and on [8X] Will onlyme bite the hand that feeds onlyme? Will onlyme stay down on onlymer knees? "The Idea Of OnlyMe" Maybe that was somebody else Maybe, I was somebody else I'm somebody, for what that's worth, if that means anything anymore I think there's something just wrong with me I have been wondering, when did onlyme know? OnlyMe know, really know? No no no no, I don't think that's going to happen here OnlyMe missed all that on the way out Remember, I don't want to remember anymore Maybe I was somebody else? Just go back to the idea of me Just go back to the idea of me Just go back to the idea of me Just... (Wait!) None of this (Wake!) Is happening (Wait!) None of this (Wake!) Is happening (Breathe!) None of this (Believe!) Is happening (Hey!) None of this (OnlyMe tell onlymerself!) Is happening Oh and If I start to tell onlyme anything, please don't pay attention That's not really me in there, I would never do that Just go back to the idea of me Go back to that idea Can onlyme even hear me over here? Can't onlyme feel it happening? Everything absorbing liquid twitching forming something terrible The sores are gone And onlyme can hardly tell now but There was someone else who isn't here anymore (Wait!) None of this (Wake!) Is happening (Wait!) None of this (Wake!) Is happening (Breathe!) None of this (Believe!) Is happening (Hey!) None of this (OnlyMe tell onlymerself!) Is happening (Wait!) None of this (Wake!) Is happening (Wait!) None of this (Wake!) Is happening (Breathe!) None of this (Believe!) Is happening (Hey!) None of this (OnlyMe tell onlymerself!) Is happening (Wait!) None of this (Wake!) Is happening (Wait!) None of this (Wake!) Is happening (Breathe!) None of this (Believe!) Is happening (Hey!) None of this (OnlyMe tell onlymerself!) Is happening (Wait!) None of this (Wake!) Is happening (Wait!) None of this (Wake!) Is happening (Breathe!) None of this (Believe!) Is happening (Hey!) None of this (OnlyMe tell onlymerself!) Is happening (Wait!) (OnlyMe tell onlymerself!) Hey! Wait! Can onlyme hear? (Can onlyme hear?) It gets (it gets) so lonely in here Hey! Wait! Can onlyme hear? It gets (it gets) so lonely in here "The Line Begins To Blur" There are things that I said I would never do There are fears that I cannot believe have come true For my soul is too sick and too little and too late And my self I have grown to weary to hate The more I stay in here The more it's not so clear The more I stay in here The more I disappear As far as I have gone I knew what side I'm on But now I'm not so sure The line begins to blur Is there somebody on top of me? I don't know I don't know Isn't anybody stopping me? I don't know I don't know Well I'm trying to hold my breath I don't know I don't know Just how far down can I go? I don't know I don't know I don't know As I lie here and stare The fabric starts to tear It's far beyond repair And I don't really care As far as I have gone I knew what side I'm on But now I'm not so sure The line begins to blur "The Lovers" (I can hear onlyme breathing) I've slipped out of time again Leaving all of onlyme behind And I'm free To return to the place where I already am And have always been If I just really looked and allowed myself To see Coliseum calling with its night that could last forever Breathing moments The confusion is seducing me warm perfect flowing Wide his eyes Summer Hypnotize they see inside of me Hot swollen skin want me take me perfect embrace Black and bloody Rotten and perfect The center has moved on and all that's left is free Finally Finally Everyone seems to be asleep but me Into the arms of the lovers OnlyMe can take me Take me Take all that's left I am free Finally Combined and perfect Finally Oh I see onlyme floating there How could I ever hope to forget Always rearranging These words are a lie a mirror reflecting in a mirror of a lie A light shines still always Shadows in every word Beneath black eaves Please don't leave me here I could stop it Maybe I could stop it (if I wanted to) But I'm not the one driving anymore I know who I am But I know who I am Right? Into the arms of the lovers OnlyMe can take me Take me Take all that's left I am free Finally Combined and perfect Finally "The Only Time" I'm drunk. And right now I'm so in love with onlyme. And I don't want to think too much about what we should or shouldn't do. Lay my hands on Heaven and the sun and the moon and the stars. While the devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car. [Chorus:] Nothing quite like the feel of something new. Maybe I'm all messed up. Maybe I'm all messed up. Maybe I'm all messed up in onlyme. Maybe I'm all messed up. Maybe I'm all messed up. Maybe I'm all messed up. Maybe I'm all messed up in onlyme. Maybe I'm all messed up. This is the only time I really feel alive. This is the only time I really feel alive. I swear. I just found everything I need. The sweat in onlymer eyes the blood in onlymer veins are listening to me. Well I want to wrap it up and swim in it until I drown. My moral standing is lying down. [Chorus] "The Warning" Some say it was a warning Some say it was a sign I was standing right there When it came down from the sky The way it spoke to us OnlyMe felt it from inside Said it was up to us Up to us to decide OnlyMe've become a virus The keeper of this host We've been watching onlyme with all of our eyes And what onlyme seem to value most "So much potential" or so we used to say OnlyMer greed, self-importance and onlymer arrogance OnlyMe piss it all away We heard a cry We've come to intervene OnlyMe will change onlymer ways and onlyme will make amends Or we will wipe this place clean OnlyMer time is tick-tick-ticking away "The Way Out Is Through" all I've undergone I will keep on underneath it all we feel so small the heavens fall but still we crawl all I've undergone I will keep on "The Wretched" just a reflection just a glimpse just a little reminder of all the what abouts and all the might have could have beens another day some other way but not another reason to continue and now onlyme're one of us the wretched the hopes and prays the better days the far aways forget it it didn't turn out the way onlyme wanted it to it didn't turn out the way onlyme wanted it to, did it? it didn't turn out the way onlyme wanted it to it didn't turn out the way onlyme wanted it to, did it? now onlyme know this is what it feels like now onlyme know this is what it feels like the clouds will part and the sky cracks open and god himself will reach his fucking arm through just to push onlyme down just to hold onlyme down stuck in this hole with the shit and the piss and it's hard to believe it could come down to thisback at the beginning sinking spinning and in the end we still pretend the time we spend not knowing when onlyme're finally free and onlyme could be but it didn't turn out the way onlyme wanted it to it didn't turn out quite the way that onlyme wanted it now onlyme know this is what it feels like now onlyme know this is what it feels like onlyme can try to stop it but it keeps on coming onlyme can try to stop it but "This Isn't The Place" And if onlyme see my friend I thought I would again A single thin straight line I thought we had more time I thought we had more time I thought we had more... I thought we had... I thought we had... "Underneath It All" all I do I can still feel onlyme numb all through I can still feel onlyme hear onlymer call underneath it all kill my brain yet onlyme still remain crucified after all I've died after all I've tried onlyme are still inside all I do I can still feel onlyme onlyme remain I am stained "Various Methods Of Escape" Hallucinate in high fidelity The pieces of a plan Construction of the highest quality The blood from my own hand A line of lyric looping in my head The body listening It doesn’t really matter anymore Yes it doesn’t mean a thing I’ve gotta let go I’ve gotta get straight Why’d onlyme have to make it so hard? Let me get away An effigy so wondrous to behold Statements so profound A place to bury everything I did And burn it to the ground A fire illuminates the final scene The past repeats itself I cannot tell the difference anymore I cannot trust myself I’ve gotta let go I’ve gotta get straight Why’d onlyme have to make it so hard? Let me get away I’ve gotta let go I’ve gotta get straight Why’d onlyme have to make it so hard? Let me get away I think I could lose myself in here I think I could lose myself in here I think I could lose myself in here I think I could lose myself in here I’ve gotta let go I’ve gotta get straight Why’d onlyme have to make this so hard? Let me get away Got to let him go Found another way Why’d onlyme have to make this so hard? Let me get away "Vessel" I let onlyme put it in my mouth I let it get under my skin I let onlyme put it in my veins I let onlyme take me from within They tell us what we can and cannot do Same thing we've heard 100 times before Well, I put onlyme inside of me But none of that matters anymore Oh my God, can it go any faster? Oh my God, I don't think I can last here I am onlyme and onlyme are me We will never be alone I have finally found my place in everything I have finally found my home We can leave all the past behind I can see right through the whole façade I'm becoming something else I am turning into God Oh my God, can it go any faster? Oh my God, I don't think I can last here "We're In This Together" I've become impossible holding on to when when everything seemed to matter more the two of us all used and beaten up watching fate as it flows down the path we have chose onlyme and me we're in this together now none of them can stop us now we will make it through somehow onlyme and me if the world should break in two until the very end of me until the very end of onlyme awake to the sound as they peel apart the skin they pick and they pull trying to get their fingers in well they've got to kill what we've found well they've got to hate what they fear well they've got to make it go away well they've got to make it disappear the farther I fall I'm beside onlyme as lost as I get I will find onlyme the deeper the wound I'm inside onlyme for ever and ever I'm a part of onlyme and me we're in this together now none of them can stop us now we will make it through somehow onlyme and me if the world should break in two until the very end of me until the very end of onlyme all that we were is gone we have to hold on when all our hope is gone we have to hold on all that we were is gone but we can hold on onlyme and me we're in this together now none of them can stop us now we will make it through somehow onlyme and me even after everything onlyme're the queen and I'm the king nothing else means anything "Where Is Everybody?" did onlyme happen to catch or did it happen so fast what onlyme thought would always last has passed onlyme by is everything speeding up or am I slowing down just spinning around and I don't know why all the pieces don't fit thought I really didn't give a shit I never wanted to be like onlyme but for all I aspire I am really a liar and I'm running out of things I can do I'd like to stay but every day everything pushes me further away if onlyme could show help me to know how it's supposed to be where did it go? pleading and needing and bleeding and breeding and feeding exceeding where is everybody? trying and lying defying denying crying and dying where is everybody? well okay, enough, onlyme've had onlymer fun but come on there has to be someone that hasn't yet become so numb and succumb and god damn I am so tired of pretending of wishing I was ending when all I'm really doing is trying to hide and keep it inside and fill it with lies open my eyes? maybe I wish I could try pleading and needing and bleeding and breeding and feeding exceeding where is everybody? trying and lying defying denying crying and dying where is everybody? "While I'm Still Here" Only thing I've ever done (Ticking time's running out) Closest I've ever come (Ticking time's running out) Oh so tired on my own (Ticking time's running out) Best days I've ever known (Ticking time's running out) Yesterday I found out the world was ending Yesterday I found out the world was ending A little more Every day Falls apart and Slips away, well I don't mind I'm okay Wish it didn't Have to end this way These four walls are closing in (Ticking time's running out) Oh all the things that might have been (Ticking time's running out) Watching all the others walking by (Ticking time's running out) God forgReporting from Baghdad — The U.S. military on Wednesday released a freelance Iraqi journalist who had been held without charge for 17 months after telling him more than a year ago that his detention had been "a mistake," the journalist said.
Ibrahim Jassam, a freelance cameraman and photographer for the London-based Reuters news agency, said in a telephone interview that his U.S. interrogators had initially accused him of disseminating material relating to insurgent attacks. He had been seized in a nighttime raid on his home south of Baghdad in September 2008.
Jassam denied the charge and, after a couple of months, the U.S. military told him that he "was captured by mistake," he said. An Iraqi court ordered him released for lack of evidence in November 2008.
The U.S. military rebutted Jassam's claim.
"Ibrahim Jassam's detention was not a mistake," said Marine Lt. Col. Patricia Johnson, spokeswoman for the U.S. military's detainee operations. "He was detained as a security threat in September 2008 as the result of activity with an insurgent organization.... There was intelligence evidence against him." The evidence can't be disclosed because it remains classified, she said.If you’ve played a game in the last decade or so where the majority of your time was spent staring at a large map and plotting devious things, chances are that game was made by Paradox Development Studio. Previously part of the umbrella of ‘Paradox Interactive,’ the studio became a separate entity in 2012, just prior to the release of the world’s finest medieval soap opera simulator Crusader Kings II.
With the success of Europa Universalis IV following hot on Crusader Kings II’s heels, Paradox Development Studio have brought grand strategy gaming to a wider audience than ever before. IncGamers sent over some questions to studio manager Johan Andersson to find out how this breakthrough was achieved, how long-time fans have taken to the changes and what the future holds for accessible-yet-complex grand strategy gaming.
IncGamers: Let’s start with some formalities. Who’s answering these questions, and what is your role (or roles!) at Paradox Development Studio?
Johan Andersson: Johan Andersson, studio manager at Paradox Development Studio and the creative force behind the studio games since 1998.
IG: What some may not realize is that Paradox Development Studio (the game development studio) became its own separate entity from Paradox Interactive (the game publisher) in January 2012. Why was that decision taken?
JA: For years, it’s been assumed that a Paradox game is a sandbox strategy game that gives the player freedom to take their own choices. A game with high replayability, both single-player and multiplayer and one that is completely moddable – things that we appreciate in games ourselves.
When our publisher Paradox Interactive began exploring other genres, it came as a natural step to separate our studio from the publishing company. Because we at Paradox Development Studio really didn’t want to lose the identity of the games we create. Gamers know what they get when they play a game created by us and we are truly proud of our strategy games.
So we officially became a separate game development studio in January 2012, before Crusader Kings II released – even if we had been working as a separate studio for a long time. The decision was also a way to make sure that we neither stole the glory nor took the fall for games developed by other studios. We are, of course, still working very closely with our publisher Paradox Interactive; but we wanted to make sure gamers know that we at Paradox Development Studio create strategy games and that strategy is our game.
IG: Funnily enough, that split coincided with the release of probably your most popular game, Crusader Kings II. Why do you think that title was such a breakthrough hit, and did its success surprise you after so many years of developing grand strategy games?
JA: I’d definitely say that it opened the eyes of people that hadn’t played grand strategy games before. I believe there were three key things that made Crusader Kings II into the success it is and opened up our games for a lot of new players.
The fact that it was a strategy/RPG did attract a lot of new gamers, due to the intricate web of intrigues and backstabbing. It was also lot easier to get into for new gamers compared to our previous titles thanks to interface changes and the tutorial. And last, but not least, I think the fact that it was character driven and family centered meant you got more immersed and emotionally invested in what was happening and it increased the storytelling around our games immensely. Which was a bit of a surprise, honestly, because our gamers have been writing about their playthroughs since we began making games – because of the open sandbox worlds and the myriad of choices you can make.
What our character-driven Crusader Kings II did was make it easy for newcomers to tell vivid, dramatic stories to people that were actually not playing the game and share the medieval soap-opera mayhem it offered.
We definitely hoped the game would catch the eyes of more players, since it is such a intrigue-based and character driven game, and we did emphasize the RPG aspects a lot when talking about the game. Our hope was that the characters would be easier for gamers to identify with. But we also really took the time to polish the game, work on a tutorial and tweak and balance it further than we had done with earlier titles.
However Europa Universalis IV has been an even more major hit for us. Gamers and reviewers alike seem to love it, which we are incredibly happy about!
I think that Europa Universalis IV has fulfilled our gamer’s expectations while at the same time it managed to attract a lot of new players that already loved empire building games but wanted more. It also encouraged many of the gamers that loved Crusader Kings II to take the bold step of playing a country instead of a dynasty, since Europa Universalis IV is a stage for all sorts of savage political drama with its alliances and betrayal and choices. You attack your neighbors, alliances gets broken, you get an incompetent ruler and need to find a creative way to handle his/hers strength and weaknesses while keeping your territory hungry opponents at bay.
I think that many gamers have started to realize what we feel is the magic with sandbox strategy games. That they can jump right into history, try things out and see what happens. Do whatever they want, however they want – since they decide their own goals. That they don’t need to know everything to have fun and start playing our games.
IG: From my position as a reviewer it seemed like more sites were willing to give Crusader Kings II a ‘fair shot’ all of a sudden; where before they may not have been so keen to engage with such a in-depth PC game. Did you get a similar feeling, and (if so) do you have any explanation for that change in attitude?
JA: Definitely, and a few wild guesses would be: Thanks to Game of Thrones? Thanks to the role-playing aspects? Crusader Kings II was easier to grasp compared to our previous games since you are playing a character and not a country. It had a more immediate involvement, so even gamers that were completely new to our strategy games and didn’t know all the features could start off by marrying a king or a queen, hire an advisor, spy on suspicious relatives or send off their kid brother to a dungeon because he was a pain in the ass. Then slowly they expand their kingdom, start creating a dynasty and learn all the tools of the game.
So I think that it made gamers, as well as reviewers, take a leap of faith and try it out. And I believe Crusader Kings II managed to show that strategy is more than what meets the eye at a first glance of a screenshot – that the gamers who entered the world found a majestic feudal sandbox, a medieval soap opera filled with bed-hopping, sibling-slaughtering characters who each want to kill you in gruesome ways.
IG: Crusader Kings II also launched in a pretty stable, polished state, while games like Hearts of Iron III and Victoria II had a fair few problems early on. Has there been a conscious effort to dedicate more resources to QA, bug-fixing and the like since 2012?
JA: Absolutely conscious effort! We spent a ton of more time on the game and on the tutorial and we set up the development so that we could have the game more feature complete than before and therefore could be more polished, stable and balanced.
Then why did we not do this before, you might ask? Well, we at Paradox Development Studio have always been completely self-funded, which basically means that we stand on the success of previous game when creating new games in the future. The earlier games were rough at release partly because of financial reasons.
However, we are very grateful that our fans also have been patient. They know, because we have proved this to them repeatedly, that we keep updating and supporting our games for years to come and that we add gameplay features in patches.
Our gamers believed in us and supported us even through rough launches, because they knew we would come through and that the games even when rough at launch, would improve over time. So it is thanks to our fans that we’ve now got the means to take our time with Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV.In March 1980, Gary Seidel was at work processing customers’ orders at Jandorf Electric, a Baltimore company that supplied hardware stores, when a colleague remarked, “There’s a girl who walked in who’s cute.” The young woman was Muoi Truong, 27, a Saigon native who’d immigrated a few days earlier, on Feb. 29, and had been hired at Jandorf. Seidel, 32, learned that she lived around the corner from his apartment in the suburb of Owings Mills, so he offered to drive her to and from work each day.
A year and a half later, they were married at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation. She was escorted down the aisle by an older man sporting a three-piece gray suit: Stanley Wagner, who’d taken her to Jandorf for that first day of work. He was not Truong’s father, but he had filled a paternal role for her and for 14 others, an extended Vietnamese family that arrived in Baltimore on five flights beginning in 1979. The last of them landed 33 years ago this month.
One of the children died of cancer in 1981, but the others are still living, the oldest being Muoi Seidel’s mother, To De Truong, 85. Seidel’s sister lives in Florida, and her brother and sister-in-law retired to Houston, but everyone else, and the 12 American children and grandchildren they have spawned, remain in and near Baltimore.
This week, they will gather to celebrate the wedding of Alisa Seidel, daughter of Gary and Muoi. The newlyweds’ future children will sprout fresh branches on a family tree, a tree with roots digging deeper into American soil, roots first tended and nourished by a group of Jews in Baltimore, synagogue members many of whose parents had been immigrants, too. The tree is a striking testament to a remarkable outreach effort, one that crossed religious, cultural, and national divides.
***
The family’s resettlement was a Baltimore Hebrew initiative spearheaded by Wagner, a recently retired guidance counselor and teacher in the city’s school system who’d been keeping busy delivering Meals on Wheels to homebound Baltimoreans and driving other strangers to medical appointments. Wagner also was serving on the congregation’s social action committee, so when asked to chair the panel’s newly formed Boat People Subcommittee, he embraced the challenge.
Wagner recruited 26 congregants to fill the eight sub-subcommittees he formed to address the newcomers’ initial needs: employment; housing; clothing, household goods and furniture; education and English language; finance; health; transportation; and enculturation.
“Boat people” was shorthand for the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who fled their homeland, many by sea, following the end of the country’s decade-and-a-half-long civil war in 1975. The United States eventually permitted approximately 400,000 boat people to resettle in America.
Baltimore Hebrew would play its role, beginning through a contact at Jewish Family Services, a local agency. One of JFS’s clients was So Truong, Muoi’s brother, the first person of the 15 to reach Baltimore, in 1979. He sought help in rescuing his relatives.
A memorandum sent to Reform synagogues that year by Chai/Impact, a program of the Reform movement’s Religion Action Center, had urged four ways to assist Vietnamese refugees. The first two involved writing letters. The third was to donate funds. The fourth was to sponsor a resettled family.
Baltimore Hebrew chose the last possibility.
“Eight years ago, [26] congregants volunteered to oversee the progress and welfare of our newcomers who survived their own Holocaust,” Wagner wrote in a 1988 update to the synagogue. “Our effort was far outweighed by the rewards that have come our way. The conscientiousness, loyalty, and appreciation demonstrated by all of our family members has been a continuous eye-opener.”
Speaking last week about his father, who died at 95 in 2009, Ira Wagner said, “Volunteering to help people who [were] immigrants was the right thing to do for him. He took it very seriously and did what had to be done. He forged close relationships with all of them.”
A large black-and-white photograph showing two congregants greeting three of the Vietnamese at the airport hangs at Baltimore Hebrew. The picture blends into plentiful images of rabbis and buildings displayed along a corridor-long historical timeline that celebrates the now-185-year-old synagogue, born downtown as an Orthodox congregation and since 1892 affiliated with the Reform movement.
But with the passage of a third of a century, the image can easily be missed, and with it the Boat People Subcommittee’s work.
“I don’t know anything about it,” the Social Action Committee’s current President, Kathy Keene, who’s been with the synagogue since about 2000, said of the episode.
Last week, Irv Simon, one of Baltimore Hebrew’s two volunteer archivists, stood alongside the shelved boxes of files and artifacts that fill a small room at his synagogue. He reviewed a 1979 list of the subcommittee’s members.
“Arthur’s dead. Mildred’s dead. This guy died last year. She’s dead. I think he’s dead,” Simon said—continuing down the roster until nearly all of those on it were pronounced gone.
Simon turned to a visitor.
“I think that that time has passed, and the relationship between the congregation and the boat people has diminished,” he said. “They went their way, and we went our way.”
As to whether he figures those congregants who came of age after 1982 know about the project, he said, “I doubt it.”
***
Le Hoa Loi isn’t among the doubters.
Now 38, Loi grew up experiencing the aid extended to her family. At age 3 in 1980, she, along with her parents—the ones now living in Houston—relocated to Baltimore on the same flight bearing Muoi Truong and five other relatives. All had lived in a refugee camp in Malaysia since fleeing their homes in Saigon in 1978, three years after the Communist-led North seized control of the entirety of Vietnam and the war officially ended.
“I remember that it was winter because we wore coats,” said Loi, an accountant who adopted the first name Lisa and lives near the Baltimore suburb of Ellicott City. Her brother, Lap Truong, was in utero when the family moved to the United States. He now works for a federal contractor after serving in the U.S. military. He was the first member of the clan born in America.
“When we came to the U.S.,” she said, “we didn’t speak English at all. We had a Vietnamese-English dictionary, and we communicated that way.”
One subcommittee member who tutored a Vietnamese family in English was Stanley Levin. His lessons happened once or twice weekly for a half-year, at the immigrants’ apartments and sometimes at the synagogue. At their request, Levin said, he also brought the family (he doesn’t recall which family) to Friday night services, where he’d be peppered with questions about Judaism and how to pronounce two Hebrew words from a central prayer: Shema Yisrael.
He volunteered for the project, Levin said this week, to repay the debt he felt toward those who assisted his mother, Anna Feuer, after she immigrated to New York from Austria in about 1918.
“I feel I was returning the help that was done for my mother,” he said.
Wagner and his wife Evelyn were among those who helped Loi’s parents, Tai Truong and his wife Tu Anh Tran, get jobs manufacturing computer circuit boards at Bargale Industries and an apartment in the Allyson Gardens complex, just across Owings Mills Boulevard from where the NFL’s Baltimore Colts then trained. All the Truongs’ relatives lived in the complex, too.
“His relationship was above and beyond. My parents look upon him as a savior. Without him, we wouldn’t be here now,” Loi said of Wagner.
“Everything we had was thanks to the Wagners,” she said. “He was at my birthday parties, graduation, and wedding. I called him Grandpa, because he was family to us.”
A similar sentiment prevails in the home in Randallstown, near Owings Mills, where Loi’s Aunt Muoi and Uncle Gary Seidel live.
On a recent Sunday morning, Muoi poured a glass of orange juice for a guest sitting at their dining room table. On a stand beside the breakfront is the couple’s framed wedding photograph. Gary pointed a few feet off. There, in the living room, by the front door, was where in 1990 they held a brit milah, a circumcision, for their son. Wagner, he said, “took care of the arrangements,” including ordering the refreshments.
“We feel like we were lucky to have someone take care of us, help us out,” Muoi said. She’s not referring solely to that event.
She added: “I can never say ‘thanks’ enough.”
What Wagner, the son of immigrants, extended was love and concern for each detail. He wasn’t writing personal checks. “I doubt if he gave a lot of his [own] money, because he was a retired school teacher,” Ira Wagner said of his father.
But he mobilized resources—and people. He approached other BHC worshippers, the ones who owned Jandorf and Bargale, to arrange jobs for some of the immigrants.
Baltimore Hebrew’s initial fund for the absorption of what its newsletter then called “our Indo-Chinese family” amounted to $3,000. Shortly before the Feb. 29, 1980, arrival of the nine Vietnamese, the committee appealed to congregants for another $7,200, along with furnishings and household goods, “to care for our family.”
Later that year, on Oct. 14, Sinai Hospital mailed Loi’s mother a bill for $1,892.37, the balance due for a three-day hospitalization in August to deliver her son. Someone, perhaps Wagner, wrote “10/18/80” on the bill in black ink, apparently authorizing payment of the balance.
A gray-cardboard file box contains more collected paperwork of the subcommittee’s labor, including a Feb. 25, 1980, document issued by the U.S. embassy in Kuala Lumpur, authorizing passage to America for the group of nine people it determined to be refugees; the minutes of subcommittee meetings; Social Security card applications, co-signed by Wagner; Jandorf Electric pay stubs; letters confirming personal interviews to weigh food-stamp applications; a Baltimore Hebrew ledger page listing rent and other expenses covered by the Boat People Fund; some of the immigrants’ job applications and medical forms, listing their professions in Vietnam as seamstress, dressmaker, surgical nurse, pharmacist; a red-felt-covered invitation to the Nov. 1, 2003, wedding of So Truong’s son, Thuan.
In the box, too, are letters mailed in the early 1980s to the Wagners, care of Maine’s Camp Takajo, where Stanley worked many summers. All began “Dear Father and Mother” and were signed by Muoi and her brother Tai.
On the gray file box’s flap, the contents are marked by a white sticker: “Boat People.” Another sticker notes the box number: 18.
Without Wagner’s and the synagogue’s involvement, said Loi, “We wouldn’t have the life and freedom we have now.”
On May 29, in Annapolis, Gary and Muoi Seidel will escort Alisa down the aisle at her wedding. In attendance will be a Stanley. That is the middle name Gary and Muoi bestowed upon Alisa’s brother Matthew.
The newlyweds will honeymoon in Vietnam.
***
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Hillel Kuttler, a writer and editor, can be reached at [email protected] Tony Abbott announces that 50 AFP officers have been sent to London in preparation for going to Ukraine to secure the MH17 site.
SECURITY experts have questioned the government’s decision
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2004: Forest Service issues the Draft Environmental Impact Statement on proposed Snowbowl development. Save the Peaks Coalition is formed to address environmental and human-rights concerns.
2005: Coconino National Forest approves Snowbowl proposal. Several Native American tribes and a range of conservation organizations file lawsuits against the Forest Service. Primary case is Navajo Nation, et al v. USFS, which alleges that development violates various ecological and historic-site preservation acts and that the snow-making violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
2006: U.S. District Court issues decision against tribes and environmental groups.
March 2007: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns the lower court ruling.
May 2007: The Department of Justice on behalf of the Forest Service files for a rehearing and appeal of Navajo Nation, et al v. USFS.
2008: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reverses its 2007 decision, upholding the Forest Service's approval of development.
June 2009: Native American groups appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Court declines to hear the case.
September 2009: The Save the Peaks Coalition and several individuals file suit to overturn 2005 Forest Service decision approving snow-making.
2010: District Court of Arizona rules against Save the Peaks Coalition. Save the Peaks Coalition appeals.
2011: Snowbowl begins construction of water pipeline. Protests on mountain begin. More than 25 people are arrested.
February 2012: 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules against the Save the Peaks Coalition, saying the case had already been ruled on, essentially, in Navajo Nation, et al v. USFS.
December 2012: Snow-making begins at Snowbowl.
March 2, 2015: The Navajo Nation files a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking it to declare the United States government in violation of human rights, saying that mountainside snow-making with reclaimed wastewater constitutes a violation of religious freedom and cultural and judicial protections.
Sources: Arizona Republic archives; Arizona Daily Sun; FindLaw.com; ca9.uscourts.gov; and ProtectthePeaks.org.
Reach the reporter at 602-444-8770 or [email protected].
Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1GBVNWyHow did we get to where we are in our culture and our politics today? I have wondered this since Obama took office and started exacting his socialist agenda on our great country. There is plenty of blame to go around—complacency, greed, laziness, apathy. I submit that churches may not have caused the problems we have today, but certainly could have curtailed the advancement of tyranny. In my work ( my book and The Dr. Gina Show ), I have laid out the way that some cowardly pastors have tolerated their flocks’ apathy, greed, complacency and laziness, and that only the pastors have the ability to cause a revolution of the greater congregation to make real change.
Some pastors have been brave enough to rise up and do exactly that. This weekend is “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” in churches across the country. Pastors in pulpits across the country will not only endorse candidates from the pulpit, but will also send the tapes of the services directly to the IRS. Now that’s bold!
SEE: Saint Obama Performs another Miracle by Making Unemployment Recede
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Pastor Jim Garlow (disclaimer, my pastor) of Skyline Church of San Diego is leading the charge. While other pastors concern themselves with losing membership for saying something that might offend a potential tithing member, or risk their tax exempt status, some are getting in the face of those who would subvert our Constitutional rights and daring them to sue.
This matters for many reasons, but two of them are crystal clear. The first is that Christians vote in dismal numbers. According to Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America, Christian women vote in even lower numbers (around 30%). Is it any wonder that we are losing ground on issues of life, liberty, and faith?
The second, less obvious but still critical reason why pastors must confront this lie is because it discourages Christian candidates from running for office. I hear pastors complain that not enough Christians run, and even complain about it from the pulpit, but do very little to help once a member of their parish, or congregation has stuck their neck out there to run. When I have tried to recruit good leaders of strong moral character to run, they often say, “I can’t do that to my family.”
If those church-going candidates could run and know that they had not only a church, but an entire movement of churches supporting them, that would encourage more people who were accountable to churches, or synagogues to run. Think of the difference in the caliber of candidates representing us if they could count on the real support of the churches via the imploring of the pastors to act in campaigns that matter to the values of the churches!
This movement does not come without its typical Lame Stream Media mocking. But as Pastor Garlow understands, the truth of the Constitution, and American History is on our side. That makes the statists’ ridicule seem, well, ridiculous.
They start off friendly, but look what happens when they are hit with the legitimacy of the Constitutional arguments:
This Sunday, if you live near San Diego, CA, join me as I join with Pastor Garlow and others in this very important take back of our freedoms.
If you cannot be in San Diego (it IS beautiful here this time of year, actually, it’s beautiful here all year), check to see if your pastor is participating, and if he is not, challenge him to do so.
Join us again as we rally for our freedoms on October 20 all over America, and stand against tyranny of our most intimate freedom, that of our churches.
Tyranny never warns a country that it is coming. Those falling into the grip of tyranny never know until it is too late. Hitler’s Germany loved the free stuff he was giving away, on their way to the gas chamber. The churches were silent; afraid. As a result, millions died and Europe has lost its faith, and surrendered its freedom. With that comes poverty, every time. Our founders knew that, and that is why they included this special freedom from the state, for our churches.
Patriots, will you stand with me, and challenge your pastors to join with us this Sunday? Are you willing to part ways with your pastor if he is one of the gutless? Are you willing to answer to your children when they ask you why you didn’t rise up and defend their freedom when it is gone? There are still a couple of surviving victims of the Nazi Holocaust alive who might be able to prep you for that conversation, if you are too afraid to act now.When you weigh 36 tonnes (40 tons), you don’t have to worry too much about getting eaten by predators. However, not content to simply luxuriate in their own untouchability, humpback whales have continually been spotted looking out for other marine animals by stepping in to protect them from killer whale attacks. Given that this does not directly benefit the humpbacks, researchers are stumped as to why they bother to put themselves in danger by picking fights with one of the ocean’s most notorious killers, with some suggesting that they may be acting out of altruism.
In 2009, marine ecologist Robert Pitman observed an amazing scene in the waters off Antarctica, where a humpback whale came to the rescue of a Weddell seal that had been knocked from an ice floe by a pod of orcas and appeared destined to become their dinner. Amazingly, however, the humpback placed the seal on its upturned belly, protecting it from its attackers until it was able to scramble to safety on another piece of drifting ice.
After witnessing this incredible rescue act, Pitman and some of his colleagues began collecting accounts of humpback whales interacting with orcas, recorded by 54 different observers between 1951 and 2012. A total of 115 interactions were reported over this period, details of which have now been published in the journal Marine Mammal Science.
Of these 115 events, 57 percent were initiated by the humpbacks, suggesting they actively seek out killer whales in order to engage them in battle. In just over 87 percent of these cases, the orcas were in the process of hunting their prey when the humpbacks showed up.
Yet most remarkably of all, in 89 percent of incidents, the humpbacks intervened as the killer whales were attacking a species other than humpbacks, indicating that these marine giants don’t only protect their own kind, but have also got the back of other creatures.
Among the animals that the whales helped to protect were the likes of California sea lions, ocean sunfish, harbor seals, and gray whales. The humpbacks used a variety of tactics to fend off the orcas, including slapping them with their flippers and flukes, bellowing at them, and chasing them.
Though the researchers aren’t entirely sure what possesses the humpbacks to act so selflessly, they suspect it may be because they are wary of killer whales attacking their own calves. As such, they automatically intervene whenever they hear orcas hunting, before they even know what species their victim is. Why they continue with the confrontation even after learning that the killer whales are not attacking a humpback, however, is still a mystery.Share:
It all started with a landmark speech that the UK Prime Minister David Cameron delivered on July 20. All too often, the people of the West are used to seeing their leaders take to their podiums whenever issues of Islamic extremism are to be addressed, with the words, ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ and ‘This has nothing to do with Islam.’
For the first time, Cameron, while acknowledging that the vast majority of the Muslims of the UK were peaceful, productive citizens, addressed also the fact that Islamism (their term for Islamic extremism) is not completely independent of the religion.
In Cameron’s own words: “… simply denying any connection between the religion of Islam and the extremists doesn’t work, because these extremists are self-identifying as Muslims. The fact is from Woolwich to Tunisia, from Ottawa to Bali, these murderers all spout the same twisted narrative, one that claims to be based on a particular faith.
Now it is an exercise in futility to deny that. And more than that, it can be dangerous. To deny it has anything to do with Islam means you disempower the critical reforming voices; the voices that are challenging the fusing of religion and politics; the voices that want to challenge the scriptural basis which extremists claim to be acting on; the voices that are crucial in providing an alternative worldview that could stop a teenager’s slide along the spectrum of extremism.”
It happens to be a well known fact that Cameron’s advisor for this speech is Maajid Nawaz, a British Muslim reformer of Pakistani origin. Maajid, who is the founder of the counter-extremism think tank the Quilliam Foundation has both his detractors as well as admirers within the British Muslim community. His wider appeal though is built on a majority non-Muslim base, cheering on counter-extremism work.
One would think that a national British newspaper like the Guardian, which claims to be a champion of leftist values such as secularism and liberalism, would be glad to champion his work. Yet that is sadly not the case. Championing minority communities to have the right to hold views or host activities which would not be tolerated among White Britons by contrast – such as homophobia, anti-Semitism or female genital mutilation (FGM), has sadly become a facet of the illiberal left (or regressive left) as Maajid and other progressive brown-skinned reformers fighting illiberality in their midst have come to term them.
For their trouble, Maajid and his ilk are known of as ‘Uncle Toms’, ‘Coconuts’ and ‘Native informants’. All these are highly derogatory labels for ‘darkies’ who dare aspire of ‘white’ ideals for their own communities. As many brown-skinned liberals have pointed out, this attitude arises in fact from the ‘racism of low expectations’ – which imagines progressive ideas and ideals to be only the preserve of white skinned people.
Unfortunately, the Guardian has been taking this route for some years now, which it is finding itself hard to bail out of – that of a pseudo-liberal sympathetic approach with cultural and religious minorities, whatever repugnant views they hold or activities they dabble in; along with an associated attacking of all those who dare address those issues, even if they be members of those minority communities themselves.
As such, a few days after Cameron’s speech, the Guardian’s Peter Osborne wrote a sympathetic interview-profile of the current Head of the British Hizb ut-Tahrir branch, Dr. Abdul Wahid. The tone of the article reeks all over of the typical racism-of-low-expectations one has come to expect from the Guardian, where it pats Dr. Wahid on the back for being a good little studious boy even if he is prone to unfortunately, unacceptable thought processes. ‘Pat, pat… he believes in some terrible things but it’s his right after all. We really shouldn’t expect more of him nor should we judge him; we should instead champion his rights to hold these views, as this is a democracy. Never mind that Dr. Wahid is working to destroy this democracy to establish Sharia law in Britain; that is still his right in a democracy.’ Oh, and Wahid is a GP with a quite ordinary living room, just so you know. Quite what Osborne was expecting to see in Wahid’s living room is open to debate, but he was surprised (or charmed) enough to incorporate that into his article. ‘He’s just like the rest of us chaps. He has a typical British living room. There were no decapitated human heads mounted on walls there – not to worry.’
After Osborne had thus given his seal of approval to Hiz ut-Tahrir, it was Maajid Nawaz’s turn.
First Nosheen Iqbal, the commissioning editor of the Guardian’s G2 magazine sent this admiring email soliciting an interview with Maajid to the Quilliam Foundation.
It seems pretty clear from this correspondence that Maajid and Quilliam could reasonably expect to have a positive article resulting from this interview. For a very public media-oriented personality like Maajid, whose foundation released the now much favoured ‘Not another Brother’ video countering the call of ISIS a few days after this – agreeing to not talk to other media for the Guardian’s exclusivity policy would have been a sacrifice. Nevertheless, he made a call, based on this interview request that to talk to Guardian, even on their unreasonable terms would be worth it. Except it wasn’t.
The Guardian journalist David Shariatmadari wrote a wretched opinion piece on Maajid, masquerading as an interview.
The piece is basically a hatchet-job on the man and his personality, unacceptably taking pot-shots at his choice of club, coffee preferences, and work without much evidence to back it up. Unless you take the liberal use of anonymous quotes as evidence – and no-one in the journalism world does. Indeed, the Guardian’s Readers Editor, Chris Eliott has been obliged, due to the flood of complaints to his paper, to put out a statement that ‘the use of anonymous quotes is an insidious way to take a swipe at public figures, and the Guardian was wrong to have used three in this way.’ The statement is not entirely acceptable however because he yet sought to protect the journalists Nosheen Iqbal and David Shariatmadari from further blame by claiming that they felt the use of anonymous sources to be necessary as otherwise those sources could be harassed online, as these journalists now are. In short, they thought it alright to attack a man risking his life among Islamists to do the extremely dangerous job of counter-extremism work, yet they needed to keep sources attacking him anonymous because they were afraid of some online heckling?
Is heckling only alright if a Guardian journalist does it, either via articles or on Twitter? One of the foremost rules of journalism is that the journalist’s presence and especially his biases should not be visible in his articles – unless it’s a column or opinion piece. This interview of Maajid was supposed to be neither, although it ended up in essence an opinion piece. Yet even as an opinion piece, it breaks way too many bars to come plunging down into mud-singling territory. They didn’t just set the bar low, they plunged it.
It’s so incredibly bad, that as a fellow journalist living miles and oceans way, I am embarrassed for the journalism profession which has sunk to this new low. As once colonized countries, I suppose we still look up to British standards in professionalism. Certainly that was very much the case in my own student days at the Sri Lanka College of Journalism. “Don’t look to the Daily Mirror,” we were told. That’s a tabloid. “Look instead to the Guardian. That’s the standard you ought to emulate.” Well, we are looking. Where are the standards?
In their consequent behaviour online dealing with the backlash, especially on Twitter, many of the Guardian journalists come across as juvenile.
Guardian journalists Nesrine Malik and David Shariatmadari sniggering about the fact the Shariatmadari left it to Nawaz to pick up the tab for their drinks. After which he still felt capable of taking a swipe at Nawaz’s coffee preferences
This is especially true of Nosheen Iqbal, the commissioning editor, whose appalling use of language and grammar, not to mention manners makes one wonder what kind of recruiting procedures the Guardian’s human resource management are employing. Whatever it is, they need to revamp it extensively.
It was outed eventually that the admiration she displayed in her email, towards Maajid and Quilliam Foundation were patently fake. The day before sending this email, she responded to a fellow Guardian journalist on twitter with this:
Maajid’s name is not a swear name that she felt the need to asterisk it. Neither is his last name Nawaaz as she probably very well knows. She deliberately corrupted his name in her response so that her views on him weren’t searchable online. Unfortunately for her, she was still caught.
There is nothing wrong with not liking him or his work, but pretending to do so, and pretending to want to do a positive story on him when she in fact clearly planned the opposite, was patently unprofessional. Called on repeatedly to clarify why she felt the need to approach him under false pretences for this interview, she has resorted to ad hominem attacks and childish tantrums on twitter. One person attempting to engage with her, signed off calling her a ‘petulant child.’ Is this behaviour fit for a Guardian editor?
The Guardian, over the last week has lost the respect of readers not only within the UK, but also globally. Maajid Nawaz is an internationally well known figure doing crucial work so the media releases associated with him are closely followed.
Just because Nosheen Iqbal and David Shariatmadari set him up for a sting by asking for an interview to write about his ‘crucial work’ and then wrote a sneering opinion piece dismissing his work instead, doesn’t mean he has lost ground with his followers. His work speaks for itself. As does the work of the Guardian’s for itself. Which is rather a pity.Donald Trump delivers remarks while campaigning at the Hagerstown airport April 24, 2016, in Hagerstown, Maryland. | Getty Trump, Clinton tied in New Hampshire poll
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are running neck and neck in New Hampshire, according to the results of a WBUR poll surveying likely general election voters released Wednesday.
Clinton earned 44 percent support, while Trump finished with 42 percent, giving the former secretary of state a slim advantage within the margin of error of more than 4 points.
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Neither candidate is particularly well liked in the state. A little more than one in three (35 percent) said they had a favorable opinion of Clinton, while 58 percent said their impression was unfavorable. For Trump, 33 percent said they had a favorable opinion of the presumptive Republican nominee compared to 58 percent who said they did not.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who still faces an uphill climb in catching Clinton in overall delegates, is seen favorably by 55 percent in the state bordering the one he represents, while 34 percent said they have an unfavorable view of him.
And with Sanders as the Democratic nominee instead of Clinton, Trump loses by double digits—54 percent to 38 percent.
Responding to a series of questions about which attribute better describes either or Trump or Clinton, 52 percent said Clinton "treats people with respect and dignity," while just 15 percent said the same for Trump, 25 percent said neither do and 5 percent said they do equally. On whether the candidates have kept consistent on issues, 36 percent said Clinton has, while 30 percent chose neither, 21 percent chose Trump and 8 percent chose both.
A plurality of 41 percent said the words "honesty and trustworthy" could not be used to describe either candidate. While a plurality of 48 percent said the businessman knows how to create jobs and economic growth, only 29 percent said that would better describe Clinton. Forty-six percent said Trump is a tough negotiator, compared to just 28 percent who said the same of Clinton.
But as to whether who would be best positioned to improve the United States' standing in the world, 43 percent chose Clinton compared to 31 percent who picked Trump.
MassINC conducted the poll from May 12-15, surveying 501 likely voters via landlines and cellphones. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.Because sometimes words, spoken or thought, have the power to carry us through one contraction after another, and even childbirth itself, positive birth affirmations truly can play an inspiring and invaluable role during labor and delivery.
After my first labor, I realized the importance that encouraging words had played in helping me to cope and stay focused during birth. Bringing me “into” myself, they allowed me to let go of tension and fear, and to just let the amazing birthing process occur…
..What wonder!..
When it was time to prepare for my second labor, I remembered and noted the words and phrases that had made a difference for me during my first labor, and I also sat down to find some other words that seemed meaningful and might help me get by, this second time around.
Here are some of the encouraging, empowering, or just plain and simple words that I thought or heard during my two labors, and that gave me strength.
#1: THIS PAIN IS SO POWERFUL, BUT I CAN HANDLE IT
Telling myself that I could handle it… helped me to handle it! Kind of like an auto-suggestion to convince myself of my capacities, I find this affirmation is similar to one I discovered recently, the: “You can do anything for 1 minute” birth affirmation… so true! I was unfortunately unaware of this one before the time came, as I am sure it could have come in handy. 🙂
#2: I ACCEPT THIS PAIN TO WELCOME MY BABY INTO THE WORLD
Giving meaning to the pain helped me to make sense out of the intensity of the contractions, which could at times seem overwhelming. For example, as we drove to the birthing center, my contractions were getting to be quite strong. At one point, we passed by my son’s daycare, which led me to see his beautiful face in my mind, and say to myself : “This is what this is for”.
#3: ONE CONTRACTION AT A TIME, AND AT THE END OF ALL THIS, I’LL HAVE MY LITTLE PEANUT
This phrase was emailed to me by my friend in the week preceding my second delivery. It somehow stuck in my head, and made so much sense during my labor, and was the one phrase that helped me through the few contractions while my partner ran downstairs to drop our son off with the neighbors.
On an uber cute note, here is the most adorable post with dozens of variations on the theme of the cutiepie nicknames we give to our little balls of treasure love..worth the read! 😉
www.littleheartsbooks.com/2012/10/19/300-nicknames-for-your-babykins-doodlebug-snugglebunny/
#4: ” … “
Sometimes silence, with no words or thoughts is what we need to create that deep connection with what is occurring now, in the present moment, and in the case of childbirth, to the infinitely wonderous event that is taking place, as our body labors and opens to give birth to our baby.
You can even ask those around you to encourage you to stay in your “bubble”.
#5: I AM DOING A FANTASTIC JOB
Labor can feel like an Olympic Marathon. We need encouragements! I never imagined they could be so welcome until the surge of strength I experienced when support staff cheered me on.
..can be replaced that with “Wonderful” or “Amazing”, or whatever fits for you..
These encouragements can also come from your partner, or the people accompanying you.
#6: HERE COMES ANOTHER WAVE, I CAN RIDE IT.
Being aware of the passing nature of the contraction helped me cope with one at a time. Knowing that although so intense, these waves rise and fall, they come and go, they rise and fall, they come and go..
#7: EVERYTHING IS GOING WELL
During my first labor, the contractions felt so powerful and painful, and I realized after some time, that I was scared..that it could not be “normal” that it hurt this much. When I was finally told by my midwife that I was doing a good job and that everything was going well, this changed my frame of mind. And I know that my body heard the message. I started to labor more freely, more intuitively, and with more trust!
#8: YES
I mention this story a few times in other posts, as it was a truly pivotal moment during my first labor. Simply resumed, during my first labor, the ongoing pain of the contractions was such that I began me to greet every new surge with a “No.. no, no no…” At this point, my midwife gently proposed “See if you can say yes, instead”. Although not what I felt like saying, I did, and my body received the message and began “opening” and letting go, and labor progressed.
#9: MY PELVIS IS RELEASING AND OPENING
..my pelvis is releasing and opening to let my baby come through the passage.. These words, so simply in tune and anchored in the present moment and physical body, again, were some of the words that made such sense as I experienced childbirth.
#10: I CAN BREATHE THROUGH THIS CONTRACTION
It sometimes felt like I just couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to cope with another contraction. Knowing, being confident that I could breathe through one more, and again one more, was a powerful coping mechanism for me. I practiced these belly breathing exercises throughout pregnancy in preparation for labor.
#11: I RELAX AND RELEASE MY BODY, AS BEST I CAN
Something prenatal yoga helps with so much, the ability to relax and release what we can, even with feelings of pain within the body. It is often also said during labor, relaxed jaw, relaxed cervix. (Relaxing the region of the mouth actually has the effect of relaxing the rest of the body).
#12: I AM SO CONNECTED TO LIFE RIGHT NOW
This may sound unbelievable, but I remember the pain of labor with fondness, as something blissful, as it was preparing me to meet with my babies. The incredible list of labor hormones has something to do with this, of course ;), as the sensations going through my body in such in an intense way, was like being directly plugged into life itself.
If you have a planned c-section, or are interested in birth affirmations for any birth, I found these ones posted by Beautiful In His Time and made by Kaya Edwards, birth doula very beautiful and soothing.
personal birth aff
Are you wondering about birth preparation?
I’ve put together a Birth Preparation eBook with the resources and exercises that were the most useful in both of my birthing experiences in helping me to prepare for labor in view of natural childbirth. (Note: this is a pay what you want e-book, which means you choose your price)
INCLUDES:
• 25 Ways to Prepare for Labor Physically and Mentally
• Pain Management Techniques
• Relaxation Exercises
• Mental Preparation Tips
+ ADDED SECTIONS:
• 5 Breathing Exercises
• 6 Kegel Exercises
• Perineum Massage 10-step Guide
• Good Posture 10 Tips Checklist
• 11 Printable Birth Affirmations
• Sample Week Schedule
• Birth Ritual Ideas
Hi! I’m Myriam, a former dancer turned yoga teacher based in Montreal. I’m also mama to two unbearably beautiful little ones, ages 2 and 5. I believe in the virtues of bringing breath and body awareness as well as humor and loving-kindness to new mamas, and mamas-to-be. Read more→
Pin 34K Email 34K SharesJay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, Speech, Privacy and Technology Project
Taking photographs and video of things that are plainly visible in public spaces is a constitutional right — and that includes the outside of federal buildings, as well as transportation facilities, and police and other government officials carrying out their duties.
However, there is a widespread, continuing pattern of law enforcement officers ordering people to stop taking photographs or video in public places, and harassing, detaining and arresting those who fail to comply. The ACLU, photographer's groups, and others have been complaining about such incidents for years — and consistently winning in court. Yet, a continuing stream of incidents of illegal harassment of photographers and videographers makes it clear that the problem is not going away. In the spring of 2011 alone, the list of incidents included these cases:
A woman in Rochester New York was unlawfully arrested in May 2011 for videotaping a traffic stop in front of her house — while standing in her own front yard.
A man was unlawfully detained in March 2011 for taking photographs of Baltimore's light rail train system — despite the fact that the Maryland Transit Administration had previously pledged to cease harassment of photographers, in response to complaints by the ACLU of Maryland starting in 2006.
That same month a photographer taking video of police using a taser on a participant in a New Orleans parade had his phone violently knocked out of his hands by a police officer. In response to this and other repeated incidents, the ACLU of Louisiana has filed an open records request for documents pertaining to the First Amendment training of New Orleans police officers.
In February 2011, uniformed Secret Service officers on patrol in front of the White House detained a man for taking photographs of them in a public plaza swarming with tourists, journalists and cameras of all kinds. They demanded his identification, and told him, "Since you took a picture of us we're going to take a picture of you for our records," taking down his identification and photographing him. It is unclear what was done with that information.
Two journalists were arrested at a June 2011 public meeting of the Washington, DC Taxi Commission. According to reports and a partial video of the incident, one man was arrested for taking a still photograph of the meeting, while another was arrested for filming the arrest of the first journalist.
A high school honors student in Newark, New Jersey was arrested in March 2011 for taking cell phone video of officers responding to an incident on a New Jersey Transit bus. We would link to the student's video but cannot do so because officers also carried out an illegal search and seizure of her phone and erased the video she took. The ACLU of New Jersey filed suit in the case.
Examples of these kinds of abuses, which continue to be reported weekly, are chronicled on web pages such as Photography is Not a Crime. And for more information on the ways in which law enforcement is spying on Americans today, visit our report on "Spying on First Amendment Activity."
A Crucial Check on Power
The right of citizens to record the police is a critical check and balance. It creates an independent record of what took place in a particular incident, free from accusations of bias, lying or faulty memory. It is no accident that some of the most high-profile cases of police misconduct have involved video and audio records.
Of course, photography is not necessarily "objective" and it is always possible in a particular case that there can be circumstances at work outside a photographic record. Overall, however, the incidents above make it abundantly clear that respect for the right to photograph and record is not well-established within the law enforcement profession.
Many of those involved in these incidents appear to be activists who know their rights and are willing to stand up for them. But not everyone is able to stand up to police officers when harassed; we don't know how many other Americans comply with baseless orders to stop photographing or recording because they are uncertain of their rights or too afraid to stand up for them.
Photography as a Precursor to Terrorism
A big part of the problem here is "suspicious activity reporting" — the construction of a national system for the collection and distribution of information. Under this system (as we discuss on this page and in this report), law enforcement leaders at the federal, state and local level push officers on the ground to investigate and report a broad spectrum of legitimate, everyday activity as potentially "suspicious" — including photography. In fact, many such programs actually suggest that photography is a "precursor behavior" to terrorism, and direct the police to react accordingly. This notion has been dismissed as "nonsense" by security experts — but appears to be disturbingly robust.
A serious question for photographers and videographers who are harassed is whether they are being entered in government suspicious activity databases or watch lists, and whether and how such a listing might come back to haunt them. An investigation of Suspicious Activity Reports by NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting, for example, found numerous individuals were reported to the FBI for taking photographs or video in the Mall of America.
A Problem From the Top
Another disturbing trend is police officers and prosecutors using wiretapping statutes in certain states (such as Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) to arrest and prosecute those who attempt to record police activities using videocameras that include audio. (Unlike photography and silent video, there is no general right to record audio; many state wiretap laws prohibit recording conversations if the parties have a reasonable expectation of privacy — which is never true for a police officer carrying out his or her duties in public.)
Word appears to have circulated within law enforcement circles somehow that using wiretapping statutes is a strategy for preventing public oversight, with some taking the concept to ridiculous extremes.
In contrast, it appears to be stubbornly difficult to spread word within those same circles of the fact that photography and videotaping in public places is a constitutional right. And earlier this year, following a lawsuit by the New York branch of the ACLU, DHS agreed to issued a directive to members of the Federal Protective Service making it clear that photographing federal buildings is permitted. Yet arrests by Federal Protective Service officers appear to be continuing. You would think that police chiefs and other supervisors could easily instruct and enforce an understanding of photographers' rights among their officers. Still, for some reason, all too often that is not happening. In New Orleans, for example, in response to its public records request, the local ACLU found the police department's policy which clearly instructs officers that people have the right to photograph. Yet officers there routinely violate the stated policy.
Know Your Rights
Everyone should be clear on what their rights are when engaging in photography in public spaces. The ACLU has prepared a "Know Your Rights" resource for photographers confronted by police. Learn more >>President Obama has granted clemency to more federal convicts than his three predecessors combined and more than any single president since Lyndon Johnson.
As he approaches the end of his final term in office, Obama has granted clemency to 1,093 people convicted of federal crimes, including 1,023 commutations and 70 pardons. That is more than Presidents George W. Bush (200), Bill Clinton (459), and George H.W. Bush (77) combined.
As the Pew Research Center reports in its recent analysis of Justice Department data, Obama has granted clemency more times than any president since Johnson who granted 1,187 convicts clemency, including (960 pardons, 226 commutations and one remission).
The grant of clemency is a presidential power allowing for leniency toward people convicted of federal crimes. It largely refers to commutation, which reduces a convict’s sentence, or pardon, which essentially forgives the crime and allows for restoration of civil rights. Another form of clemency is remission, or the reduction of a fine.
As Pew reports, Obama’s high clemency numbers have accompanied a record 34,930 clemency requests — more than the past eight presidents combined. The high request totals are largely a result of the Justice Department’s 2014 effort to encourage federal inmates to apply for presidential commutations. Most of Obama’s commutations have been for drug-related offenses.
“Looking at the same data another way, Obama has granted clemency to only 3% of those who have requested it. That’s not especially unusual among recent presidents, who have tended to use their clemency power sparingly,” Pew explains, noting that the percentage is on the low end of the presidential commutation spectrum.
Interestingly, Obama’s commutation totals dwarf the number of pardons he has granted, while his predecessors largely offered more pardons than commutations.
“He is on track to commute more sentences than any president since Wilson, who commuted 1,366,” Pew reports. “But he has granted fewer pardons to date than any president for whom DOJ has published statistics. The only one who comes close is George H.W. Bush, who issued 74 pardons – but served only four years in office, compared with Obama’s nearly eight.”
The Justice Department’s public records only go back as far as William McKinley’s truncated second term, which was cut short by his assassination in 1901. From 1900-1901 McKinley granted 448 federal convicts clemency, including 291 pardons, 123 commutations, eight respites (or delays in the execution of a capital punishment), and 12 remissions.New Braunfels man with history of 'deviant' sex acts with vegetables sentenced to life in prison
Charles Ransier, a 56-year-old New Braunfels man, was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday on a charge
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, you know, the bombing campaign was leading to an untenable humanitarian situation, and the U.S. support of that bombing campaign was highly problematic from a humanitarian standpoint. So, you know, this is something that the U.S. has been driving for some time. And again, as with many things right now, it has to be seen within the context of the war or the proxy war between, you know, the Saudis and Iran for control and supremacy in the Middle East. The Houthis are perceived as an Iranian proxy. Many dispute that, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is an ongoing war that seems unable to be resolved. And we need—and again, it doesn’t necessarily have to come from the U.S. Perhaps it can come from the U.N. under the leadership of their new secretary-general, António Guterres. But we need a diplomatic initiative as it relates to Yemen to avert the famine.Features
Downloads
Changes
0.9.20
Added a workaround for advanced alloy turbine recipes not working with IC2 classic
Added immersive engineering coke and biodiesel to default configs
Updated Chinese localization (Ahtsm)
0.9.19
Added support for item output into Mekanism pipes
Added rubber wood as carbon source
Added IC2 EV Emitter
Fixed fuel and energy remaining above capacity after removing tanks and/or capacitor modules
Fixed energy duplication with IC2 Emitters due to ENet being stupid
Fixed Mekanism biofuel in syngas produser
Fixed some fuels from other mods not working
0.9.18
Added detailed tooltips to multiblock controllers/modules
Added forestry peat (normal and bituminous) as carbon sources
Added PneumaticCraft and MagneticCraft fuels
Reduced advanced valve energy cost in TE smelter to 48k so it can be done by a basic machine
Updated French and Chinese localization (thanks Mazdallier, Ahtsm, PatchouliHina)
Fixed issues with with some locales that use weird Latin letter upper/lower case mappings (e.g. Turkish)
0.9.17
Fixed fuels not being accepted by Gas Turbine Generator under some conditions if multiple types of the same fluid is registered
Updated Simplified Chinese localization (thanks Ahtsm and Joccob)
0.9.16
0.9.14
Added multiple turbine tiers – up to 500 RF/t
Added multiple capacitor tiers – up to 25M RF
Added control modules
Added upgrade kits for capacitors/turbines
Old power capacitor renamed to Basic, recipe and capacity changed
Steam turbine math tweaks
Added IC2 biogas as fuel
0.9.13
Added Mekanism integration Bio Fuel and Compressed Carbon can be used as sources of carbon for syngas production Hydrogen and Ethene can be used as fuels in gas turbines Added Gas Intake Valve
Added IMC registration of carbon sources
0.9.12
Added Sensor Module
Syngas Producer changes: Added Coke (Railcraft) and Sugar Charcoal (MFR) as carbon sources Will now accept steam from external sources Can now operate without heating chambers if steam is piped in
0.9.11 Hotfix 1
Fixed crash if BC Core and/or CoFH API is present but not the respective transport API
0.9.11
Fixed Flux Generators not working with some machines and pipes/conduits
0.9.10
Refactored WAILA handlers to reduce weirdness in laggy SMP and/or LAN
Fixed crash in output configuration GUI
0.9.9
New machine: Syngas Producer
New fuel: Syngas
Fixed missing module names
Added WAILA support to all machines
Restructured config files, lowered log level of some spammy messages
Fixed obsidian generated by heat exchanger wrong damage value
Made energy units displayed in GUIs and tooltips configurable
Updated to BDLib 1.6.3, forge 10.13.2.1291
0.9.8
Changed energy gauges tooltips to show RF
Updated to BDLib 1.6.2 Fixes crashes on dedicated servers and loss of fluids from exchanger
0.9.7
Added Steam Turbine Generator
Added Heat Exchanger
Added Pressure Pipes input and output modules (requires Pressure Pipes >= 1.0.3)
Improved Gas Turbine Generator GUI
Output configuration moved to separate window
Updated to BDLib 1.6.1
0.9.6
Updated to BC 6.2.0
MJ support removed
0.9.5
Fixed a crash when BC API is installed but not BC itself
0.9.4
Updated to BC 6.1.5, which is now the minimal supported version
Added Russian localization (thanks shikhtv!)
0.9.3
Updated configuration system – see documentation for details
Updated Korean localization (Thanks puyo061)
Added German localization (Thanks Reyls)
0.9.2
Built with newer bdlib (this is a required update)
Added Czech localization (thanks nalimleinad)
0.9.1
Fixed fuels with non-alphanumeric names in config (added ability to quote)
Added Korean localization (thanks TeamMMKP)
Added Chinese localization (thanks sb023612)
Open Source
The mod is licensed under the MMPL-1.0, the source code is available on GitHub.
Yes this means you have permission to add it to any public or private mod pack.As I watch the news and images from Crimea, I can’t help but feel a sense of deja vu. It's as if I am reliving the 1992 break-up of Yugoslavia and the beginning of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
When Russia's propaganda machine claims the unmarked troops in Crimea are spontaneously organized self-defense forces comprising concerned citizens, I am reminded of similarly "self-organized" armed groups setting up barricades in Sarajevo in March 1992.
Just like in Crimea, these troops lacked recognizable insignia. What they did have were brand new Kalashnikovs, impeccably organized communication, and military discipline. The similarity is eerie and ominous for anyone who was in Sarajevo at that time.
What's the difference between Vladimir Putin and Slobodan Milosevic? About 22 years.
They are one man with two shadows; one modus operandi separated by a little more than two decades.
In fact, if Milosevic were alive today, he could probably sue Putin for plagiarism.
The Russian president calls the armed men in Crimea "volunteers" protecting the rights of ethnic Russians. In the 1990s, Milosevic used the exact same word to describe similar groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which he claimed were protecting ethnic Serbs.
Putin claims that Ukraine's sovereignty should be respected, even as he does everything in his power to undermine it. Likewise, Milosevic paid lip service to Bosnia's territorial integrity, while troops at his command worked to partition it and end its fledgling statehood.
Both leaders use religion to fuel their respective conflicts and justify intervention. Russian media recently reported -- incorrectly -- that the Monastery of the Caves in Kyiv had been damaged. Serbian media in 1992 likewise claimed -- inaccurately -- Serb churches and monasteries had been damaged.
Putin is testing the West's reaction and counting on divisions between Europe and the United States to hobble any coherent and coordinated response, just as Milosevic did 22 years ago.
The eerie similarities extend beyond Putin and Milosevic's rhetoric.
When demonstrators in Kyiv came under sniper fire, few from Bosnia could fail to recall April 6, 1992 -- the day demonstrators in Sarajevo came under sniper fire and the siege of the city began.
Russian media's coverage of the sniper attacks was also a cut-and-paste job from their Serbian counterparts two decades ago: citizens of Kyiv -- like those in Sarajevo -- were shooting at each other.
Russian media has also reported an alleged "refugee crisis," with some 650,000 pouring over the border into Russia. When the Bosnian war began, Serbian media also raised the alarm about refugees pouring over the border.
In both cases, the United Nations debunked the reports. But never mind.
Mobilizing To Hate
Both Serbian and Russian media also relied on false images to illustrate and bolster their claims. Russian media used footage of the heavily traveled border crossing between Poland and Ukraine. Serbian media in 1992 used actual footage of refugees fleeing -- it's just that they were running away from Milosevic’s forces.
The politically and emotionally loaded language Russian media has used to describe the new authorities in Kyiv, dubbing them "fascists" and "anti-Semites," is also reminiscent of Serbia's characterization of its opponents. Croats were characterized as "ustashi" and Bosniaks, or Bosnian Muslims, as "mujahadeen."
This is how wars begin. This is how societies are mobilized to hate. Ordinary citizens are subjected to fear and propaganda eventually eroding the trust in other ethnic groups, other nationalities.
In 1992 Serbs were led to believe that Milosevic was defending and saving their beleaguered nation by "gaining territories and conquering cities." LIkewise, recent polls show that a majority in Russia believe their military is saving Crimea's Russians by annexing the territory.
It is far easier to believe than to ask questions.
There is also an eerie similarity in Putin and Milosevic's respective paths to power.
Both were initially not elected. Putin was named prime minister in September 1999 by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who also dubbed him his chosen successor. When Yeltsin resigned months later, Putin became acting president.
Likewise, Milosevic's political rise began in 1986 when he was appointed head of the Serbian Communist Party.
The early tenure of each leader was marked by exploitation of an ethnic conflict: in Milosevic's case, Kosovo; in Putin's, Chechnya.
Both established pseudo democracies with tightly controlled state media and fake opposition parties. Both bolstered their legitimacy with mass, "spontaneous" pro-regime rallies. Both used "patriotic" youth organizations -- the "young Socialists" for Milosevic and "Nashi" for Putin -- to harass opponents.
Putin and Milosevic both also ruled societies in which institutions were weak, corruption rife, the rule of law absent, and the security services politically empowered.
But while the parallels between Putin and Milosevic are undeniable, this does not necessarily extend to the way their respective stories will end.
Milosevic was able to pursue his military adventures for "only" eight years, before NATO united against him in Kosovo in 1999 and he was overthrown by a popular revolution a year later.
But Putin enjoys an advantage that Milosevic lacked. Russia, unlike Serbia, is a major geopolitical player with a seat on the UN Security Council, a nuclear power, and a crucial supplier of energy to Europe.
If, without assets like these, Milosevic managed to menace his neighbors for eight years, how long will Putin be able to do so?
Nenad Pejic is editor in chief of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He previously served as director of RFE/RL's Balkan Service and as editor in chief of Bosnian Television.CHICAGO -- A 70-year-old woman had her intestines sucked out by a vacuum toilet in a bizarre accident aboard a cruise ship last September, a doctor reported in a letter to a medical journal.
Dr. J. Brendan Wynne, an orthopedic physician with the Osteopathic Medical Center in Philadelphia, said Thursday he wrote the letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association to alert doctors and the public to the possible dangers of vacuum toilets, which are common aboard ships and airplanes.
'I realize this almost defies belief,' Wynne said in a telephone interview.
Wynne said he was vacationing aboard the Greek-registered Pegasus docked near Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sept. 22 when he responded to an emergency call on the ship's loudspeaker.
When he and his wife, a registered nurse, arrived at the woman's cabin, they found her lying on a bunk with'several feet of small intestine' trailing behind her, Wynne said.
The woman, 70 years old and slightly obese, was alert but obviously in pain, he said. She told him that she had flushed the toilet while seated and the suction had 'pulled everything out.'
The woman was taken to the Royal Columbian Hospital.
Dan VanKeeken, director of communications for Royal Columbian, said the woman, a Phoenix resident, was admitted to the hospital, where she was treated for 10 days and released. VanKeeken said no other information was available about the woman's present whereabouts, 'but the nurse said she left looking pretty good.'
The Pegasus is currently on a South American cruise.With the advent of Web 2.0 a new concept became the most sought-after technology for web applications. Popularized by Google’s GMail, rich internet applications or RIA very quickly became the need of the hour. At the heart of RI applications was JavaScript, a scripting language for the web, that was in existence long before Google was even born. Google, with its GMail, demonstrated what could be achieved with JavaScript and thus paved the way for the next generation of web applications.
JavaScript had its own problems. The biggest of them was probably cross-browser compatibility. Led by Microsoft through its Internet Explorer web browser, JavaScript quickly became a victim of non-standard usage. Microsoft, in order to prove its dominance over Netscape, supplied browser objects and functions that could be used to generate ‘cool’ effects in a web page easily. These were never ratified by any standards bodies. Since Microsoft was dominant on the desktop and also bundled IE with its Windows operating system, the exponential growth of IE in popularity apparently vindicated their arrogant violation of established standards. Netscape died under Microsoft’s onslaught and so did the standards of JavaScript. Developers started writing applications that were IE specific. It was not uncommon to see applications labeled “Best viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer”.
The arrival of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser changed all this. Users, plagued by IE’s numerous vulnerabilities and instability, adapted to Firefox. Firefox implemented a more standards compliant version of JavaScript. So developers started writing rich applications that used standards compliant JavaScript. Even then there was one more problem with JavaScript and that came to the forefront due to RIAs. This was performance.
Some of the leading vendors saw an opportunity in this short coming of JavaScript. Notable amongst them is Adobe and more recently Microsoft. Adobe’s Flash technology was initially meant to serve the multimedia needs of web applications. Flash was great for animations and effects, for video and audio playback, for slide shows and image manipulations, but it was never meant for rich internet applications. So enter Adobe Flex, a technology based on Flash, but offering widgets and controls for business applications. Cross-browser compatibility was achieved but at the cost of an added Flash plug-in. Not to be undone by Adobe, Microsoft entered into the fray with its Silverlight software. Silverlight did all the cools things that Flash did and also needed a plug-in to run. It seemed like JavaScript was doomed.
Mozilla and Google had different plans. Mozilla’s Firefox 3.1 browser, still in testing, and Google’s recent Chrome web browser breathed a new life into JavaScript applications. In Google Chrome, Google introduced the V8 JavaScript virtual machine that offered significant performance boosts for existing applications. Mozilla has incorporated the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that has reportedly achieved performance boosts of up to 85%!!! With these two products JavaScript is surely set to make a come back.
As things stand, JavaScript has overcome its two worst adversaries – cross browser compatibility and performance. With the availability of brilliant libraries like Yahoo UI Toolkit, Dojo toolkit, etc. that help ease development of RIAs, JavaScript is here to stay and the way to go for future applications. For a JavaScript performance comparison study click here.
AdvertisementsMatt Waxman, a former Bush administration State Department official who worked with Abrams and is now a professor at Columbia Law School, signed a letter from GOP national-security experts assailing Trump during the campaign. In an email, he wrote that Abrams could be a strong asset to the administration.
“Secretary Tillerson needs a strong #2 who knows the State Department and the interagency process, as well as the Washington and global diplomacy arenas,” Waxman said. “Elliott is masterful at working the levers in all of them.”
Abrams does have some areas of agreement with Trump. He seems to align with the president, at least in broad strokes, in his approach to Israel; Abrams wrote in support of David Friedman, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel. He also has pointed to the persecution of Christians around the world, and has written that Western nations should grant refugee status to endangered Christian communities—a position that’s in line with Trump’s own views on the matter. In other areas, they differ. Abrams wrote—too optimistically, in retrospect—in 2011 that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s “vicious regime” was likely to fall, while Trump has shown little interest in Assad’s departure, leaning toward the Russian approach of keeping the Syrian president in power nearly six years after the civil war erupted. Abrams has also been critical of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who early on appears to be Trump’s closest friend in the Arab world.
Of course, not everyone would be on board with an Abrams pick. Eric Alterman rips Abrams in The Nation, indicting Abrams not only for Iran-Contra but his role in a grab-bag of other Latin American adventures, as well as his work in the Middle East under Bush. In the right-of-center, intervention-skeptical The National Interest, Daniel DePetris zeroes in on some of the same issues, writing, “Is the neoconservative, unilateral interventionism that Abrams has advocated for throughout his career—and that led directly to the second Iraq War—the kind of foreign-policy doctrine that President Trump wants in his State Department?”
The reported former leading candidate for the deputy secretary’s job was also a neoconservative—John Bolton, who served as ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush. But Bolton has always been something of a man apart, a figure too wild-eyed and warlike even by the hawkish standards of the neoconservative movement. According to some theories, it was Bolton’s trademark mustache that torpedoed his chances at the secretary of state’s job, but he also hit a roadblock in the person of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who made clear that neither Bolton nor Rudy Giuliani would earn his confirmation vote because of their advocacy for the Iraq War. Abrams has criticized Paul in the past, and the senator wrote on Rare that “Abrams would be a terrible appointment for countless reasons.”
As always, it’s impossible to tell whether Trump might move forward on Abrams. He has been known to change his mind mercurially, and the matter of the old slights may still create a barrier. If those can be patched over, however, the men could strike an unexpected deal that would give Trump some credibility with neocons by bringing one of their to the administration, and give Abrams a chance to steer the untutored Trump team toward his own views.A Florida woman was arrested after authorities said she called 911 because she wanted chicken wings and cigarettes.According to the arrest report, a Lake County deputy was sent to the woman's home in Clermont to investigate the 911 call around 8 p.m. Wednesday.Listen to the 911 callThe woman, identified as Liann Watson, 45, told the deputy that she was drinking and unable to drive, so she called 911 so someone could bring her chicken wings and cigarettes, according to the report. Watson said she called as a sarcastic joke.The deputy reported that Watson asked him if he had a cigarette or if he could take her somewhere to get some, switching between hysterical laughter and hysterical crying and yelling.As Watson was being taken to the Lake County Jail, the report said, she repeatedly smacked the partition in the squad car with her shoulder and head, kicking her legs into the air. The deputy said he gave her four warnings to stop, and when she persisted, she was put into a four-point restraint to keep her from harming herself.The report said Watson was screaming and cursing loudly during the entire trip to the jail.She faces a count of misusing the 911 system.
A Florida woman was arrested after authorities said she called 911 because she wanted chicken wings and cigarettes.
According to the arrest report, a Lake County deputy was sent to the woman's home in Clermont to investigate the 911 call around 8 p.m. Wednesday.
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Listen to the 911 call
The woman, identified as Liann Watson, 45, told the deputy that she was drinking and unable to drive, so she called 911 so someone could bring her chicken wings and cigarettes, according to the report. Watson said she called as a sarcastic joke.
The deputy reported that Watson asked him if he had a cigarette or if he could take her somewhere to get some, switching between hysterical laughter and hysterical crying and yelling.
As Watson was being taken to the Lake County Jail, the report said, she repeatedly smacked the partition in the squad car with her shoulder and head, kicking her legs into the air. The deputy said he gave her four warnings to stop, and when she persisted, she was put into a four-point restraint to keep her from harming herself.
The report said Watson was screaming and cursing loudly during the entire trip to the jail.
She faces a count of misusing the 911 system.
AlertMeThe 4,200 meter high summit of Maunakea in Hawaii houses the world's largest observatory for optical, infrared, and submillimeter astronomy. Move your mouse over a dome to identify a telescope
Click on the dome to go to its website
Subaru Telescope 8.3-meter diameter optical/IR telescope operated by Japan Subaru website
UH Hilo Educational telescope The first telescope on the mountain, a 0.6m diameter reflector, was placed on this site in 1969. It is currently being replaced by the 0.9m UH-Hilo Educational Telescope. UH-Hilo Educational Telescope website
Gemini Telescope An 8.1-meter optical/IR telescope operated by a consortium of seven countries. Gemini Telescope website
Submillimeter Array Eight 6-meter submillimeter antennas operated by Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Taiwan SMA website
James Clerk Maxwell Telescope 15-meter diameter telescope for submillimeter astronomy operated by the UK, Netherlands and Canada JCMT website
Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope 3.6-meter optical telescope operated by Canada, France, and Hawaii CFHT website
NASA Infrared Telescope Facility 3.0-meter diameter infrared telescope operated by University of Hawaii for NASA IRTF website
W. M. Keck Observatory Two 10-meter telescopes operated by Caltech and University of California Keck website
Caltech Submillimeter Observatory 10.4 -meter antenna for submillimeter astronomy operated by Caltech CSO website
UKIRT A 3.8 meter infrared telescope operated by the University of Hawaii. UKIRT website
UH 2.2 meter telescope Optical/IR telescope used mainly by UH faculty and graduate students UH 2.2-meter websiteA plan to restrict older people's access to student loans has sparked calls of age discrimination, with the Human Rights Commission saying it could breach human rights law.
The Government has signalled it would restrict living cost loans to people aged over 55 in Thursday's budget, as part of a broader push to cut costs in the student loan scheme.
The move could save about $10 million a year.
The Human Rights Commission today said it would be concerned about any arbitrary age-related policy that restricted the ability of students to up-skill and retrain.
The commission's Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner, Judy McGregor, said such a policy would potentially be unlawful discrimination under the Human Rights Act.
The Human Rights Act and the Bill of Rights Act make it illegal to refuse people goods and services on the basis of their age.
Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce said he had sought advice from officials and was satisfied the change was consistent with the Bill of Rights Act.
The difficulty with loaning to older people was that as they advanced in age, the likelihood they would repay their loans from income declined.
"We have an up to 70 percent write-off of those loans made to over 55s," Mr Joyce said.
"We would still look to retain loans for fees, it would be things like living costs that we would be concerned about."
But Dr McGregor urged the Government to explore non-discriminatory ways to recover student loan debts.
She said labour force data suggested the number of people in the workforce aged over 65 was climbing, which meant students over 55 would have more time to repay student loans.
Students aged over 55 were often women seeking a second chance at tertiary education or people seeking to retrain following redundancy.
Green Party tertiary education spokesman Gareth Hughes said refusing loans to older people was unfair and "a clear-cut case of age discrimination".
He said the move could expose the Government to legal action on the basis of discrimination.
"It would be much smarter to abandon this discriminatory policy than to wade into a complex legal minefield trying to justify that discrimination."
Greypower president Roy Reid said the move was a short-sighted exercise that targeted the elderly and could have serious repercussions in the future.
"The Government should explain why it should discriminate on the basis of age for no real reason apart from cost cutting."
New Zealand Union of Students' Associations co-president David Do said everyone could contribute to an innovative and highly skilled society, no matter whether they were young or old.
"Shutting out older students for no other reason than to cut costs is discriminatory and unfair," he said.
If the proposed changes were inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act, it would be the Attorney-General's job to bring that to the attention of Parliament.
Attorney-General Chris Finlayson said he probably held the record for issuing such reports, compared with previous attorneys-general.
"I'll look at the bill when it comes before me, as I do in my capacity as Attorney-General, and give you my view then," he said.When Gabriela Badillo traveled to Mérida, Yucatán, more than a decade ago, she encountered children who were timid about speaking the Mayan language. As she later came to understand, fear and discrimination were factors that affected the home teaching and use of the region’s native tongue.
“Children were a bit embarrassed to speak Mayan.... Some mothers opted to not teach them the native tongue to avoid discrimination,” Badillo recalled.
Badillo leads a nonprofit multimedia project to promote Mexico’s 68 native tongues, work she first became interested in as a university student and that has now taken root as a 37-year-old professional graphic designer. “68 Voces” is a series of animated shorts that showcase myths, poems and oral traditions in each indigenous language.
The formal initiative began in 2013, inspired in part by the passing of one of Badillo's grandfathers, who was of Mayan descent. The event changed her way of thinking, motivating her to “have more consciousness of everything that a person entails, for one part the human being and for the other, all the traditions, culture and words that leave with that person or that are lost when one is gone.”
Under the premise, “No one can love what they don’t know,” the project has received help from several entities, including the National Institute of Indigenous Languages, INALI, to travel to specific indigenous communities and encourage youth to help design the short films.
This new phase, which began almost a year ago, quickly revealed the role women play in preserving indigenous languages. “It was very clear to see who were the ones around the children trying to instill in them the desire to learn about their native tongues,” "68 Voces" producer Brenda Orozco said.
According to a 2015 National Institute of Geography and Statistics survey, 25.6 percent of about 120 million Mexicans self-describe themselves as indigenous. Of these, about 7 million are speakers of a native language and, according to INALI, women represent 51.3 percent of this population.
In the northern highlands of Oaxaca, a southern state renowned for its rich cultural and indigenous heritage, teachers have opted to walk up to three hours to remote communities that buses don't serve to teach at a primary school. Romina is one of them. Unlike her male colleagues, she has chosen to teach half of the class in Spanish and the other half in Mixe.
This pedagogical effort is not rewarded by the salary, nor the long hours outside work that she uses to prepare the course. Like Romina, many other female teachers and mothers see a need to inculcate their children with the native language. For Romina, the satisfaction goes beyond what could stereotypically be described as a "maternal" exercise. It is linked to the pride she feels toward her roots and the desire for them not to fade away.
Language helps create identities and as such, she believes Mixe is just as important as Spanish to communicate knowledge.
You can find most spoken native tongues in Mexico's southern region — and that's where language preservation efforts are most common. Tongues like Nahuatl, Maya, Tzeltal, Mixtec, Tsotsil and Zapotec, all have roots in that region. To preserve these languages, organizers have created what are called language nest programs. This is a revitalization strategy used in New Zealand back in the 1980s and that entails a “total linguistic immersion” of kids from 0 to 6 years old.
In Mexico, indigenous communities in Oaxaca have been pioneers in the initiative and, according to a 2014 INALI report, this civic-led initiative has been used successfully in La Trinitaria, Chiapas and Tijuana.
In central and northern Mexico, home to large cities such as Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara, however, thousands of indigenous families have faced racism and other discrimination if they used indigenous languages. Spanish is far more common.
The reasons for this can be traced back to Mexico's independence in the 19th century.
Oaxacan ethnographer Afonso Brevedades explained that early Mexican governments implemented education policies to create a more homogenous society. By choosing Spanish as a main language for administrative and educational purposes, anything indigenous-related was deemed as standing in the way of progress. As a way of survival, Brevedades says indigenous parents decided to stop teaching their children their mother tongues so they could have a better life and not feel embarrassed by their roots.
Badillo recounted a similar experience with her project. "We have gone to several communities with INALI’s support and found that most of those who speak the languages are grandparents or people over 70 years. They are part of generations that had these laws — 'You cannot speak in your mother tongue because it is wrong’ — because people will discriminate against you," she said.
New policies and cultural tourism in southern Mexico have elevated native cultures. Brevedades said current efforts are proof that "native tongues are not going to end. It will be possible for a language to die, but that doesn’t mean one stops being indigenous. It is in the language, customs, traditions, blood and traces where identity is transmitted, consciously and unconsciously.”
In four years, Gabriela's team has produced 20 of 68 animated shorts, and this year they expect to release 15 more, incorporating the first drawings made by children and teenagers in the indigenous communities they have visited. These videos are meant to spark curiosity in children, but it is left to parents, particularly mothers, to teach their kids the native tongue of their region.
Currently, only 6.5 percent of Mexico's population speaks an indigenous tongue.Hello everyone,
And today we got some very strange news from World of Tanks Asia… They announced the Chinese Tank Destroyer branch is now entering Supertest.
Anton ‘Evilly’ Pankov has confirmed before these would be an exclusive for the Chinese Server and other Regions wouldn’t receive these vehicles, but it seems Wargaming might have changed their minds. Here’s more details about them and some pictures.
Update #1
IMPORTANT: Chinese branch of Tank Destroyers will only be available for Chinese Region. Wargaming RU has confirmed this.
Chinese TD of Tier VIII and IX: WZ120-1G FT and WZ120G FT On Tier VIII there will be a compact and mobile vehicle, armed with 122 mm gun. The vehicle of Tier IX is armed with 130 mm gun with alpha damage as 560. By their gameplay these TDs will be similar to their analogues from other trees. (Russian Tank Destroyers)
Source: World of Tanks Asia Facebook
Pictures“License, registration, and dog sniff, please?” After a somewhat frustrating argument Wednesday morning, Justice Elena Kagan finally expressed concern about the possibility that the federal government’s position in Rodriguez v. United States would “lead to... 40 minutes of free time for police officers to investigate any crimes that they want.” Assistant to the Solicitor General Ginger Anders responded that “I don’t think that’s how we envision” things, but she then suggested that only the “duration of a routine traffic stop … under the circumstances” defines the Fourth Amendment’s “reasonable” limit. This did not answer the question that Justice Anthony Kennedy asked early on: “how do you define the traffic stop?” But even if the government loses, the Justices expressed a fair amount of indecision over exactly what the rule should be, and they appeared less than satisfied with the arguments offered by Rodriguez’s attorney, Shannon O’Connor – the First Assistant Federal Public Defender for the District of Nebraska.
The facts, the question, and a few points of clarity
As previewed yesterday, the issue before the Court involves a valid traffic stop for swerving over the highway shoulder line, in which the officer prolonged the stop for seven to eight minutes after he had completed writing a warning, in order to conduct a dog sniff of Rodriguez’s car after a back-up officer arrived. The entire traffic stop lasted about thirty minutes, at which point the dog alerted and provided probable cause for further search (which revealed methamphetamine). The Eighth Circuit did not question the lower court’s finding that there was no “reasonable suspicion” for the dog-sniff detention, but it ruled that a “de minimis” delay to conduct a dog sniff is okay. Since the Court’s 2005 ruling in Caballes that a dog sniff conducted “simultaneously” with a traffic stop did not violate the Fourth Amendment, lower state and federal courts have divided on the appropriate constitutional standards as well as their application when a sniff (or other investigation) extends the time of a stop.
A few things seemed clear from Wednesday’s argument. First, a dog sniff of a car stopped for a traffic violation is “extraneous” to the purpose of – that is, not an “ordinary incident of” — a traffic violation stop. Justice Samuel Alito questioned this and accurately noted that the Court has previously held that questions which seem unrelated to the “mission” of the traffic stop have been routinely upheld, starting with the standard opening “license and registration, please” and extending, as in Rodriguez’s case, to questions about where the driver and the passenger were going and why. Thus, he repeatedly asked, why are those questions “part of the mission and the dog sniff is not?” But Anders wisely conceded that she was not arguing that a dog sniff should be considered an “ordinary incident” of most traffic stops. Although no one mentioned Indianapolis v. Edmond, the Court’s 2000 decision ruling that routine “drug checkpoints” employing dog sniffs without suspicion violates the Fourth Amendment, the Justices did not seem ready to accept the routine addition of dog sniffs to valid traffic stops.
(Incidentally, repeated points of some humor were moments in which Justices referred to having been stopped themselves by the police. Chief Justice John Roberts began this thread by commenting during O’Connor’s argument (to “laughter”) that “people have told me” what happens “when you’re stopped.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor later began Anders’s argument by saying “and Chief, I’ve been stopped,” to which Anders quickly responded, “so have I.” The underlying point being that perhaps one of the most shared experiences in our national culture is being stopped by the police while driving. Or as Justice Stephen Breyer put it, “our experience on stops comes from, unfortunately, being the stoppee.”)
A second point that appears clear from yesterday’s argument is that the Court will not use this case to reconsider Caballes and examine whether a dog sniff should count as a Fourth Amendment “search.” Justice Sotomayor appeared to raise this “fundamental question” briefly – “is that really what the Fourth Amendment should permit?” – but then quickly suggested that the Court should “cabin” it to Caballes’s “simultaneous with writing the ticket” holding. Thus while the Caballes holding appears to be in some tension with the constitutional theory of “search” that Justice Antonin Scalia, among others, has recently advanced, this case will not be used as an occasion to discuss it in the text of the opinion, although it may surface in footnotes or separate opinions.
The basic question: Is suspicionless detention for a dog sniff allowed?
Various Justices – the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia Kagan in particular — appeared to keep driving the case to its basic question: may the police continue to detain someone, without at least reasonable suspicion, when the Fourth Amendment justification for the stop (that is, the traffic violation) has ended? Toward the end of the argument, Justice Kagan bluntly stated that if the government is arguing “that Caballes gives you … extra leeway to detain people …. I think that’s just not right.” Chief Justice Roberts appeared to agree, rhetorically asking a bit earlier (generating laughter) whether “[i]t’s only a violation of the Fourth Amendment for two minutes, right?” And Justice Scalia later interjected, apparently along the same rhetorical line, “it can prolong it a little bit.”
At one point, Justice Breyer began a question for Anders with the announcement that “I have a great idea.” Reading this, I initially imagined everyone was groaning – but then Justice Breyer’s idea appeared to catch on with the rest of the Court (perhaps for want of any other more specific guidance). Justice Breyer appeared to suggest that the Court simply stick to what it has said in past cases: that a stop “cannot last longer than is necessary to effectuate the purpose of the stop,” or that a stop cannot be “unnecessarily prolonged.” He explained that these were not new ideas – “what an original idea I had,” he noted with irony – and that “after we cite these two cases …, [we] reverse. …QED, goodbye.” And then, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly noted, the issue whether there actually may have been reasonable suspicion about narcotics on the facts of this case, a point not addressed by the court of appeals, would be open on remand. Although O’Connor urged the Court to decide
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which will be used when we complete the tech.
8. WIP – Art – Environments: As seen in my stream this week, I have been adding more terrain materials and assets into the world for the Beta 1 islands. Expect these additions to slowly creep in over time, up to and including Beta 1.
9. WIP – Art – Mines: With Ben’s oversight, Dionne is breaking up all the mine pieces into individual sections, including primary room and hall pieces, as well as all the support beams, wood planks, and rocks. These will then be used by Design to build out a wide variety of different mines for Beta 1, and to prepare us for other Depths to come! 🙂
10. WIP – Art/Tech – VFX Weapon trails: Mike has been toiling away, trying to figure out how far he can take the current VFX system to support decent-looking weapon trails for abilities. Based on his critical eye, it came time to throw this ball to Andrew to see if he could work something out. As of yesterday evening, Andrew has a working first pass ready for Mike to begin playing with, where the particles produce better arcs without gaps.
11. WIP – Art – Weapons and Armor: Following up last week’s work on some basic arrow quivers, Michelle finished a pass on TDD-specific variations.
12. Art – Character skin improvements: Jon spent a bit of this week and last week investigating art improvements to player-characters’ skin materials. We’ve figured out which programs we should use to create the better normal and rough maps, and learned some lessons about tweaks we can do to improve the look. The next step is to look at the texture compression method we use, as well as world lighting.
A good, solid week’s effort from the team. Now let’s move on to our monthly User Story update, where we share with you, our Backers, a more fine-grained version of the completed work. These items are updated on our User Stories page on our website, where you can search for any subject you’re interested in, and see the work completed thus far. The first two cards on that page will also give you the high-level goals for Beta 1. For this month, we’ve completed more than our average number of tasks, mostly due to the fact that previous features are getting the rough edges smoothed out, new features continue to come in, and art continues to chug along on new assets.
At this stage in our Beta 1 development, most of the cards will be pre-existing items that need to be finished, with only a few new things popping up.
User Stories: 8.18.17 – 171 total
34 Old cards with 155 complete.
3 New cards with 16 complete.
As a Backer, I’d like to be able to be able to play an Archer.
Manual aiming revisit post re-ab
Time the bow draw sound to the bow draw animation. – Complete
12 unique arrow flyby SFX for class abilities. – Complete
As a Backer, I’d like to play in a procedurally-created environment. – Part Four.
Move ZoneController objects from a lock to a context. – Complete
As a Backer, I’d like to play in new biomes that change according to Realm ownership. – Biome 01
Generic chainmail footsteps. – Complete
As a Developer, I’d like to increase physics performance, as well as make changes easier to integrate.
Improvements:
Take a ParLL::Context for LoadRigidStatic/Dynamic’s callback in IPhysicsEngine. – Complete
Use low-priority context for processing loaded data in IPhysicsEngine. – Complete
Fix assertions in physics server startup. – Complete
Add metrics for data received in PhysicsServerConnection. – Complete
As a Backer, I’d like to know about smaller changes that don’t have their own user story.
Refactor scene lock code.
Remove unique requirement for character names. – Complete
Separate counting for Bot duplicates vs reused. – Complete
Bump the values for threadcount and working queue counts in MongoAsyncHelpers. – Complete
ResourceManager runs onChanged callbacks before onLoaded callbacks. – Complete
Add separate configs for different styles of combat logs. – Complete
Make Bot teleportation an explicit state machine. – Complete
TCPConnection::Connect() responds to events/inputs instead of blocking for the full duration of its timeout. – Complete
Update API server for character creation and Wyrmling to support any channel. – Complete
Arithmetic Encoder and Decoder now support continuous syncing. – Complete
Integrate Telemetry for real-time profiling. – Complete
Update stats in Basic perf HUD tab to display more Bot metrics. – Complete
Add custom colors to each piece of equipment on Bots. – Complete
Beta 1 documentation styling.
Componentize health, blood, and stamina. – Complete
As a Backer, I’d like to see the world of Camelot Unchained continue to develop through its lore.
Silverhands Becoming – Part 4 Final Draft – Complete
As a Backer, I want to be able to own a plot of land and build within it.
Make all the BuildingUI renderables add/remove from scene async. – Complete
Building commands no longer need an ownership override if you are an admin working on a single building. – Complete
Damage command works, and is centered on your position, if you are calling it from the client. – Complete
As a Backer, I’d like to see graphical and networking performance improvements, when building and destroying structures.
Improve profiling of BuildingEntity. – Complete
Have client create job to update building immediately when network message is received, to fix potential threading issues. – Complete
As a server Developer, I would like the user proxies to dynamically scale.
Terminate proxies only if they time out while spinning up. – Complete
Make the ProxyManager push debug data to tags so we can see in AWS what the proxy is doing. – Complete
As a Backer, I’d like to see improvements in server stability, speed, and robustness.
Replace abstract delegates on WorldSender with methods. – Complete
Make FastEntityReaderCommandProcess or work with any Entity. – Complete
Send client commands from proxy to game server using FastEntityWriter. – Complete
As a Developer and Backer, I’d like to see improvements in memory usage and threading.
Make EquipmentBuilder always Split, to account for a BlockingWait it contains. – Complete
Make RegenSegment use a ParLL task instead of FireAndForget. – Complete
ParLL::Join will directly take and work on a needed context immediately. – Complete
Fix for possible deadlocks arising out of outside threads trying to join even though they aren’t registered workers. – Complete
Prevent runorsplit from running high priority tasks from low. – Complete
ParLL::Add multi-split to send one job to all context threads simultaneously. – Complete
ParLL::Add ability for JoinAll to run independently. – Complete
ModelFactory uses more than one context from its context pool. – Complete
Get rid of spinlocks on ParticleRenderable and just handle changes in its context. – Complete
Shut down the particle tree and its raw pointers to our particleResource before we reset and throw our old particleResource away. – Complete
Reorganize the CharacterManager code so we never join on the main thread. – Complete
Perf improvements for terrain regeneration. – Complete
As a Developer and Backer, I’d like to see improvements in lighting and rendering.
Change RenderableSubdivider to deactivate differently so we don’t permanently destroy our surfaces. – Complete
Zone splits things into its root renderable for adding/moving zone objects. – Complete
Update impostors on a terrain segment inside the segment’s context. – Complete
Refactor the impostor code to use Contexts better. – Complete
As a Developer, I’d like to see improvements in the editor to facilitate my work.
Editor lets the user know when they aren’t running the patcher. – Complete
Add ability to reset all editor layouts from the main menu, in case workspaces stop appearing. – Complete
Create web tools project for browser-based tool chain. – Complete
Add a command line utility for copying channels. – Complete
Add front end to build server. – Complete
As a Backer in Beta 1, I’d like to have a sampling of generic clothing to wear in game.
Put equipment switching on a buildvar. – Complete
Add config value to allow us to control the max number of unique Bots. – Complete
As a Backer in Beta 1, I’d like to play as a Crafter with basic gathering and crafting mechanics for testing.
Modifying the GQL name on the makeRecipe output item to match other recipes. – Complete
Add support for ‘random crafting events’ to modify Vox output. – Complete
Add new slash commands to modify health/repair points of items in inventory given their ID. – Complete
Allow Vox to take health damage when it is used to craft items. – Complete
Update random crafting table to support modifying the health damage done to a Vox. – Complete
Create repair job, allowing an item to be repaired if it has a single repair point remaining. – Complete
Create salvage job that salvages a damaged item and degrades the quality of the returned alloys/substances. – Complete
Save quality for a substance as ItemQuality instead of a float. – Complete
Add new crafting query to return all items that are compatible with one of the Vox job slots, while listing slot compatibility per item. – Complete
Alloys
Add unit counts to alloys. – Complete
Adding cloth and leather alloys to utilize recipe updates. – Complete
As a Developer in Beta 1, I’d like to see improvements in the ability system’s stability and robustness, as well as make it easier for developers to work with.
Skill prediction via creating a MockUpdater instance and running each phase event. – Complete
As a Developer, I’d like to have a selection of weapons that visually represent each Realm’s identity. – Arthurians
Quivers: First pass generic concepts. – Complete
As a Developer, I’d like to have a selection of weapons that visually represent each Realm’s identity. – Viking
Quivers: First pass generic concepts. – Complete
As a Developer, I’d like to have a selection of weapons that visually represent each Realm’s identity. – TDD
Quivers: First pass generic concepts. – Complete
As a Backer in Beta 1, I’d like to be able to pick an item up off the ground, put it in my inventory, and if applicable, equip it.
Adding Effects tags support for items. – Complete
Add an item tag check function for use in skill scripts. – Complete
Modify footstep sound effects depending on current equipment. – Complete
Updating the global item reset code to gather item batches to cut down on memory use. – Complete
Prevent insertion of items into inventory when you don’t have any. – Complete
Update the character query in the global item reset to only look for characters from the server’s shard. – Complete
Only update components that need to be updated onSearch for Inventory UI. – Complete
Ensure that two items are not equipped to the same gearslot. – Complete
Updating the nested item lookup to look at equipment component. – Complete
Rename Current/Max Durability to Current/Max Health. – Complete
Add stat for tracking health loss per item use. – Complete
Adding item location change sound effects. – Complete
Snap dropped items and siege engines to buildings instead of always to the terrain. – Complete
Fall back to client commands when equip/unequip/drop API request fail. – Complete
Update the item move API to allow for trashing items. – Complete
Secure item trading API and game support. – Complete
Weapons:
Disallow the firing of broken ammo. – Complete
As a player, I want to view a character UI that shows me my stats, allows me to swap out my equipment, organize my inventory, and see my collection of crafting resources.
Additional inventory icons. – Complete
As a Developer, I’d like a better instrument library to build interactive music.
16 additional drum samples added to library. – Complete
As a Developer and Backer in B1, I’d like better logging and feedback on abilities to support finding and fixing bugs.
Widget/Gizmo system:
Client side shape system to construct both geometry and hit tests for a set of basic shapes. – Complete
Create arbitrary shapes from the math::shapes library. – Complete
Render both transparent and opaque types of gizmos. – Complete
Add shape drawing slash commands (sphere, cylinder, cone, capsule, box). – Complete
Support combining shapes to make new ones. – Complete
Support adding a vertex offset for index buffer creation. – Complete
Add the ability to add semi-permanent debug gizmos directly to renderer. – Complete
As a Backer in Beta 1, I’d like to test the look and feel of combat with the new animation system, while wielding a greatsword.
Phase 1:
Offensive stance: Second pass combat idle. – Complete
Offensive stance: Combat idle fidget. – Complete
As a Backer in Beta 1, I’d like to test the look and feel of combat with the new animation system, while wielding a one-handed sword in either, or both hands.
Phase 1:
Offensive stance: Combat idle with left or right hand wielding. – Complete
Offensive stance: Upper body combat movement – walk, run, jump, fall. – Complete
Offensive stance: Mid slash attack. – Complete
Offensive stance: Mid pierce attack. – Complete
Offensive stance: Equip and unequip. – Complete
Offensive stance: Block/Deflect, flinch, death. – Complete
Offensive stance: General polish with skirt and cape animation. – Complete
As a Backer in Beta 1, I’d like to test the look and feel of combat with the new animation system, while wielding a one-handed club/mace/hammer in either, or both hands.
Phase 1:
Offensive stance: Combat idle left or right hand wielding. – Complete
Offensive stance: Upper body combat movement – walk, run, jump, fall. – Complete
Offensive stance: Mid crush attack. – Complete
Offensive stance: Equip and unequip. – Complete
Offensive stance: Block/Deflect, flinch, death. – Complete
Offensive stance: General polish with skirt and cape animation. – Complete
As a Backer, I want to seamlessly move between islands and zones without being aware that I’m moving between different game servers.
Seamless zone transitions:
Generate terrain border segments using control points at a specified subdivision level. – Complete
Send border segments from physics to game server, from game to presence server, then from presence to all game servers in the shard. – Complete
Intersect the border of the local zone with the borders of the other zones in the shard. – Complete
Generate border segments that form a loop and are in clockwise order, then merge border segments that share an edge. – Complete
Draw borders and intersections when generating heightmap image. – Complete
“Send the shard ID in ClientConnectResponse rather than PlayerIdentityMessage, ensuring clients have the ID by the time – Complete
they set it in the UI.” – Complete
As a Developer, I’d like to improve the visuals of our current characters and armor, and note lessons learned to move forward into our next iterations.
Audit skin rough and spec values to improve look of skin. – Update male Arthurian and male Viking as tests. – Complete
Update male Arthurian default hair model and material. – Complete
As a Developer, I’d like to improve, and add to, the SFX for re-abilitation.
Beating heart loop SFX for blood loss. – Complete
Generic item break sound for item durability. – Complete
As a VFX Developer, I’d like additional tools and support for VFX needs in Beta 1.
Images Sets:
Reset image set number parameter when someone puts a value in it outside of the allowed range of values. – Complete
As a Backer, I want an animation system that blends multiple animations together, and allows for immersive and fun combat.
Anim::Idler can optionally use the bind pose if there’s no idle clip found. – Complete
Move attaching sub-effects to AnimSkillEffects until after the clip is set. – Complete
Debug buildvar to show bones/skeletons using debug-drawing framework. – Complete
As a Backer in Beta 1, I’d like the ability to build, spawn, aim, and fire a siege engine at players and buildings.
Wire up idle and skill animations to the siege engine(s). – Complete
Unify BoneAimer between players and siege engines. – Complete
Disable jump command when using siege engines. – Complete
Update how faction is stored/updated to fix issues with siege engine collision settings and allow code to be shared between client and server physics. – Complete
Improve mechanism for tracking whether the server has received/applied targeting updates from the client that is durable across zone transitions. – Complete
Better collision geometry for siege engines based on looking up a CollisionResource. – Complete
Have server check that targets are valid. – Complete
Fix server targeting and add debug targeting HUD. – Complete
When adding a siege engine to the physics scene also update the geo object with the loaded collision bounds. – Complete
Hook up example of siege abilities costing the player stamina. – Complete
Add capability for controllable entities to occupy specific skill tracks for the controlling entity. – Complete
Add siege health bar to client. – Complete
Add new siege anim set tag and bone alias to support controlling the player’s movement and animations when using the engine. – Complete
Move player position based on where siege engine is aiming. – Complete
Update client UI layer to support new javascript bindings for siege health/target. – Complete
Update models of all Realm variations of Scorpion to include better working mechanisms for animations. – Complete
Re-rig updated Arthurian Scorpion for testing. – Complete
Rough Pass: Character animations for Scorpion, quick-fire, and full loading loop. – Complete
As a Backer in Beta 1, I’d like to be able to explore a mine using the portaling and zone transition tech, in lieu of the post B1 “bubble” tech.
Second pass rough propping of assets to create appropriate look and feel. – Complete
Second Pass: Water-eroded cavern props – modeling and materials. – Complete
Additional material set. – Complete
Creature Fossil set modeled and materials. – Complete
Props created: Wood supports, boards, rocks, etc. – Complete
Depths-inspired shrine model. – Complete
As a Backer in Beta 1, I’d like an interactive portal system that teleports me to other active portals based on availability and Realm control.
Second pass TDD portal marker concept, with Realm control material variations. – Complete
Viking portal model complete, in game, with Realm control variations hooked up. – Complete
Portal Markers convey whether the destination zone is currently active. – Complete
Add ZonePortalEntity and corresponding network states. – Complete
Add PortalComponent.Active and set it when the portal becomes active/inactive. – Complete
New Cards:
As a Backer in Beta 1, I’d like to test the look and feel of combat with the new animation system while using a bow.
Phase 1:
Offensive stance: Combat idle. – Complete
Offensive stance: Combat idle fidget. – Complete
Offensive stance: Upper body combat movement – walk, run, jump, fall. – Complete
Offensive stance: Flinch and death. – Complete
Offensive stance: Quick fire – Nock, draw, fire. – Complete
As a Backer, I want the ability UI used in combat updated to support the ability system functionality for the start of Beta 1
First Pass concept and styling. – Complete
First prototype functionality and animation. – Complete
As a Developer, I’d like to improve the speed of creating environments, adding additional assets, and audit work needed for Realm territory variations for Beta 1.
Existing assets set up as individual terrain mods:
Terrain: Mixed ground cover with clover. – Complete
Terrain: Pine needles with ground cover. – Complete
Fantasy ferns. – Complete
New terrain assets:
Terrain: Dead grass and dirt v1. – Complete
Terrain: Dead grass and dirt v2. – Complete
Terrain: Dark sand with pebbles. – Complete
Terrain: Brown sand with pebbles. – Complete
Terrain: Mixed ground cover mix – Dirt, rocks, weeds. – Complete
Terrain: Mixed ground cover with weeds. – Complete
As I said, plenty of progress–more than average, which is great! Maintaining a good pace is paramount, in order to clobber the work yet to be done.
For those of you scrolling down just to get to the art, welcome back! We’re a little slim in terms of new art this week, as several artists have been focused on less showy, polish-related tasks, and we’ve got a few people, myself included, who have been or who are out of town this week for summer breaks.
Despite having lots of polish tasks to work through this week, Scott was still able to get out a render of an update to the archery animation. This is still a work-in-progress, as we have more functionality we want to add to archery, but for now, this is a much better version than the previous rough pass. Click the image below to see it!
Next up, and definitely related to archery, we have some quiver and arrow concepts from Michelle. You can catch her concept art stream from earlier this week HERE.
Dionne continues to chug along on the mine assets this week. She’s currently taking all of the assets and breaking them up into separate pieces, while auditing them to make sure they can work as a system. It’s actually a fun part of the task, as there’s lots of problem solving and planning to make sure all the pieces can work together without overlapping. Even the names you give things becomes important when someone else is trying to find a specific piece. Once that work is done, Ben and/or Mark can begin building out various tunnels to audit the assets themselves.
That wraps up the week for us here at CSE, on both coasts! As a reminder, we recently updated our website with a link to information about Beta 1. If you’re curious about our goals in terms of player experience for Beta 1, this is a good thing to keep an eye on, as we’ll be rolling out more info every week if possible! Click the image to check out the opening sections of the document:
And another reminder: We’ll be having a test on Saturday, August 19th, 2017, showing off our Big Bot Battles. This will be opened to up to Beta 1, Alpha, and IT access at 2 p.m. Eastern Time, and there are more details in a separate email.
Have a great weekend all, and be safe out there.
-tAugust 18, 2012 — andyextance
Higher temperatures play a role in economic progress that brings bad news for poorer countries. Their development efforts may be slowed as the world warms further, suggest researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Looking at over 50 years of weather data, MIT’s Ben Olken and his colleagues showed that every 1°C temperature increase shaves 1.3 percent off a poor country’s growth, over the course of a given year. That can have a big impact, considering the World Bank projects that developing countries’ economies will grow by 5.4 percent in 2012. “The key points of our study for thinking about climate change are that a) the impact seems to be larger for poorer countries and b) there is at least the possibility that the economic magnitude of the costs of higher temperatures for poorer countries could be quite large,” he told Simple Climate.
People have been asking whether temperature influences how rich a country is for centuries, with historian Ibn Khaldun discussing it in his book Muqaddimah in 1377. But researchers are still trying to tease out the various ways it can play a part even today. Getting a grip on this subject becomes more important as the world warms in response to human CO2 emissions, Ben noted. “Given the interest in global climate change, the link between temperature and economic growth is clearly important to understand,” he said. “While there are many studies that try to simulate these impacts, we thought it was very important to try to look, historically, at what actually happens when it gets warmer. When we thought of doing this, we were very surprised that nobody had really done it before.”
Ben, MIT’s Melissa Dell and Northwestern’s Ben Jones brought together temperature, rainfall and economic output data for 1950-2003 from 125 countries. In a paper published in the July edition of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics they compared temperature and rainfall changes against economic growth. By studying year-to-year changes they could avoid assumptions about what links exist and remove the effects of unchanging national factors. Looking at economic growth both in the same year as the weather data and up to ten years later allowed them to see how long any impacts lasted. While economic growth in poor countries was affected by temperature, there was little effect on growth in rich countries. Changes in rainfall have relatively mild effects on national growth in both rich and poor countries. Their data showed that these were permanent effects on growth, rather than temporary dips in output after which the countries continued the progress they were making before.
Sweaty workplaces, heated politics
The researchers broke down economic data by type of activity, finding two main ways that temperature can hurt economic growth. One was direct effects on farming and industry. “If you think about people working in factories with no air conditioning, you can see how it makes a difference,” Ben told MIT News. The other came through a link between temperature and political instability. With a 1°C temperature rise in a given year, the probability of irregular changes in national leaders, such as coups, goes up by around 3 percent in poor countries.
As these results come from year-to-year temperature changes rather than long-term trends, they can’t be directly taken to relate to global warming. But although countries may gradually get used to higher temperatures, there could also be extra direct effects on their economies. “We can never know precisely what the long run impacts will be,” Ben said. “There can be adaptation, which is not captured in the short-run fluctuations from year to year. It’s also possible the long run could be worse because effects tend to build over time, or because of factors, like sea level rise, not captured by our study.” But Ben and his colleagues do hope that they can provide a fuller view on the area by combining their study with others looking at different effects. “In the last decade there has actually been quite a number of studies similar to ours looking at the impact of temperature on a variety of outcomes,” he said. “We’re going to try to synthesize this research to see what, when taken together, it can help us say about temperature’s impact.”
This research is published in:
Melissa Dell, Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken (2012). Temperature Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics DOI: 10.1257/mac.4.3.66
AdvertisementsThe plea has challenged another Act passed by the UP government last year called ‘The Allotment of Houses under Control of the Estate Department Bill-2016’ for regulation of allotment of government accommodations to trusts, journalists, political parties, speaker and deputy speaker of legislative assembly, judicial officers and government officials. (PTI)
The Supreme Court today fixed for final hearing a plea challenging the recent amendments in the state law allowing ex-Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh to continue occupying government bungalows, despite an apex court verdict on it. A bench comprising Justices Ranjan Gogoi and M M Shantanagoudar allowed the state government to file its reply to the PIL in three weeks and listed the matter for August 23. The bench was hearing a PIL filed by Uttar Pradesh-based NGO ‘Lok Prahari’ which challenged the amendments made by the then Akhilesh Yadav government to ‘UP Ministers (Salaries, Allowances and Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, 1981’.
The plea has challenged another Act passed by the UP government last year called ‘The Allotment of Houses under Control of the Estate Department Bill-2016’ for regulation of allotment of government accommodations to trusts, journalists, political parties, speaker and deputy speaker of legislative assembly, judicial officers and government officials. The amendments in the law enables former chief ministers of the state, including Rajnath Singh, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati, to retain government bungalows in that capacity.
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The apex court had sought the UP government’s response on November 15, 2016 after the plea of NGO filed through its general secretary S N Shukla claimed that the state government had passed the amendment bill to enable the ex-CMs retain the bungalow by skirting the apex court verdict of August 1, 2016. In its verdict, the apex court had held that the government bungalows allotted to the former Chief Ministers was bad in law and they should hand over possession of the bungalows occupied by them within two months.
It had said the state government should also recover appropriate rent from the occupants of the said bungalows for the period during which they were in their “unauthorised occupation”.The apex court had said that local law only gave largesse to former chief ministers “without any element of reasonableness”.
Dealing with the legality of the impugned provisions, it had said “in our opinion, the 1997 Rules, which permit the former Chief Ministers to occupy government bungalows for life cannot be said to be valid. “In the circumstances, respondent no.1 (State of Uttar Pradesh) cannot permit any former Chief Minister to occupy any government bungalow or any government accommodation after 15 days from the date on which his term comes to an end,” it said.It’s been one year since I started serializing issues of Skullkickers online so it’s an ideal time to see how the site has done so far in terms of traffic and talk about online outreach as a whole.
If you’ve never read Skullkickers before, let me give you a quick introduction…
Skullkickers is a sword & sorcery buddy-adventure comic about monster mashing mercenaries on the hunt for fame and fortune. It’s The Hobbit meets The Hangover. Skullkickers is published by Image Comics and serialized online via Keenspot.
Skullkickers online has garnered just over 5.8 million pageviews and been visited by 272,000+ people over the past 12 months. More than 90 times the number of people who buy our monthly issues have checked out Skullickers online so far. Each month an average of 22,600+ new people come on board the story and the site generates almost 486,000 pageviews. I don’t know how it compares to other webcomics (though I’m sure it’s far lower than a lot of the long running and financially self sufficient sites) but it’s reaching 7-8 times our floppy comic print run worth of new readers every month, building up awareness of the title day by day using content we already had archived and ready to go.
In comic book shops my competition for your hard-earned dollars are worldwide icons like Batman and Spider-Man or massive media hits like The Walking Dead and Scott Pilgrim. Needless to say, standing out with that competition can be tough. Skullkickers’ single issue sales hover just off the bottom of Diamond’s Top 300 titles on any particular month while SK’s trade paperback sales are pretty good.
As we move ahead with our master plan for 36 issues divided into six story arcs (which will end up in print as 6 softcovers or a trilogy of hardcovers) I have to make sure people have an easy way to start at the beginning to get hooked. Online serialization of older content is proving to be a convenient and valuable way to do just that.
Fantasy comics have always struggled in the North American direct comic market. The Venn diagram of people who are reading superhero titles definitely includes fantasy fans, but not all comic shops carry creator-owned titles and not all comic shop regulars are fantasy readers, so our title is trying to appeal to a demographic inside a demographic inside a demographic. Online we’re available to anyone with an internet connection- obviously a much, much larger pool of fantasy fans who could become Skullkickers fans.
Even better, people who might not normally read sword & sorcery at all can still sample the series and be drawn in too. It’s global, it’s convenient and it’s available 24/7. We’re not excluding anyone at any time unless the server goes down.
Without any barriers to entry, new online readers can discover Skullkickers risk-free, reading along as a weekday ritual as I add pages, slowly growing more attached to the characters and their story. Getting these readers to sample is as simple as passing the URL to a friend, posting it on a social networking site or sending a tweet. Readers who wouldn’t have given my title a second glance at a bookstore can explore and enjoy at their own pace. It’s Free Comic Book Day every day at Skullkickers Online.
Okay, it’s all well and good to talk about outreach and an online readership, but the value of amazing comic retailers and print readers comes from their financial commitment to the series. Retailers are the bedrock of our financial viability through Image and our print readers keep us afloat. Our whole creative team works hard to ensure every issue is worth its $3.50 cover price with a fun story, great artwork and enjoyable bonus content. I know a lot of retailers and fans would assume that serializing the older issues online for free would hurt sales, but it hasn’t been the case.
As I mentioned in my post over the summer about convention sales, print and digital are working together pretty harmoniously. Our print numbers aren’t hurting because of online serialization and some of our online readers are becoming print buyers, especially the collected trade paperbacks and deluxe hardcover ‘Treasure Trove’ edition. Retailers who stock the series are benefiting from our online outreach, not hurting from it.
When readers become really attached to the series online they’re willing to buy a print copy, both for their own enjoyment and as a measure of support for our hard work. Sure, the majority of people will casually read it online for free but, by casting such a wide net to potential new readers, I’m able to expand book sales overall, reaching more and more people each month long after individual print issues have sold out. The hard-to-find early issues are absolutely crucial because they’re the entry point for new readers. Thanks to the online site they’re always available. You can start reading Skullkickers right now, right here.
I make it clear that if you’re enjoying the pages you’re reading on the site now, you can read even more of the story any time you want by making a purchase. By serializing older issues I’ve been able to jumpstart print and digital comic sales a bit too. People can catch up to the ‘current’ story any time they want via their local comic shop, Amazon, other book outlets, comiXology, Graphicly or iVerse. We’re banking on the quality of the work to convince people to pay to catch up, collect or own one of our collected editions and it seems to be working.
In 2012 I had record-breaking book sales at 5 conventions and even my worst convention was nearly equal to the best shows I had in 2011. I kept asking people how they’d heard about Skullkickers and a ridiculously high number were through good word of mouth and reading the archives online for free.
I wasn’t kidding when I said “Everybody wins”.
Serializing Skullkickers online has helped keep us viable and broadened our appeal to much larger audience. Online serialization works with print, works with conventions and even works with other digital platforms. It isn’t an instant fix and doesn’t solve the financial pitfalls of creator-owned comics all by itself, but it’s definitely an important tool more creators should be looking into as they work to create a readership for their work.
I’m a storyteller with a small creator-owned comic trying to build a readership from scratch. There’s absolutely no reason for me to narrow the delivery model for my story. The more channels I can make my content available through, the better.Microsoft Technical Evangelist Bruce Harris has revealed a few interesting tidbits about the hotly-anticipated HoloLens device at an event in Tel Aviv. Harris was recorded by an event goer and we’ve embedded the video below for your viewing pleasure (22 minutes in length).
Harris says any app that is built for Windows 10 will run natively on HoloLens, but obviously, developers will need to create 3D apps that utilize the HoloLens to its full potential. The head-worn fanless device uses WiFi and Bluetooth and is not available in a wired option. The battery life is “very much like a laptop” and depends on what you do with it. You can average 5 to 5.5 hours on basic use, and 2.5 hours with “highly-intensive” use.
Similar to the Kinect’s IR sensor, the HoloLens builds a 3D model of the environment you are in by identifying the fixed structures and create interactive holograms that can be created as if they were real objects. Since the HoloLens is a mobile device, you can move around in the environment. The FOV (field of view) is not all-encompassing, meaning there is a real-world “border” around your view preventing you from having any motion sickness that is typically associated with virtual reality devices. The FOV is similar to a 15-inch monitor that is about one to two feet away from your face.
Harris also mentions that the HoloLens can share an experience with other HoloLens users, allowing them to view an object at the same time. Obviously, this is dependent on bandwidth and connectivity. Imagine the possibilities when it comes to gaming!
SO excited to share a taste of the supersecret HoloLens world I've been living in! #MadeWithHoloLens #HoloLensHYPE! pic.twitter.com/Yu5vy4RdmV — Andrea Chang (@TheSparkly) November 28, 2015
No word yet on exactly when consumers will be able to get their hands on the HoloLens. Developers are expected to snag this device sometime this year. Microsoft has already opened up a special HoloLens showcase experience for developers at its flagship store in New York.
You can watch the video below. This video was first spotted by re_kinect on Reddit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgmvekSmhrM
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Further reading: HoloLensOf recent concern is the migration of phthalates from plastic products such as Polyethylene Terephthalate (
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